vanderwal.net

Getting better

Comments are now working here and the CSS issues hopefully are resolved (fingers crossed). Now back to the regularly scheduled programs.

Redesign explained

You most likely have noticed. There has been a redesign here. This new site is nearly all XHTML and using CSS box model. Going through this process introduces one to all the bug that browsers have that you need to work around. I found that IE 5.5 and up on the PC is horribly buggy and does not follow standard box model too well. Netscape 7 on the PC is the best browser. On Mac OS X the best browser has been Navigator/Chimera and IE 5.2 (through this Chimera became my favorite browser on most any platform).

You dare ask why the redesign? Well it was well past time. The last design had been around for a year or so and the CSS was giving me fits. I really wanted cleaner markup and I wanted to have a font size that scales. I believe that the font scales on all web standards compliant browsers and platforms. It should even scale on the PC's IE 5.5 and 6 browser (this has had broken functionality since day one, if you need a browser to scale font sizes properly get a real browser, one that is Mozilla based will do just fine). I am trying to remove the thin white line under the logo graphic and above the menu bar, it is showing up in IE on the PC and on versions of Mozilla on the Mac (Please contact if you have a solution).

I also wanted a better layout that would permit a cleaner layout. I moved the global navigation to the top bar and it uses and unordered list and CSS to put it in line and give it the roll-over (I stole part of the code from Scott and tweaked it). I also moved the local navigation to the left, which has been a joy as it is near the scroll bar and has made life a little easier. The right navigation may also be a place for other goodies. The right navigation has also helped me on the links page as there are a ton of links and I wanted a sub-navigations (yes, the links page is going to be getting an over haul in the near future with some needed integration with other elements in the site). The redesign also give the opportunity to introduce some small photos or images on the pages and not have other colors overwhelm them.

The box model drove me crazy, but I created some cheats I hope to share in the near future, once I get some minor tweaks around here done. The redesign was done solely on the TiBook and using a combination of the Macromedia MX Studio (Dreamweaver MX is a decent text editor, but I could not find a way to have it show a passable rendering of the pages in its own browser) and BBEdit. I started the process with outlines in Omni Outliner (a tool that rocks and is unparralled) as well as Omni Graffle to put together some wireframes to help me sort out the layout and functionality. This set of tools has been one of the best combinations I have used, I wish I could use this combo at work. I really am missing Adobe Photoshop, which may become my next software purchase, as it is a great tool that saves time.

Please, please write wit questions or bugs found. Thank you. I did this for me, but I hope you enjoy it.

What CSS

I think I am using "Crack Smokin' Styles" (CSS) as I have not touched the CSS is a couple days and I have seen four different font sizes today. There is no consistancy from browser to browser on the Mac, nor on the PC. It is very strange I am using the same styles for all the pages, but it varies from page to page. Time to dig in, maybe.

Happy anniversary OtT Tool

Yesterday, October 31st was the one year anniversary of this weblog's home rolled CMS (Content management system). In the past year I have posted 722 entries, set 142 keywords to classify and cross-classify these posts, had 122 comments posted, and had 2,055 category entries in the database to help find related information posted.

This was a wonderful step as the tool did exactly what I wanted it to do. Mostly stay functional and usable from where ever I am. I had started rolling it about six months before it went live and used it as my "travelblog". I had been hand coding every entry for six months to a year, which was getting to be a drag. To post hand coded posts I needed FTP capability, which was not available everywhere. I could find a web browser much more easily. This was functionality I found I had with Blogger, which I started playing with out of curiosity with the interface and desktop application like functionality.

I have been asked why I do not use one of the other all ready rolled tools. I like what I built and it works for me. I can also add functionality to it that I want to play with. Some of the lack of functionality is my own lack of time or motivation on with this tool, but it because of me. I also like the quick responsiveness when posting comments and the general posts themselves.

Here is to another year and more, with time to add everything I want to add.

Happy first

Woops, it is the first of the month and I don't have my updated CMS tool running that better handles the first of the month "issues". It also looks like the CSS did not take on lower level pages from the update of last week. Hmmm.... Hopefully being All Saints Day will help the Angels of HTML look kindly upon me.

