vanderwal.net

Headers for everybody

I am trying out visual enhancements on the Off the Top weblog display. I have added the header titles for each of the entries, which I have wanted to do for a long time. This should make the page easier to scan for information.

I have used the dark blue color for the type and given it shading in the CSS to offset the header from the date. Once the headers were added the dates were lost on the page, so I have given the pale orange background color to break up the page a little more. The pale orange background also seems to help the reader scan the page more easily.

Depending on feedback I may keep this and add it to the other multiple entry pages in Off the Top.

Site clean-up and other bits

Yes, we have done a little house keeping here by updating the links, fixing some of the "Previous Month" links in this section, fixing more non-standards snippets that have remained a bee in my bonnet (more still remain), and creating more continuity in the presentation layer. It is a continual update of design and development of the application that runs the site, but that is what makes it fun. I have been planning some of these fixes for months, but other things cropped up. I am trying to get many of these things done, as well as a long list of other items, before the baby arrives.

Yesterday's diversion was baby CPR class and baby safety, a power outage, trying to track down the contractor who was supposed to have been at the house all day finishing fixing the gutters, roof, and putting storm windows back on (along with a long list of other half done tasks).

Today I woke to a dead car battery and a dead PC. The car had a light that had been left on. The PC seems to have had the power supply die. Joy has been working on some stationary for the kid and printing cards for a small gathering at her sister's and needed to finish printing out the final cards today. I have only been using the PC for playing some older games and syching my Palm to applications that I have not ported or others have not ported to Mac as of yet. I got the car jump started by myself and ran the PC to the shop, it may become a Linux box in the near future, if Joy gets a new PC for work. I am also considering the G5 for a desktop in the Fall or Winter.

Mobile edition added

We have added a mobile edition of Off the Top capturing the last 10 entries. This should work well on nearly all mobile devices, including PDAs. The entries are provided in plain XHTML and do not have categories nor comments.

Let us know how this works for you.

Photo galleries from September 2001

September 2001 was wonderful and a little hectic, to say the least. Hence, I have just posted three new galleries of photos from my trip to San Francisco in September 2001. Posted are People, Places & Things, Flowers, and Architecture. These are some of the 450 pictures taken on that trip. The galleries will get a little more tweaking to improve browsing structures, but they are there to enjoy.

This process of posting was eased as I finally turned on the Windows file sharing in Mac OS X, which even works with XP Home. I can now view the directories on my TiBook from the PC. This allowed me the ability to pull files to the PC and build Adobe Photo Shop Web photo galleries from them. I have build the photo libraries on the Mac using iPhoto, but the PS galleries are one of my favorites for layout (not for accessability nor standards compliant). This solution will work until I move Photo Shop to the Mac with version 8.

Reposted honeymoon photos

Our Honeymoon photos are back posted again. The coverage stops in Brugge and does not include Paris or Giverney. It will someday when we get a scanner again.

Site housecleaning and rebuilt essay section for MoA info

There have been some more modifications here at vanderwal.net. Many of the pages now have links to the Essays section. The Essays page has finally been brought into the new look and layout. The page also integrates the Model of Attraction section more closely.

Over the past few months the MoA has grown through word of mouth and remembering the URL for its mainpage has been problematic. Much of the traffic that has been coming into MoA has been going to the first draft, which is good, but it is also just the first draft. The newest information on the MoA, there is more coming, will be placed at the top of the list.

The Creative Commons license has been added to more pages, including the MoA. Finally the links page has been updated to add some of my regular reads, remove dead links or stale content, and update links to where helpful resources have moved.

There are some more modifications on the way in the near future, some you will be able to see and others will be admin tools or just seemless updates.

CMS goes over 1,001

This is post 1,001 in my homebuilt weblog CMS. Yes there have been other odometer parties on this site, but turning over 1,000 was one that really has pleased me. My tool is missing some elements that others now have, but I still have fun tinkering with mine and extending it. There are some plans for the summer to add functionality by embracing the categories and using them in conjuction with the links page as well as tying the links and entries together, sort of like a Web strawberry banana shake. I have a book review repository planned too, but it has not moved out of the ERD phase yet (uh, yes I plan, chart, and document my apps and changes for the site, it eases making changes in the future -- I just need to get all the docs on one machine and in one directory).

Lift you glass to 1,001 entries and no digi-barfing

E-mail outage again

E-mail was barfy again yesterday here at vanderwal.net. It seems mail was down for 5 or 6 hours. Everything seems to be back to normal again.

We are back

We have been down for the past 36 hours or so, due to a hardware crash and recovery. Most everything is back, but recent e-mail. Please resend anything sent since Monday evening. E-mail seemed to be the first thing to go. One nice thing about a full entry in the RSS feed is being able to save the RSS feed and restoring the last two entries that did not make it onto the backup tape.

