Building 1 | File Syncing | Textual Sitemap | Graphic Sitemap | WebSite Maps

WebSite Redesign/ReDo

Thoughts

NOTE: This area will be used to record "those things" that we think of whilst putting this together... and don't want to forget. Topics can, and probably will, be in any random order.

Don't forget about bbclone!!
Affiliations - Make some money!!
Message banner all pages with same message
Eliminate the self modifying code.
Stick in that Calendar
TR Data Base - Fix it!!
Blog - Do we want one??? Nope!!

We am a ...

.... but not yet...

Check it out and please help if you can.

Templates we are trying to use

Design106 by DCarter
The one we are using here.
LightSpeed by Enjay
Future/In progress Lord's Page.
Replenish by Free CSS Temps
Thoughts about New Home Page.
Blend by Free CSS Templates
Going to try this in SuSE write-ups.
Found this 'Easy Layout'
Another form of Templates.

Introduction

The fate of
"The Best laid plans of mice and men"
is to often go awry.

The reason for the above anouncement is, cause, we are finding it to be very, very true. All our plans in this "Re-Write" started puffing smoke and then went up in flames. The changes, in HTML, XML, over the years, the differences in Browsers, what one accepts as valid and what the other doesn't has just thrown us for a loop. Then we have the "Standardized CSS" that everyone follows... not! This initial Design Page, and the other Design Pages will be jumbled. A clean step by step procedure is not possible. Leastwise not unto us. Thank you. Especially ... since ... when ... as ... we are building it, we are documenting it. We can be moving along and then ...
Rut Roh!! ... something goes awry. Either something new, something we don't understand like we thought we did, Browser differences... etc, etc. So we stop and investigate and the solution may be explained, by us, right where we had the difficultly. Consequently, we are just a little jumbled. Our "original" first paragraph is next a couple paras down.

Injected Note:(20 Aug 2011) Making more changes. We needed to create a "Software Trouble Shooting Page" and rather than just repeat what we have been using from the beginning (Stuff from Bravenet.com), we decided to look around... and in looking around we found things that needed more explanation. Even for some of the stuff that we are already using. Sooo... we have changed these 'Design Pages' to have a Double Row of buttons across the top. We may not use them all -but- we needed more than were there. So, enjoy and have fun.

This Page, and hopefully this site, was/will be written entirely in XHTML 1.1 and CSS, and can be validated using the links in the footer(s). (Dumping ALL of the previous stuff, and totally starting anew, proved to be to monumental a task. Especially since this is mostly for ourselves. You are going to see "new" and "old" code throughout. Organization??? Attempts will be made -but- no guarantees. Ah! Now we feel more relaxed and less pressured.) Mistakes are going to be(and have been) made, and hopefully corrected before publishing ... but ... they can sneak in. Some of the jumbled nature of this site will be because of talking about correcting -or- changing an operation. We are finding that we have done things "that are not kosher" in HTML. Some are of our own doings/failings and some that we copied. The gigantic effort here will be to get it all straight. Again, as stated above, instead of brand new, this has become a conglamoration of the old and the new. You will see our first attempts along with the latest.

You must learn one thing: it is NOT optional to close <li> elements (or for that matter any non-empty element) in XHTML. They ALL must have closing tags.

Which is best??? The one that presents the info that you are looking for.

For anyone interested in our former "Building a WebSite" area, you can jump to it by clicking on "Building 1" at the top of this screen.

Begin Rant

Note: We just gota say it here and now. There are 'some' out there putting out really screwy code!! And they are working for reputable companies too!! We were just borrowing/swiping the specs for a ViewSonic A75s Monitor. This is the Monitor that our wife uses and we wanted to include it on our Monitor page. Well if you visit ViewSonic Support and look at the source code, you will be amazed. They have a Specs Table that is horrendous and we do believe that the HTML interpreters should be punished for allowing it.

This table has 3 columns and a number of rows. They created the columns very, very uniquely. They have the:
table start - normal,
  then a row start - normal,
   then 3 td cells - normal,
    then a row end - normal -but-
the next item is NOT a row start but two td's followed by a row end!!

