Sunday, April 3, 2011 Lethbridge

8:00 am

 

8:30 am tag: Technology

I spent almost 3 hours this morning trying to debug a problem with this website. At the time I had 2 web pages - one that was properly formatted and one that had no formatting. I couldn't find any difference between the code for the two pages. Intriguing.

It turned out that last evening I realized that the code that I had inherited from the DW system placed the CSS code inside each web page rather than creating an external CSS page. So the problem became one of why does it work in one case and not the other. A very careful comparison of the code that was calling the two pages was identical. And they were both calling the same external CSS page. There were no error messages, but one page was formatted and the other wasn't.

Then it finally dawned on me. The link to the external CSS should be different because the path for one page was nested inside a folder and the path for the other page (which worked) was at the same level as the CSS page. Simple, and obvious, once one sees it. But it would have been nice if DW had flagged that in the case of the nested page the link to the CSS had failed instead of just giving me the result of not using it. Anyway, now it is working, and I can begin adding content to the pages.

9:50 am

I have finished shovelling the driveway and sidewalk. This took about an hour as the snow was quite heavy. According to an app on my iPhone this burned about 600 calories. Better exercise than the coulee walk.

11:20 am tag: Technology

I have links working between the Technology activity web page and the April 02 daily web page, but have not yet found an efficient way to do this.

1:10 PM tag: Technology

I have all of the links working between the basic web pages of this web site. However I have not yet filled in the particular entries in the activity pages for the last three days. This will also involve setting up links to the specific sections within each daily page.

I want to do some reading on the topic of using DW CS5 to create links to targets. I understand the idea but am not yet sure how to do this with this software. It is primarily a matter of becoming familiar with the interface and learning where to find the relevant commands.

I also need to do some reading on how to use CSS to have the links appear in blue before they are used for the first time, and red after that.

Now to upload this material to a web server and verify that it works.

2:00 PM tag: Technology

Good. I have set up the commands for interacting with the web server and this website is now on the Web.

A brief comment on the shift in emphasis between this website and the one I have been using for the last 2 years. With some justification the earlier version emphasized bean-counting. Each day I tallied up an estimate of the number of hours spent on different activities and entered it into a couple of tables that gave me a visual image of the pattern of my time spent on these activities. The present version has no beans. Rather each activity is described in words and a summary statement will be made at the end of each month. This puts the focus where it properly belongs - on the meaning of the activity rather than its size. It is surprising how long this has been bothering me without any real attempt to rectify the situation. But my subconscious has been working.

3:30 PM tag: Technology

It took me almost an hour to find a way to center the two photos at the top of the page using CSS within DW CS5. The book I am using did not provided information on this! It showed me how to place it on either side of the page and how to embed it with text flowing around it, but nothing on just centering it. I finally did a google search "center a photo using CSS" and obtained a small piece of code that I copied into my CSS file. There are some simple things that CSS makes difficult!

7:05 PM tag: Literature

 

McEwan's "Solar" is a delight. A lovely justaposition of global and personal priorities and human strengths and weaknesses.

The novel itself presents the dilemma of an older man who has had 5 divorces because of his philandering who suddenly finds the roles reversed. The story moves forward 5 years and he now finds that his mistress is pregnant and he is facing the prospect of becoming a senior citizen while trying to raise a teenager.

 

 

 

8:00 PM tag: Technology

This is the first time I have tried a smaller image of a book cover. The image is "floated left" and the text wraps around the image. However the software does not do this perfectly. If there is not enough text to fill the left side then the image hangs below the page overlapping onto the footer. A few blank lines can solve this problem, although it may still be a problem if the viewer has a wide screen.

As I continued to play with this feature I quickly discovered that the DW editor became hopelessly lost as it embedded various tags into the text and soon this display was a real mess. I had to go into the code in order to clean it up. But it seems to work fine if the text is first created and then the image inserted at the end.

Ooops. Not so fast. There must be enough text to fully wrap around the image. Otherwise even a new heading which looks fine when one is creating the page will appear as part of the wrapped text if there is not enough text to surround the image. The result can look different depending upon the width of the window one has while viewing. And Firefox and Safari treat the code differently (I can only guess what Internet Explorer does). This is rapidly becoming a nightmare.

It is safer to place the image by itself on one line, perhaps indented a few tabs.