I did not realize how dependant I am on my links page until it is gone. Much of what I read at home is out of RSS feeds, but at work, many of the links I use and share as resources are on that page. The links page has been my bookmarks for well over seven years now as it began at some point in early 1996.

Tweaking the presentation layer for links

We are still doing some tweaking related to the recent redesign. This latest change includes the underlining of links. The style sheet now treats the distinct content area separately. The links page does not have any underlining on the links as the page is all links and the underlining tends to interfere with the user's scanning of the links and therefore the lack of underlining eases this pages use. The hover is identical for all the links through out the site, the hover provides an orange hue to tie the colors of the site together. The right content frame does not have any links either as the combination of the light orange background and the blue link has a little reading difficulty, but with the underlining there was strong reading hinderance. The links through the rest of the site are all underlined to ease the user's ability to discern that the links can be clicked. The links under the Off the Top remain grey with underlining with orange hover.

Let me know how these work for you.

Posting from Hiptop

This is a test post from my Hiptop. This post was done from my regular management page.

Creative Commons license added

I have finally added a Creative Commons license that applies to all content on this site. The bottom of most of the pages contains a link to the license that states how the information on this site may be used.

Blog odometer moves to 1,000 posts

Well my friends this is entry 1,000. The counting of each entry began June 1, 2001 when I moved off Blogger and began completely handcoding again.

In May of 2001 I put together my TravelBlog tool that allowed by to post from any Internet connected Web browser again. This step was only used while I was on the road or I did not have ability to FTP new content. In September 2001 I moved my hosting of vanderwal.net to PHP Web Hosting, which I had been using with great happiness for other projects for over a year. In October I began using the hand built CMS that I am still using and developing. This gave me the ability to set multiple categories for each post, which no other tool allowed at that time, and to set location and entry type.

I keep making updates to my own tool and it has served me well. There as some changes to the administration tools that I really want to make and a couple changes to the tools that will allow all of the pages generated out of the CMS to produce valid XHTML. I am also wanting to build a mobile admin tool that I can use from my cell phone, which would give me the ability to post information to myself from anywhere.

Each of you are basically voyeurs. This has been my place to post my thoughts and annotated links so that I can get back to them later. These offerings are open to all as they may spark and interest or help others resolve problems. Finding information that is helpful or entertaining is a blessing of the Internet and having a resouce like a weblog (the term makes me cringe - I do not know why) is a benificial method to share information. I learned most everything I know from others sharing openly or getting new ideas based on reading what others openly shared.

There is one posting that has out drawn all other posts. The why I bought my last Windows-based computer and why I love Mac OS X has received a few thousand readers (2,000 read it in the first three days it was posted). It seems there are many others that felt the same pain and dropped in to read it. More than half a year after it was written it still gets about 50 visitors a week.

I love having this tool at my use and enjoy the friends it has brought closer and people it has introduced to me. Thanks for reading and drop a note to just say hello.

Title to the top

One of the modifications here at vanderwal.net was making better use of the title in the HTML header. This is something that I preach at work, the title should describe the information as it is used by search engines. Google uses it in their algorithms and in their hyperlink to the information. I took the category in my homebuilt CMS and placed the category name in the title and put the same title in the H1 header tag at the top of these pages. After the first Googlebot scrape of this site the incoming Google clicks quadrupled in 24 hours and have stayed rather constant.

I knew something like this would happen, but not to this extent. I guess there are so many poorly formed Web pages out there that a properly formed page sticks out (tounge partially in cheek). The categories are set based on my personal taxonomy and each entry can be cross classified as there is often cross-cutting issues in a post. The things people are seeking and ending up on these pages is extremely broad, much like the topics covered here. Some of the Google queries end up at Off the Top as it is near the top in the search results, but not nearly as on target as others that are farter down the list that have not structured their information properly.

Get your RSS feed

Yes, I finally got up to speed with the rest of the world and added an RSS feed and have added a new page that will track available vanderwal.net XML documents and RSS feeds. I may make a couple category specific RSS feeds as there is interest. Use the (now working again) comments or the contact to let me know what you would like.

I have only put out the first RSS feed in 0.91 at the moment. I may upgrade it in the near future as I now have it relatively easy to build from my end. I have been getting a decent amount of pestering and bother from folks asking for the feed. You see I still build my own CMS for the site and it takes time and priority to get around to some of these things.

Why not move to Movable Type or Drupal (the only two I would currently consider)? I enjoy building my own system, but it does require that I build my own APIs or even my own applications to mirror functionality. I like building CMS and this one is one of six that I have designed and/or fully built since 1997. It is like a hobby for me as well as a job.