<table>
    <tr>    The beginning...i.e. the Row Start.
       <td>CRT</td> .. valign=top with a rowspan of 4
       <td>Type</td>.. valign=top with a rowspan of 1
       <td>17" (16.0" viewable) CRT </td>.. NO valign or rowspan
   </tr>.. "Normally" ends a row
       <td>Dot Pitch</td>.. valign=top with a rowspan of 1
       <td>0.24mm horizontal, 0.27mm diagonal</td>.. NO valign or rowspan
   </tr>.. a Row End with NO Start
       <td>Phosphor</td>.. valign=top with a rowspan of 1
       <td>RGB medium persistence</td>.. NO valign or rowspan
   <tr>.. a Row End with NO Start
       <td>Glass Surface</td>.. valign=top with a rowspan of 1
       <td>Tint (TM=46%) ARAG® screen treatment</td>
   </tr>.. a Row End with NO Start
<tr class="overline">.. Start of new Row with border line at top for separation
       <td></td>
       <td></td>
       <td></td>
   </tr>.. a Row End with NO Start
       <td></td>
       <td></td>
   </tr>.. a Row End with NO Start
       <td></td>
       <td></td>
....and it continues
</table>

And the above will produce:

CRT         Type            17" (16.0" viewable) CRT
            Dot Pitch       0.24mm horizontal, 0.27mm diagonal
            Phosphor        RGB medium persistence
            Glass Surface   Tint (TM=46%) ARAG® screen treatment

... plus the other rows.
Notice the use of the rowspan command. The first column has a rowspan adding up to the number of items to be displayed. The second columns only span one row. We're sure what they are doing was originally found by "Mistake" -but- to continue the use of this "Loophole" is really Not Kosher... in our humble opinion. We are trying our dammedest to write correct, legible and legal code. Really bugs us to see stuff like this. Not sure who to complain to... -or- if it would do any good. We are so locked into what is "Out there" already. Do you realize how much code would die IF they really and truly enforced all the Proper HTML Laws?? Most of our "Old" Current stuff probably would. -But- we are correcting it.

We do want to thank them for one thing. The creation of the Row Line by using one of the borders is a neat idea. -But- it is another mystery. We don't understand why it is:
.overline td {..info..} and not .overline tr {..info..} ???

As a parting note on this subject, we also ran into some problems with the ViewSonic and Logisys specifications. ViewSonic had some hidden characters and we had to literally delete and re-type in the text. On Logisys, they are using a • bullet character in 'literal' form. We had to change it to the • form so it would pass our CSE Validator. It comes from the Windows-1252 character set. (ALL of these problems were found with the free version of CSE Validator. Can hardly wait till we can aford the real version.)
March 2nd, 2012 We finally did!! Got the TopStyle 4 and CSE Validator package.

End Rant

This Page, and possibly more, came from a Template package originally designed by dcarter. It was desired to re-write our Web Pages -but- we are not much of a designer, lack some imagination, and it is just simpler to grab some of the fine Templates available on the Web. Taking one, or more, of them as a base, we can then modify them to suite our own desires. We mean, these Templates are just offering a good strong foundation, for the most part. It is then up to the user to make it fly. We do try to give everyone credit. IF you find something that you think you need credit for, e-mail us and we will discuss it.

One of the items we have been experimenting with, recently, is margins. We are surprised at the defaults they have for some of these margins. On this page we have intervened on them individually. However, we do believe that CSS will come into play here... later, or sooner, depending on the frustration level. (As it turns out, CSS has come into play from the original author. We mean, that is one reason we got this in the first place!) HTML is the basic 'create your Web Page' code and CSS is the 'show it nicely' code.
The following is from someone named Steve, out on a Webmaster forum on the Web (circa 11-02-2007, 17:49 PM):

We are to use HTML to structure our site, and CSS for presentation.
structure = headers, lists, paragraphs, links, etc
presentation = position, font, font size, link behaviors, colour, backgrounds, etc.

Margin Note: And from what I've seen and experienced, the above scenario pretty much covers it.
* margin or padding - top, right, bottom, left
* note: margines are for outside the 'box'. padding is for inside the 'box'.
Annnddd... on the 'Table' item described above, we had one heck of a time getting the 'proper' spacing around the line just above it. In the end it was cause of the <P> start even though the </P> end is AFTER where we placed the line. Seems that even a break in a Paragraph is affected by the margin settings. 'Cypher' through the source code for this page and you will see what we are talking about. The 'Rant Area' in particular.

