Due to the lack of descriptions/pictures of Valisere in Cairo, I need to come up with another name for the lingerie store...something I can use on a fictional shop. It strikes me as a good/logical meeting place for two female characters to exchange information. I can't have Aiyesha come to Hassan's, convenient as that would be. She isn't family, strictly speaking, and she probably cares about her reputation. Half of Cairo knows that Hassan's Tea Shop is a den of theives. However, running into Alex in the Egyptian version of Victoria's Secret might work. Naturally, she would give Alex the journal then.
Although I find it the quandry of whether or not I should be celebrating the day the "snakes" were sent forth from Ireland (though I do imagine that the Pixies and Leprechauns stayed anyway) I always wear green in self defense (warding off pinches) and often pluck a bouquet from my shamrock pot. This year the shamrocks were not in bloom (I don't know why--maybe not enough rain until just recently?), so I left them be. However, I found myself walking through the misty, rainy morning to the building next door to the one where I work. On one side of the side walk was a vertible forest of clover. I plucked two hand-fulls and came back to my office, where I have an electric laminator.
This is the one place where the new page structure falls down. The only reason you don't get that ever is that I don't link to it, but you *can* get it, per the dynamic structure. Doesn't it look funny?
Okay, knowing that there is a ladies underwear Bazaar in Cairo just makes me smile. It's one of those things that just affirms that we are all the same, no matter what...and other fuzzy thoughts.
"Growing up in Dar Hassan was like living in an orphanage in downtown Gomorrah at the crossroads of Hell Avenue and Damnation Way. I have been shot at, yes. I've also been kidnapped and left in the desert for dead. It just hasn't happened in a very long while," Alex explained.
It's not something that will make me popular with Emily, mind, but I'm trying to exterminate as many bugs as possible on the site due to new design/whatever. I've already caught a couple and will edit when I get home. Now, finally, it's true at last. I have titles on every page and they aren't all the same. (Although pages in the same category all all titled the same. Until I want to add another level of $_GETs, I don't see a way to fix it. Frankly, I don't want to do any more big code changes for now. Tired of it. I'm hanging my hat up here.
Well, notepad in some combination with Internet Explorer. For the record, IE 5.2 for Mac is terrible. I can't wait until MS replaces it...if they ever will. I heard rumors that MS "abandonned" IE 5.2 for Mac. If they abandonned it, what, aren't we getting 6 ever? I'd like to have what is still unfortunately the most popular browser actually work on my favorite platform. Doesn't matter if I don't want to use it.
(The irony is that I am writing from MS Internet Explorer for Windows right now.) Have you seen this place lately? I apologize from the depths of my heart. Maroon and Fuschia should never be side by side on a page. I didn't exactly *pick* the colors, so to speak. I chose them randomly to help me determine why it is that some of my CSS boxes are not functioning. The answer appears to be the Internet Explorer is not recognizing them as boxes.
I got the bright idea to actually look at what I've been doing. Strange, I know. I added borders to all of the CSS IDs and classes. Guess what? The borders on the banner div, me div and rightbox div don't show up. Almost as if there was no div there at all...with a small exception. Any changes I make to the css makes the banner and me divs react.
Or 50 ways a web designer goes mad.
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Meeting places
Thursday, March 17, 2005
St. Patrick's Day Project
I arranged the clover on a piece of card stock, covered them with a heat seal pocket, and ran them through the laminator. A little bit of liquid pooled on the cardstock below the cut stems, but I think it worked well enough. I'm not sure how long the clover will last or if the card stock will mold where it is wet through, but I will watch it and let you know.
When I was small my mother used clear contact on four leaf clovers (I've never found one of those in my life, by the way) and it kept them fresh for a long time. I thought perhaps heat seal might do a bit better at the pressing/preservation. For now, they are quite pretty, having almost the appearance of a water color painting of shamrocks.Friday, March 11, 2005
An Example
The Lingerie Souk
Why did I look this up? It's kind of important if you send a character out of the country without adequate clothing. I don't have any mental images of Alex buying lacey nothings, particularly, though. It's not that kind of story.
Growing up in Dar Hassan
Thursday, March 10, 2005
Stomping Bugs
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
Actually, I believe Notepad was the one
On with browser ratings: Firefox rules. Safari comes in a close second. text-align=center; still doesn't work in Safari, but it works in Firefox. I got everything running in an acceptable manner with the exception of the Dragon Con pictures, which have a problem in Safari. Frankly, I find that inexplicable, because I used the same code I used on the Guestbook, which shows up fine. It's all out out there, if you want to see the horror. I don't know what Windoze makes of the pics pages, but it likes my code on all the rest. (Actually, I haven't tested either Guestbook or Events in Windoze yet.)
But I'm not here to rate browsers. You'll notice a new icon in the "Weapons of Choice" links page. Well, there's a pretty good reason for it. I would never have worked out what was wrong with my css this time without the help of the W3C CSS Validator. Seems that some of my CSS was originally adapted from a file I found floating on the currents out there and chose to learn from way back when.
