Dysmey Post Archive > Pages for 2001 > Labor Day 2001 Edition

Labor Day 2001 Edition

west editorial workout

The three-day weekend went by really fast because I was really busy. My sister Vickie, herself busy with freelance work, has no time to upgrade her site, so I'm doing it for her.

I rebuilt her home page first. I pulled out her embedded style sheet and put it in a separate file. Then in its place I put Dublin Core tags for search engine use and cataloging. When the rebuild was complete, I copied the head, foot and sidebar of the page into a TextPad clip library in order to make building the subsequent pages easier.

There are now five rebuilt pages (home, résumé, book list, and two others), which I put on my web site for her to review. (I said her, not you folk, hence the lack of a link. Sorry. You'll see them when the site is complete.)

how the work was done

Some of the changes in her site include:

Unified style.

Each page had its own embedded style sheet. I have merged them into a single stylesheet file. That way, Vickie can apply a single style for all her pages.

Better color coordination.

IMHO the general color scheme (ice-blue sidebar on a peachpuff background) was painful to the eye, so I worked the colors over with TopStyle. With its RGB Picker I found a better-looking desert-like background and a light dust color for the sidebar. I kept the earth colors for the main links and headers and the blues for the sidebar, though.

Fewer tables.

Vickie used tables to align bullet images in her lists. It worked, but made her pages a bear to update. In the new unified style sheet I have made different classes of lists, each with its own bullet image, using the form of this general selector.

ul.x {list-style-image: url("./img/x.gif");}

It cleared out a lot of tables, and made lists easier to update.

The one change I could not make work was converting her GIF files to PNG. The title image (the one with the pencil) did not want to convert at all to PNG. After several hours of work, I had to give it up and use the original GIFs.

work (I mean my real job)

The first day of work after Labor Day was a real bear. The internal web server was transferred to a newer computer. The one program I wrote for the web server, although transferred with all files entire, would not work when the server was fired up. The web pages could not detect the program's database, no matter what I try to get them to see it. Prodding the new web server to make the program work didn't help, either.

I drove myself half-nuts getting it to work. Worse, it's one of the most important programs for half my coworkers, so we were getting phone calls and e-mails all day about this.

Next, I will have to copy the program off the old server onto my workstation after installing PWS (personal web server, which comes with Win98). If it works on my computer, we will have to see what is wrong with the new web server itself.