More on the margins In our New Format for the openSuSE descriptions, we ran into a little problem. They had a 'Fine Print', if you will, by-line under the Headers. This was neat -but- (that word again) it was/is contained in a .post class that had a line-height of 200%. Well, as stated before, we don't like all that space and we figured most of it was to fill out the "Template" page so it would look nice. I changed it from 200% to 100% and re-loaded the page. ARRGGGHH!! The 'Fine Print' line went right up into the Title line!! It was hidden in the bottom half.

<div class="post">
    <h1 class="title"><a href="#">Welcome to Our Website!</a></h1>
    <p class="byline"><small>December 14th, 2010 by
             <a href="#">TRComputing</a></small></p>
.... other lines ....
</div>

So, we need a different change. Well, they have an .entry class that is used to just set the padding in the center, or content, section. We'll add a line-height to it of 100%. That fixed the problem.
Later Note: Well, had to change things again. These 'onelinerBox' thingys that we stick in here now and then, needed more room. Had to make the line-height 120%.
(These are the 'little things' that can make this exasperating at times.)

Templates
Whilst we are choosing the New Look(s) of our site, we are going to note here what Templates we have chosen and where they came from, both locally and on the Web. Why?? So "I" remember.

design106.zip - public_html/Styles/Templates - design by dcarter
blend.zip - public_html/Styles/Templates - Free CSS Templates
Replenish.zip - public_html/Styles/Templates - Free CSS Templates
lightspeed.zip - public_html/Styles/Templates - LightSpeed by Enjay
The Invisible Blog - public_html/Styles/Templates - Dan Beahm and The Invisible Three

I chose this package(design106.zip) because of it's subtle, calming nature. Here in the designing stage we don't want all that harsh, loud, yelling nature of some of the others that we have seen... including some of our own! Now we must say, this started with good intentions of keeping everything straight and organized. Well, we didn't even get finished with this file and it is jumbled. =But- we are not gona straighten it out or change it. Contrary to what some people say, this computer stuff does not start out all well and organized itself. We mean there are lots of decisions to be made and mind/thought changes occur... a lot. And besides that... we are always learning.
(a Jump to the Re-Creation)

Ah, but here comes the really hard part ... What? ... What, will your Web Page(s) be about?? What will be discussed?? The reason we named this Page:......................................................

Design and Decide

One thing in our plan(s) is, to discuss the building, creating and modifying of these WebPages so that someone else could use the info for their own site. What, why, wherefore?? What are the Web Pages going to cover? Stuff that I'm interested in. Has it already been done? Probably. Why do it? For our own enjoyment and learning. So, what am we interested in? Well, if you look at our previous setup you will probably be able to tell. But, I'll list them here anyway: (cause the previous may not stay)

The Lord and the Bible
Computers- Hardware & Software
Model Airplanes - R/C
Music - Listening and Playing
Cars and Racing
Cameras and Photography
Cell Phones - Smartphones - HTC Rezound
Electronic Devices

That's all we can think of at the moment... but I'm sure the list will increase.

Now then, there are some concerns and consequences when you grab someone elses work. You have to put up with what they decided to do -or- you must make a lot of changes. Here, right off the bat, we have a 'problem', at least in the way that I view it.

The spacing, or margin, above and below the "Design and Decide" above, is/was just to great. (the dots are just to aid in seeing the spacing) The 'normal' means, of changing the top and bottom margins, didn't seem to have any effect. After making changes, taking the 'div' for centering out of the paragraph and getting totally frustrated, we did some serious analyzation of the CSS files. Turns out this author likes a lot of space 'after' his paragraphs. There are a number of ways to do this but, two of them are with 'margins' and/or 'padding'. In the 'original' CSS file that came with this package he has a padding on the bottom of 24px. Then we have the 'space' between the lines. He has that set to 20px and we do believe that might be a little to much. (-But- this has been good. We learned, and had driven home, a lot of what we didn't know or 'forgot' to pay attention to.) Now then, one item of interest is the setting of variables. The last value set is what is used. So, even though you have a CSS file full of settings, you can 'over-ride' them in your HTML file. We changed the paragraph and div values, locally -or- inside this HTML file above, to get the spacing that we desired for this particular instance. The rest of the usages will remain unchanged. (By the way, we did finally change the paragraph bottom margin to 16px and the paragraph line height to 18px in the CSS file. Seemed better to me. Still readable, yet not so spread out. Some factors to keep in mind and play with.)

