I knew right from the beginning that I had to have an image of the map and a hand-coded table over the top of it. How could I do this?
How could I make this image be the background of the page?
That wasn't hard. I found a plugin that would do this and tried it. No go!
I tried another one. No go!
Finally, I researched this and turned up a very simple one that DID work! I was in business!
As you can see in the picture, I've gotten rid of the background color and then easily shaded the map to make it look like it was slightly hovering over the page.
Coding Begins
This is where the REAL fun began! Day 2: Get a Table to Cover the Background Image.
I had no problem building a table. What I found out very quickly was that the table I had on there was as fine as I could get it but it was still too coarse for the map. My idea here was to create a table with lots of cells in it in both rows and columns. I had all kinds of problems the second day at this, and for the time I had available to me to be on the computer and not engaging in other responsibilities, I began trying to figure out why I could not get rid of the padding in the cells.
Note on the picture above that there are white lines across the map coming from the table. The cells are not visible, but the rows are. Each cell had two "#" characters in them so I could determine how this thing was going to set over the map.
Not very good! It was time to go to bed. The code I was using just was not working!
Sleeping on it...
You have definitely accomplished what you set out with this motivational lesson.
Brilliant job.
I'm grateful you shared this. Obstacles will eventually cross our paths along this IM journey; your story serves as an inspiration (as you meant it) to push ahead and work our way through.
Thank you so much.
In a perfect world where we start out with a good deal of money, we can just assign the idea or task and have it done, but here we are as you said having to wear many hats until we reach a certain knowledge and experience level.
I like having to learn in the rough as you have shown in your tutorial, knowledge seems to stick better in my brain that way.
Thank you for taking the time to share your journey and the lesson that goes along with it, I appreciate you. :)