Category: Weblogs

The past week and a half, I have been preoccupied with upgrading and redesigning my website at www.stardel.com, including my weblog there. Once I set my weblog to be standards compliant using HTML 4.01 and Cascading Style Sheets, I decided to go back and redo my website as well. This was a tedious job, because I had bits and pieces of non-compliant HTML written over the course of eight or nine years. To find all of it, I wrote a Perl script that validated each page using the W3C validator. Then I had to interpret the error messages and warnings from the validator. I also had to fix various scripts that I use to maintain and generate various files from templates, and that took a while as well.

In the process, I broke a few things, like my RSS feed and my comments system, and had to fix them. And, I continually had to struggle against the temptation to just play with my Cascading Style Sheets, since they were so much more entertaining than retagging old html files.

However, it is done now, and everything validates. I even wrote a script that I can run each day against recent files to make sure that no errors can creep back in. I feel a warm little glow as the program reports each updated file as valid.

I’ve learned a lot from what started as an intellectual exercise. This is something I had been wanting to do for a long time, but had been putting off because I knew it would take a lot of time.

I didn’t like the way my personal photo looked on the sidebar, so I spent too much time today taking a self-protrait with more muted colors. When I originally read the documentation for the digital camera after I bought it last fall, I vaguely noticed it had a time lapse feature, so I dug out the manual and read about it. I found a place to set up a tripod, and then ran back and forth between the camera, chair and camera docking station until I got a photo that I liked. I felt very silly, but not enough to stop.

Anyway, this is what I look like: the only digital processing was to slightly lighten the photo in Paint Shop Pro since the original was a little dark. Digital photography brings a whole new slant to the concept of “unretouched” photography.

On her weblog Anita commented that I am writing longer posts here than I usually do in my weblog Coffee and Oranges. I had noticed this myself, though three days hardly seems enough to make a trend. For CaO, I write my entries into a text editor (a very nice one called NoteTabPro.) I then run a script that converts the more or less plain text into HTML, wraps the template around it, and ftps the results to my website host. I’ve been using this editor for years, and feel very comfortable with it, so I was surprised that my usual verbosity became more apparent when I started writing “Five Acres.”

I looked at the input screen for TypePad which is nice and clean (surely I can say that much, despite the Non Disclosure Agreement.) Then I looked at my editor which was ready with my weblog text file. The thing that immediately occurred to me is that the font sizes of the two applications are very different, with TypePad being much smaller. I fill up the screen in my editor a lot more quickly than I do the input box for TypePad. Filled up screen seems to equal time to post for me. I think there may be more involved, but have changed the font size of my editor to see if that makes a change in my behavior. In fact, as I wrote this post in Zempt, I found myself growing uncomfortable when I reached the bottom of its box.

Trying to see if Zempt works for me even though my primary interest in TypePad is to see if I prefer posting through a web interface.

Such an undistinguished title. At times, I think that they ought to put such things as titles and subjects on the bottom of the screen, since I never know my subject until I am done.

It was tough choosing a title. However, I google’d Five Acres With a View and it doesn’t seem to have much in the way of conflicts. I also like Flying Changes but there are already some online sites with that name, even though there don’t seem to be any weblogs.

I spent the morning converting some more stuff on my website. I want all the pages to be compliant, and am glad that I already had most of the content separated out from the style. However, there are some things about the way I wrote my template program that are rather awkward, and I am trying to decide if I can design something fairly easy to fix the problem.

I went over to the barn after lunch, taking Dudley, and rode Lily. She was quite extraordinarily good for me. She has better brakes at six than Hap did at fourteen. This is quite reassuring when one is riding at the same time as a bunch of junior riders who are bareback on their ponies.