-But-, there is another factor to keep in mind. This is a Programmable Language on a Programmable Device. This means you can make changes... all over the place.

And Another... In the CSS file, the Menu Links are set to be 'lowercase', period. We prefer to have them mixed so, here we will have another change. We will just comment it out so that later we can either just refer to it -or- use it. (style106_right.css -or- style106_left.css)

MSIE...oops Taylor... css screw up

We... created a "class" in style106_right.css right after the "p" element re-definition. We are still using Homesite as our "main man" for creating, editing and modifying WebPages. We use it inside Win2K, inside VMware, inside Linux. Yes, we like it that much. Homesite is not exactly a WSYSIWYG editor -but- it has a Browse feature in which it will display your work in a local Browser. By default it is using MSIE. Unfortunately, or fortunately, in this case it is MSIE ver 6.
August 23rd, 2012 Would like to note that we are no longer using anything connected with MSIE version 6. In fact we have put code in some of our pages to detect it and tell the user to get a newer one. Not all pages have it -and- not all pages are going to get it. It has come to the point that IF a user still has it... they are just out of luck. Sorry.

What we are talking about is this: (the class we created/added)

.thoughtsP
{ font-size: smaller;
    line-height: 10px;
    padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px;
    margin-bottom: 0px;
    margin-top: 0px;"
}

The error is marked in Red. It is the single quotation mark. We had copied and pasted code from a test that we had made using inline code. Now then, it worked in Firefox -but- not in MSIE. Using both brought on confussion and caused an investigtion to finally find the error.

Now then, what made this error "unique" was; all we did was add in the class code and save it. We viewed this Page 'without any changes' and the top portion scrunched all the way to the left side in MSIE. Firefox ignored the extra quotes and displayed the page properly. Now which is right? Ignoring an error -or- failing because of it??? Another thing to keep in mind while you are creating/building your Site. An outright error in one may not show in another.

Start of our Own...??

Ok. At this point we are starting to get real serious. We have been trying to use things we have used before, or wanted to, and we couldn't. Why?? Cause they were in our "old" CSS file!! So, can we just include our 'old one' or do we have to create a new one from the 'old' and the 'new'??? We can just include the old one IF there are no conflicts. Remember we mentioned up above that the last value set is the one used. You can include a whole bunch of CSS files -but- their order may be important. The last one loaded will over-ride a previous one IF there are any contentions.

Now then, (say that a lot, don't we?) it has been noticed that this package contains multiple CSS files also... and not all are used. The author, like us, has different, 'only the same' CSS files for different colors. He named his colour1.css, colour2.css, etc. We name ours TRred.css, TRblue.css, etc. Plus we had a Common.css where he has a style106_left.css and style106_right.css that are equivalent.

Note: As usual, this gets trying. Family interuptions, Holidays comming, fixing 'puters and ... trying to do this correctly with the current software practices ... at home. Course, they, the software practices, changed during our last stint and now, in November of 2010, we are following the current "crazes" ... or at least trying to. -But- there is that "other problem". What we think is current, may not be. Some of these Templates are a couple of years old.

Well, we're not going to just include our old CSS files. Just going to include the parts we want to use, which is the way it should be. We will move our color specific portions to the appropriate colour file and then the ones from Common to the two sytle106 files.
Hmmmmm.... maybe not. We just included the Common.css file in all these cause of an IE6 "fix". IF you are using IE6 you will see that it is not really a fix, it is a message... get a new Browser! We have mentioned elsewhere that the usage of IE6 has decreased and it is not worth the trouble to accomodate it. So, in effect, IE6 will be abanded.

Columns Discussion

Let's see, a Page is a certain number of pixels wide. We want to divide that up into columns. In this case, two(2). In this Template it has already been done -but- we are not totally happy with it. We are of the vintage that we don't like a lot of wasted space. On the other hand, we don't want to get to much going on one page either. So let's calculate.

Difference between right and left

These are the "main" differences between the two positional controlling CSS files in this Template. "Column 1" is always the sidebar and "Column 2" is always the page contents. Just some slight of the hand changes to get them to opposite sides.

