Journal Entries - October, 2003

October 30, 2003

Yesterday, I spent several hours looking through ratings and reviews scripts at both HotScripts and the PHP Resource Index. I found many scripts that do what I need, but aren't compliant to any Web standards. Finally, last night, I found a script that is XTHML-compliant and could possibly meet both my needs and current Web Content Accessibility standards with some (hopefully easy) tweaking of its underlying code. I'll do some tests with it, and tell more about it if I decide to use it for my User Ratings pages.

October 28, 2003

I've discovered that WSN Links, the ratings script that I've been using to run my User Ratings pages, does not comply with XHTML, CSS, or Accessibility standards. In fact, it doesn't even come close. Unfortunately, its author has indicated that he has no plans to update it to comply with standards. So, I'm looking for a good, free ratings script (preferably a PHP script) that is standards-compliant. If you know of one, please write and tell me about it.

October 25, 2003

During the entire 8 weeks of my site redesign, I used the excellent online W3C Validator to repeatedly check and validate the XHTML code of each of my hundreds of pages -- a tedious, time-consuming task that had to be done one page at a time. Today, I discovered the online WDG (Web Design Group) Validator. The WDG Validator does the same job as the W3C Validator, but can check up to 50 pages at a time. I used it to quickly and easily check my entire site, one subfolder at a time, and it found minor errors on 3 or 4 pages that I had missed when I had checked my pages individually.

October 23, 2003

I'm still waiting for the new forum software update. In the meantime, I moved Welcome To ComputerBob.com so that it spans the center and right columns, helping to visually break up the straight, vertical, 3-column look. I also changed the background colors behind Graffiti, added a blue background to the dates in this journal, made more tasteful validation icons for my left column, and redid the tiny CB logo that appears at the end of each of my articles, to make it more closely match my new site logo.

Scientists announced today that they have found a genetic mutation that causes obsessive-compulsive disorder. Actually, they found it several months ago, but then they checked and re-checked their findings over and over and over and over and over...

Anyone who is interested in cutting-edge Web development techniques will be glad to know that Web standards guru, Jeffrey Zeldman's A List Apart site is back online, with a new, redesigned look.

October 18, 2003

I just added two new book reviews to my Reviews section. Click on the Reviews button to the left to read my reviews of HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS, by Dan Shafer, and Designing With Web Standards, by Jeffrey Zeldman.

October 13, 2003

My forums are the only part of my site that I haven't yet converted to my new layout. Because that's going to be a major effort, I'm waiting to do it until after an upgrade to the Invision Power Board forum software is released, hopefully within the next several days.

The Saga Of My Total Site Redesign is a series of posts in my forums that describes the day-to-day processes, choices, problems and solutions that I faced during the 8 weeks that it took to redesign this entire site.

Some observant readers may have noticed that the light blue top, left, and bottom areas of each of my pages form a large, boxy letter "C." That was intentional.

October 6, 2003

It has taken nearly 7 weeks, but I am very close to finishing my complete redesign of this entire Web site. My new design uses XHTML 1.0 Strict for structure and content, and CSS for layout and presentation.

The first thing you might notice is that each page of my site loads much, much faster than it used to. That's mainly due to the following:

1. Along with the actual page content, each page of my site used to contain nearly 80KB of logo images, border images, and transparent spacer images. In contrast, my new design uses less than 8KB of images on each page.
2. My site's previous page design used lots of inline styles (i.e. font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="4" color="#ff0000") to control typography. In contrast, my new design uses a separate Cascading Stylesheet that defines all of the font faces, colors, and sizes, as well as list styles, box styles, line-spacing, section margins, padding, etc., used throughout my entire site.
3. My site's previous page design used bloated, cryptically coded, heavily nested tables-within-tables-within-tables to achieve the desired layout. In contrast, my new design uses very efficient and easy-to-understand XHTML code for each page's structure, with CSS handling each page's presentation.

The next thing you might notice is that the navigation buttons have moved to the left column, and that there are many more of them. I used CSS to create and style the new navigation buttons. Each button "lights up" when you hover your mouse pointer over it. Buttons also "light up" to indicate when you are viewing one of the main table of contents pages, and they "light up" not as brightly to indicate when you are viewing a sub-page of one of the main table of contents pages. To see how it works:

1. Click on the Reviews button in the left column. Notice that it stays "lit" to indicate that you are viewing the Reviews table of contents page.
2. Click on the name of one of the reviews on that page. Notice that the Reviews navigation button stays lit, but not as brightly, to indicate that you are viewing one of the sub-pages of the Reviews page.

You might notice the four new icons at the bottom of the left column. Those icons indicate that my pages meet several rigorous Web design and Web accessibility standards. In fact, my pages actually exceed current accessibility standards.

You might also notice that all external hyperlinks (links to other Web sites) now have a link title and alt text, indicating that they are external links, and most also have a dashed underline, letting you choose if you want to use your browser's features to open those links in a separate browser window or not.

If you prefer to use your browser's font-sizing feature to make the text on Web pages larger or smaller, you might notice that my site's text is now fully resizable.

Finally, if you print any of my pages, you might notice that your printout doesn't contain my new ComputerBob logo or the left navigation column, and that there's a dashed box surrounding the page footer. All of that is done "behind the scenes" by a separate print stylesheet that does away with the need to create a "Printer Friendly" version of each page.

By using this new design and by coding to standards, I have ensured that my Web pages will display and be functional in a wide variety of old and new browsers, as well as on different types of computers, cell phones, and Web accessibility devices, for years to come.

I've also ensured that future site updates and redesigns will be much easier to perform, since I can now make sitewide changes to layout, fonts, colors, and more, by simply changing a few lines in one stylesheet.

As always, I welcome your comments and suggestions for improving my site.