May 12, 2008
The long awaited machine brain transplant has now come to pass. However, it came as a completely new computer rather than a transplant. It isn't really possible to be without a platform for 2-3 weeks while my main computer is torn apart and rebuilt. And it did take about 3 weeks.
The new computer is another PC running Windows XP. I wasn't willing to "bet the farm" on Vista at this point. The new box is built around an Intel Core 2™ Extreme (Quad Core Processor) CPU, an Asus Striker II Formula Motherboard and two Nvidia GeForce 9800 graphics processors. This is, quite frankly, a gamers machine although I am not overclocking or getting into any of the "extreme" limits of what this can do. I'm not a gamer. I just tend to have a lot of hungry processes running all at once.
When I brought home the new box, the power supply in the old one immediately gave up the ghost (jealousy?). So I've learned a little bit about diagnosing power supply problems and digging around in a computer's innards to replace parts. Hardware isn't something I'm used to messing with, but there is a first time for everything.
I also had issues with the configuration of the new monster that got me reading motherboard manuals and sticking my fingers into its case.
It took me about a week to transfer all the data from the old machine to the new one and to find ways to deal with the ways these newfangled machines are built. This new one has no serial ports. It has no parallel ports. It has no SVGA ports. My collection of assorted monitors, weather stations, printers and digital toys have ALL of those things. Fun.
At this point I have everything running on this machine that I had on the old one and I have upgraded the web development environment to the Adobe CS3 Suite, which means a new generation of Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Flash, and Publisher. So far the installation of the upgrade was the only really difficult part of that change.
The new machine is noticeably more responsive and a lot faster at moving data and (so far) has been pretty reliable. I think I have rebuilt my little development world. However, the old machine is there in the corner so I can grab missing bits from it when I need them.
April 22, 2008
The new style Webster has been up for a couple of months now and for the most part reactions to it have been very positive. I did have a couple of users that were using the old Internet Explorer 6, so I did have to try to address some of the portability issues there. I have a laptop that is used for Farm accounting that rarely is connected to the Internet, and that now has IE6 installed so that I can test.
The next frontier is to add Print Media styles to what I've got so that more of the pages will print well. It seems that more modern browsers do a pretty decent job of printing from a normal, screen media HTML file, but I'd like to be able to suppress some decorative graphics, colored backgrounds and maybe get pagination to be more rational. Then maybe I'd need to post fewer things as PDFs.
One big advantage to PDFs: whatever their origin, you do not need to edit them to strip all of the florid, verbose and non-standard HTML encoding that gets spewed forth from MS Office documents converted to web pages. It can literally take hours to clean up a page like that.
February 24, 2008
At this point about half the site is the new design. What's left? The Show directory and the directory of miscellany called “other”. I think the Other directory is going to convert pretty easily. The Show directory has a lot of PDFs that won't be touched, but it also has the Calendars that are going to need a lot of work. They are going last.
February 23, 2008
Some good news today and some bad. The next tranche of files in the new format got posted to the live site today: the Freestyle articles. The good news is that these converted to the new style very, very quickly. The style sheets fit well, and the templates were ready to go, so the entire set of articles converted in under an hour.
The bad news is that a little inconsistency in naming conventions finally made a mess for me. The original site was developed in the context of PCs and 3-letter files suffixes (i.e. .htm). I am a child of mainframes and servers and habitually give my files the full suffix: .html. I've had files with both kinds of suffixes mixed together now for nearly 2 years with no issues... until now.
When I put together the new menus I forgot that I had mostly root files named index.html, but there were also some legacy files named index.htm, so I was merrily busting links all over the place.
Such are the wages of sin.
I should have done the conversion to my naming convention a long time ago. Instead I had to do a hunt and destroy action this afternoon. If you find a busted link, now you know why.
February 22, 2008
After hacking away for almost a month at the CSS for a new site, I have merged the style sheets into the main VADA/Nova site and converted some side pages: the Membership pages, these Technical pages and some of the Contributed Articles. I haven't posted any of these to the actual live server yet. I am starting with pages that don't have to change frequently and that are not critical to our members. This way I can still make rapid changes to critical pages without risking a melt-down.
It is interesting to see how a style that works very well on a page that contains a lot of text (like these Technical Pages) turns out to be horrendously ugly on our typical VADA/Nova page. One of our typical pages is rather like a Powerpoint slide: a few headers and lots of bullet points. The bullet points are sometimes navigation and sometimes a list of rules or directions. Use a typical assignment of sizes (doesn't matter if fixed pixel-sized text or scalable em-sized text) and you get great, big headers and teensy, weensy bullet list items and spacing between them that makes no sense at all.
I've tinkered with the style lists enough now that I have something that works fairly well for both kinds of pages. I am also making the presentation of like-data more uniform as I go. For example, the Year End Awards pages were an absolute pig's breakfast of presentations. No two were alike. The styles are now (mostly) the same, although the earliest years that we have records for (1999, 2000, 2001) didn't keep quite the same information or make the same awards. These changes are not on-line yet... so if you want to see the chaos I'm dealing with - look now.
Taking the plunge
I mentioned up above that I do not want to risk a melt-down of critical functions. That does beg a question. Which pages can I risk to make an initial deployment of these changes? I set up a local, private web server on my own PC to do basic testing of these pages. That is a lot more than I have been doing with the VADA/Nova pages in the past. Nothing I've done in the past couple of years has involved the sort of crawling out on a limb that this particular venture does. (And I have backed up the old pages in case the limb breaks behind me.) But there is nothing like installing something on a live server with live users to really find out what's what.
Today it occured to me that the most marginal, sacrificial pages on this website are these technical pages, so these will be the initial experiment. And my guinea pig users will be those daredevil, geeky techno-equestrians that that have ventured here to the dark side of the website.
Wilkommen, Bienvenue, Добро пожаловать!
If you can't read that last one, don't worry... it means you don't have a Cyrillic font rattling around your computer somewhere. I promise it's the only place I'll ever use Russian here.
Tonight I'll load the styles, script bits and these few pages on the live server and wait for the screams.
I've grown fond of this new look, but you never do know if it is just familiarity that makes it attractive. I need some fresh eyeballs.
Some observations about HTML/CSS text styles
Back in the dark ages when I was doing my Ph.D., the average Grad Student did their thesis on an IBM Selectric typewriter. The lucky, lucky Comp. Sci. Grad Student got to use Troff or maybe Latex and a laser printer to generate a document that was beyond beautiful (or so it seemed at the time). Working with Troff and Latex introduced you to mysteries of kerning and vexing minutia of typesetting. And you had to go there or your thesis would never pass the format inspection.
HTML and CSS does not begin to give you that kind of control over presentation, and they are not meant to. One major goal of these technologies has been to separate the presentation of documents from their content and structure. The major gain is flexibility to deal with different media (print, big screens, little screens, and so on) and different viewer preferences. But, if you really, really think that after a period in a sentence there should always be two spaces before the start of the next sentence, you may find that preference a little difficult to implement. What we have here is not desktop publishing and it most certainly is not up to the standards of commercial publishing... at least not without a serious (and seriously expensive) web design guru.
Finally, it does seem that the rule of Grief Conservation does apply here. While using CSS certainly does let you get rid of a lot of icky tables used for placement and some rather crufty JavaScript, it is not a free lunch. Getting images and text blocks to float into position without other parts of the page running amuck can be tricky. And sometimes you find thickets of <div>s blooming where you just weeded out a mess of <table>s. I may owe some of this to the learning curve, but the fact that a web search of a term like “css image float” gets you 183,000 hits on Google indicates to me that none of this is trivial.