> diff style106_left.css style106_right.css 
157,159c157,159
column 1 - contains sidebar items
#column1
< { width: 202px;
<   float: left;
<   padding: 16px 0px 15px 19px;
---
> { width: 190px;
>   float: right;
>   padding: 16px 0px 15px 31px;
=======================================================
180c180
column 2 - page content
#column2
<   padding: 12px 22px 15px 0px;
---
>   padding: 12px 0px 15px 22px;
182c182
<   float: right;
---
>   float: left;

The above is brought out here cause we want to change it. We don't want so much space between the columns. ALL of the numeric values for widths and positioning are in the two style106 right and left files.
note: margines are for outside the 'box'. padding is for inside the 'box'. And they go: top, right, bottom, left

main container - width: 779px;
links above the logo - width: 699px;
logo - width: 739px;
navigation menu - width: 740px;
main content - width: 739px;
column 1 - width: 190px; change to 210px
padding: 16px 0px 15px 31px; change 31px to 11px;
sidebaritem col 1 - width: 165px; change to 185
column 2 - width: 482px;
footer - width: 739px;

The background image is also 779px by 1px.

So, the whole thing is 779px wide. To make it any wider would require a wider background image. -But- we don't want it any wider. That fits in with what appears to be the standard size now-a-days... 800x600. We don't want to change that, only the column width(s).

We have 190px + 482px = 672px. But this must fit inside the 739px of the main content. That leaves 739 - 672 = 67px. Now the top part of Column 1 is a sidebar item which is only 165px in width. 190 - 165 = 25px. So we have room, if we change the correct numbers. changes are in red above.

As we have said many times before, most of this is for us. Well, we forgot to mark down a change and now we can't remember how we did it. In the links along the side, we removed the large spaces between them. The bottom and/or top margins. Now then, we have since decided that we would like a little more space between them -but- we can't find the place where the change was made!! Hate it when this happens!
Ah... but the change was the simplest of all, and probably why we forgot to mention it. The Template had two(2) <br />'s after each link and we removed one!! Now, with our newly enhanced margin knowledge, we think we will use it to get the spacing we want.

Links Discussion

Now then, we tried, feebly, to get a little extra spacing between those links along the side. Was not successful. Then we looked closer at the CSS files. He plays a lot of tricks with the "a" element and links... in both the colour files and the style106 files. We do believe that the default ops for links is to have them underlined for both the normal and hover modes. Then when you hover your mouse cursor over the link it will reverse video to show you it has focus. This can be ... and has been ... changed. We want to make some further changes. Further examination and trials showed that the only way we could get what we wanted was to enhance the <br>.
<br style="margin-bottom: 3px;" />
And that is how you change 'great' ... into 'wonderful' for yourself.

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions...

At the start of this page is a title that proclaims the Re-Design and ReDo of our Web Site... like everything was going to change. Some of this was brought on because of our attempts at creating a Sitemap. The Sitemap Generator showed us what a mess of files that we had on our site. Also showed some naming problems, which we have since corrected. -But- now after investigating this Template, and lots others, we think that our originals are not so bad after all. They are not meant to be fancy, but to present information. So we think that we will keep what we got and just enhance it with newly enhanced and/or aquired HTML/CSS knowledge. We mean, there are a lot of files here and ..... Hmmmmmm... going back to the idea of ReDoing.
Better make up your mind soon, Taylor. This gets so confusing!!! HTML, XHTML, XML ...

Alllrighty now. With that decision (which is still not solid), we moved our "new stuff" from our public_html2 directory to our "normal" public_html directory. After getting everything straightened back out we'll try again. We don't really see why ... yet ... but for some reason some of the new stuff is working differently in normal public_html directory. Must be something that we missed -or- something with conflicting settings. Ok. We found it. Missing a CSS file.
Final Decision Ok. This is our Final Answer. We are NOT going to Blow Away 10+ years of information and code. Changes will be made and added to the current public_html structure. We are finding that, "We just got to much chit out there." So we have another, and the last, delay for code movement.

Speaking of which, the CSS files, we do believe that now would be a good time to go over the stock of CSS files and combine/eliminate some attributes and features that conflict or are dups. We don't need two versions of colour files and there are other things that we would like to get straight. It will be testing to make the decisions of what will go in what file(s).