RSS in the near future

The RSS feed is in the works here and should be ready by the anniversary of the tool, which is October 31st. There have been many upgrades to the application that runs this site in the past year, but one that I really wanted was RSS. I have it running on my laptop and it needs only one tweak and then to get dropped into my main posting page. Did I mention I am loving having my a my development tools and full webserver with all the application elements running on my TiBook laptop again?

Tweaking begins again

I have been tweeking the code in the weblog and modifying the CSS too. I have the whole of my CMS running on my Mac, which gives me the ability to tweek and update the code. Having Jaguar behind the scenes made adding the MySQL component much easier than in previous builds. In the past it was similar to a Linux or Solaris compile and build. The Mac build was much easier and worked seemlessly with PHP and Apache. The downside was the Data Load element is not available so I used cat to import just the each table's data.

The CSS I started tweaking tonight as the pages were rendering very small on Mac IE 5.2 and oddly in Mozilla 1.1. Last night's updates to the weblog code have it a little closer to validating 4.01 transitional, and fixed a few font oddities of class clashing. I am using a body with 12 points and using percentages in to size the elements in the pages. This is giving me an adjustable font size in IE on Mac, which I will test tomorrow at work on a PC

One of the next steps on the tool side is building a RSS feed and making a few needed changes to the administration tools to ease editing submitted entries.

Temporary Leave

Things will be very very quiet around here over the next few days to 10 days. We move in the morning and will have very little connectivity for a week or so. Not even a phone line until Monday evening. Enjoy your selves and take in some items I find of interest over on the vanderwal net links. I have added a few new ones recently. Of most interest of the new links have been Pixelcharmer and Mike Lee's "Visual Lee". When we get settled all of you will have to come by and just say hi. See you soon.

Correcting a downfall

The vanderwal.net Homepage has been brought back to life. Thanks to those that noted this problem and reported it. There are actually two homepages with different names. One is just a copy of the other. I know it is not the best way of doing this, but there were many links to a hosted site that used the Microsoft default.htm as its poor option, while the rest of my hosts have used index.html (which is the the most common way). I was playing with Dreamweaver MX the other night while eating dinner. I did not check to see that the files were being save for Linux/Unix and found really goofy oddities in the markup. I have lived in a hand-coding world with only minor GUI help for years and having the default server code defaults set was a step I had set in MX, I guessed wrong. A little regex and the "cp" command and all was right in the world. I guess it is time to make all local links only point to index.html.

Down in the bits

Thanks to all who e-mailed yesterday and called to say the site was having problems (barfing MySQL connection errors). The site hosts corrected the problem relatively quickly and we are back in business again. This did get me thinking that maybe the front page of "Off the Top" should be baked (static and not dynamically generated with each hit, which is fried). This would require an XML processing for the page to keep the number of comments (those things you are not using) accurate below each link. This would be some recoding on my part and that will be a little bit off in the furture as my development time and non-work brain time is allocated elsewhere for the next short little bit.

Find friends at IWeb Graphics

Some new additions to the link page including Web Graphics, which I found a few folks I know are posting their finds.

Monthly update

The beginning of a new month usually means a few changes here at vanderwal.net. Each month I tweak the site slightly. One of the elements that you will notice is opening a new full window from the comments links. This helps me and I hope it helps you. I will be providing more options to you so you can make the choice what you want to do, but not this month.

Things may be a little quiet here for a few days or more due to the need to get some things done. If I am posting normally or more than normally I must be ahead of scedule.

Prepare for turbulance

Things may be a little bumpy around here at vanderwal.net for a few days.

Updates at vandwal.net

The about page has been updated with new employment information. Finally! Links has been updated with the addition of First Mondays. The 404 page was finally updated (no more change this page garbage.

So you want to build your own weblog tool like the one here? Start with PHP and MySQL with a little Apache and a sprinkling of arrays and script code. Yes, this is basically what is under this puppy.