Now, of course, it's totally different, but back then I was more trusting of the code I found. It harkens back to those idyllic days of yore when webmasters actually wrote to one another with the immortal question, "Hey, how'd you do that?" It hardly ever happens anymore, of course, because most webmasters out there are using a WYSIWYG util. Plus, the days of rapid growth of HTML seem to be in the past. W3C is deprecating as many tags as it adds these days. So creative coders are forced to learn other languages. Which is not really so bad, when you think on it.
Actual HTML code is ten times smaller now, easier to read, and in much cooler layouts. (I mean, Lesenvlk has what, fifty or a hundred some pages? Something like that? Imagine if I'd had to hand code everyone one of them instead of just coding pieces to plug in. Whew, what a job that would be! Oh, and, yes, folks, this whole thing was done in a text editor. At least I think so. I will probably write my own guestbook and mySQL picture gallery one of these days, but until then I go on faith that those were coded by hand by caring crafts-people like myself.) If only the browsers would catch up with the W3C, we'd have it made.
I digress, but if you read this page often, you know that. Back to the point of my bad css file.
Have you ever cheated on a test only to discover that the person who's paper you copied got a D? It hasn't happened to me, because I don't cheat on tests (Really. I don't. Why would I? Stop looking at me like that. Ahhhhhhggggnnnn...), but I imagine that what happened with my old css links codes was pretty close to what that's like. Apparently he who's css I read from, borrowed, and made purple and red, wrote all of his color codes minus the # symbol, so I did too, for the most part. I can remember thinking that looked odd, but that it must have been a trick about this brand new language I was trying to learn. Little did I know the moment I put a strict XHTML doctype on, I was going to lose the colors that I hadn't "accidentally" left the # on. (In all this time, would you believe that I didn't know I was doing a good thing by putting in the # on a hex color in a linked CSS?)
The layout problems were all caused by the accidental replace of a } with a ). See the title for a comment on Notepad, where those two symbols look almost identical in the default font. It's BBedit for me all the way now. I don't like doing my editing in Windoze anyway. Testing's ok, but the thing about hard returns not transferring back and forth properly bugs me.
And there you are. Feel free to use the buttons. They all work now. Only took me three weeks--although that's a three weeks punctuated by hospital visits, doctor trips, and even a funeral. Still and all: Isn't it pretty?Tuesday, March 08, 2005
Why I hate MS Internet Explorer
To be perfectly honest, the highest percentage of boxes showing are doing so in FireFox. Nothing, not even FireFox, wants to recognize "text-align: center;" in the css file, although W3C claims that is valid. That's annoying because the HTML 'align="center" ' has been deprecated and html center codes are just ugly.
If the W3C is putting out standard codes, why can't the browsers read them? I pick on Internet Explorer because it is the most popular and least compatible--and the Mac version is stuck in the stone age--but no implementation seems to be comprehensive.
So, what did I do rather than fix it? Well...I changed all of php behind the site in order to bury my content in separate folders and try to vary my titles. The reason you can't preview it is that I didn't replace index.php yet. I will soon. When I do, 404 errors will be generated from here to Chrisendom--or, actually they won't. People will just be routed to the main page until whatever webmasters (and search engines) correct the links. I *could* make it so that everything shows up on the old links, but I want the engines to update. They won't if I make it simple for the old pages to show up.
I will try to alert webmasters of the need to update referring links, but even I can't anticipate everything.Saturday, March 05, 2005
Tried adding borders
Waxing Poetic: CSS in Four Part Harmony
You might have noticed some changes going on to links and excerpts. (Don't try the links button from this page. I haven't rerouted it yet. Checkout excerpts first and take the button from there.) Right now both places are full of packing peanuts.
I decided to use a little php script to give you the links list or the excerpts lists when you click on the broad category headings. So fine, so good, so hoopy. Only, I decided I wanted to have the links/excerpts lists show up beside the list of category headings. (This after spending a good afternoon playing with different javascript menus.)
Ok, so it's a little heavier on bandwidth. I always have been a server-side-who-me-I-coded-all-these-pages-in-html-just-ignore-the-nonstandard-url-it-doesn't-mean-anything type of girl. DHTML with Javascript displayed for all the world to see and text firmly stuck in lines of code just bothers me.
Well, if you look at those pages, you will find that the links list wraps around the left floated categories list, as does the default "Gratuitous Plug." The only reason that the excerpts is ok (except for the default) is that there aren't nearly as many.
It does it whether I use a div or a span, whether I declare it as a class or use it as an id and it doesn't show up in Safari. Using float right to kick the other text over doesn't work either and just makes the banner area go nuts.
So, why, you ask, do I think this should work? Because it did just before I deleted some of the codes that control the behavior of my definition lists and unordered lists. No kidding.
And get this: Putting those back didn't help.
So, who's up for pizza?
///
BlogThis!