Thinking Ok now, let's stop right here and do something new. Think. We already have a Web Site that gets visited. Mostly for the SuSE, openSuSE and meager Virus info that we have placed out there. Now most of our site is in HTML. There is a small part in which we have used PHP. The goal here is to straighten out this mess and use the newer stuff. That can not be done easily by trying to keep all the old ... UNLESS ... we want to spend a lot of money for a converter/transformer and/or a lot of time. And then still not learning a lot cause it will, in essence, just be a lot of cutting and pasting again. So, we are back to the Creating a New Site again with references to the old till the new is complete.

At this point we are beginning to wonder if grabbing one of these "Free Templates" is really so great.?.? In our start below we wanted to talk about the DOCTYPE and we have three lines of DOCTYPE displayed. We had troubles, lots of them, at first cause of some justification that the original author has setup. You see, in all this we have CENTERing, LEFT and RIGHT alignment and JUSTIFICATION to make it all look pretty. -But- sometimes... What we have had, was the content and column2 elements text-justified. Which was/is essentially the whole document!! We moved it to the paragraph element. We are getting the same effect only more controlled. (We couldn't find a way to cancel the justification for a small portion.) This was another thing that took some time. It takes time either way....
.... to find out How-To do it -or- to find out How-Not-To do it.

The Re-Creation of our Site

Ok. Once again we are going to move the code. This time we are going to rename our original public_html to public_html-old and then use public_html for the new stuff. In other words, just go for it.

Well now... this was supposed to be the start of the text on the Re-Creation. Right off the bat it has turned into a DOCTYPE discussion. Guess we should have paid more attention to it, the DOCTYPE, in the first place. The changes in Homesite operations is what made us do all this investigating anyway. And during this, we learned of another little line of insertion. This one involes XML and is talked about below.

DOCTYPE

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

Anatomy of a DOCTYPE
Fixing your site with the right Doctype

The DOCTYPE defines which version of HTML -or- XHTML your document is actually using, and this is a critical piece of information needed by some tools processing the document. One of them being the editor that you are using, or going to use. We are using Homesite, and have been for years. This is our first really and truely involvement with the XHTML side of things. We had/have our copy of Homesite setup to produce the code in a format and structure that we like to read and use. All our DOCTYPE's in the past were of the first one listed above. Now we have two Templates that are changing that to the other two. This particular file to the second one and our possibly new home page is using the last one. According to what we have read so far, the last two are almost the same, but different.

XML In checking out the above, and looking closer at the Template we chose for our home page set up, we came accross this "other" line of code that gets placed at the Top... IF you are doing XML.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
Actually, looking closer it came from a test_index.html file that we created to check out using a Calendar from Epoch. ( which will be discussed later) =But- we need to be aware of it cause: XHTML = HTML + XML

So what's the problem now?? You ask. The editing setups we changed/created are stored in the HTML section of Homesite. We tried changing the parts, that we thought should be, for the XHTML section and we have not been successful. We're actually gona have to break down and get out the Manual!!

Well now, this is interesting. In Homesite we can enter a reference tag via the Anchor Button at the top -or- by Right Clicking and selecting insert a tag. Then select the tag from the items displayed. Using the 'Button' on the Toolbar, we get new lines breaking up the code. Using the 'Right Click' we get the code all on one line. ie;

<a href="file or http" target="_blank">
Reference
</a>

<a href="file or http" target="_blank">Reference</a>

This is what happens when you break down and read the manual. ( even though part of the reading was from online searches) We didn't realize that we could do that Right Click thingy and enter code. Still... we don't understand why they are different... uhmm, here in the XHTML code. In HTML we were/are getting it like we want it, all in one line.
Update: Found that it will stay on one line when using the 'anchor' on the Toolbar IF you do not fill in the Content section. This was, as usual, found by accident. So far, this is only in the XHTML ( think that includes XML).
-But- alas it is not consistent. Sometimes it is the way we want... and sometimes it ain't.

Another Hair Puller Now whilst investigating and documenting the 'a' (anchor) problem we found another discrepancy. At least to us. In the above code examples, we tried to use <span> to set a margin of 10px and then a padding of 10px. Neither one would work for 'all' the lines of text. Only the first line. Even though we had span surrounding the whole text block. Then finally using <blockquote> we got the indent that we wanted -but- there was a space above the block and not below it... until we placed an extra <br> at the bottom. ( well once again it was becuase of the settings in the CSS file)

BBClone - A PHP based Web Counter on Steroids

Last stable release: BBClone 0.4.9c - Sat, 01 Mar 2008 23:04:13. BBclone needs to be tested on various platforms. Hence it may not work with every configuration. It is known to run on Windows NT4, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003, FreeBSD, Solaris, Linux and MacOs X, but is likely to run on most Unix flavors, too. Windows 95/98/ME are unsupported.

As the title states, this was written in PHP and is one of the reasons we went with HostRocket as our ISP. BBclone gives a detailed view of the visitors of your web site by displaying the nth last users (and the data they provided, like their IP, browser and so on) that visited the web site, not just showing a number of visitors. This is very handy for webmasters that want to see who is visiting their sites, what browser people use, where they came from etc.

As can be seen by the above date, this like a lot of others, has fallen into the un-supported category. Or at least it hasn't been recently updated. Do not fear though, the source code was, and we think still is available. This counter does not depend on you linking to another site. Once you get it and set it up, it is yours, on your site. -But- your Internet Service Provider must have PHP available for you to use.

Hmmmm... we have a small write-up on setting up bbclone that must be somewhat favored. We did a Google search for bbclone and our bbclone Web Page got a first page listing. Yep. It makes us a little proud of what we have. We try to share any, and all, information that we obtain. So, we will definately keep that one in this new stuff, with maybe some enhancements. These will be acquired as we set it up again.

Links - Incoming and Outgoing

Seems that we have something that we were not aware of. With all the changes and enhancements to this Web Stuff we should have expected these. But, we are finding out now and passing it on to anyone who cares.

Now then, one of Sitemap Generator's functions is to litely Analyze your site. In this analysis of mine it kept coming up with a lot of 404's. (Not Found) This was very puzzling on some, cause we did not recognize the names. As it turns out, Links ... into your site ... are now recorded and those are checked in these analyzers. Wow. In Google, search for "Incoming links found within Website". (as usual, without the quotes) This will open your eyes... IF you didn't know it already.

But, we had a couple that were complained about and shouldn't have been. Now I have been making lots of changes -but still- these shouldn't have caused errors. The first one was my Glossary.html file, referenced from our home page, index.php. Both of them get:
This document was successfully checked as HTML/XHTML 1.0 Transitional!
When we run them through the W3C validator.

Summary on HTML elements

The html and body elements are distinct block-level entities, in a parent/child relationship.
The html element's height and width are controlled by the browser window.
It is the html element which has (by default) overflow:auto, causing scrollbars to appear when needed.
The body element is (by default) position:static, which means that positioned children of it are positioned relative to the html element's coordinate system.
In almost all modern browsers, the built-in offset from the edge of the page is applied through a margin on the body element, not padding on the html element.

Reference: Understanding the HTML versus BODY Element in CSS
Read over this page. It has some well presented information. On top of that it has some interesting code and ways that we haven't seen yet.

<style type='text/css'>
  .example     { border:1px solid #999; margin:-0.5em auto 2em auto;
                 padding:1em; width:37em; position:relative }
  .example pre { margin:0 }
  .example hr  { border:1px solid #eee; margin:1em 0; padding:0;
                 clear:both; width:100% }
  .example-end { clear:both; height:0; overflow:hidden; 
                 margin-bottom:2em; white-space:pre }

  img    { display:block; margin:0 auto }
</style>

Now then the above are used inside the page as follows:
<div class="example"> a div is declared
Then inside the div boundry the pre and hr declared above are used inside it. Interesting. If you go to the page referenced and then view the Page Source you will see what we are talking about.

The following items came with the Template

Template example elements

Here are some example elements available with this template.

links

example link 1

block quotes

Some blockquote text. Instead of the junk test we are actually going to say something in this blockquote example. We are leaving these in here for now as examples for both you and me. The color attributes are set in colourX.css(X=1,2,3,etc) and the numeric dimensions are set in style106_left.css or style_right.css.

lists

list item 1
list item 2

images

images can be placed on the left, in the center or on the right.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur.

This page was created from a template released as an 'open source' design (under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Licence), which means that you are free to download and use it for anything you want (including modifying and amending it). All of the logo images are from digital photographs taken by dcarter, and he claims there are no issues with copyright. All he asks is that you leave the 'design by dcarter' link in the footer of the template, but other than that...

You can view other 'open source' template designs here.