Well, I’m still hard at work revising the entry page for SCLRR. I have a number of variations, here, here, here, and here. Of course there’s the usual stuff in dealing with a committee of people and a plurality of decisions. We’ll get there. Also the switch over between a shell account with a redirect for the domain (sooo late nineties…) to an actual hosted domain has gone fairly smoothly, although I expect I shall shortly hear from a multitude of volunteers who had their computers memorize their passwords so that they’ve long since forgotten what they are…

The real story is in those drop down menus. I got the idea from A List Apart which has a gorgeous css only (well mostly) drop down menu styling. It seemed like this would be the perfect solution to so many links as on the old one.

Oh dear. That “mostly” contains a drama in of itself. Because it seems that most browsers do just fine with the css definitions which basically involve defining the display to none for the li containers in the ul list (really, really elegant) and then changing the display back to block on hover.

Except of course our dear old friend Internet Explorer 6 doesn’t do hover when it’s not a link. Pish. So there’s a little javascript hackery that rewrites the hover routines on the fly for IE6. All well and good, I snarfed the css file examples, integrated them into the css and js files and went about happily buffing and polishing the newindex page.

Of course, the astute reader will recall that not only do I use Firefox, but I also work on Linux (Ubuntu, and yes I’m ecstatic that Dapper Drake comes out tomorrow, though I’ve been using the Dapper Beta for the last month and titch) so he or she will spot the looming cliff that I am oblivious to. I am also dealing with a crew of very non tech people, so they are all using IE6 hands down.

And of course it turns out that the dropdowns aren’t working at all in IE6. Figuring a conflict between css elements from the original css file with the new stuff, I copied just the example over and sure enough that worked. So I slowly added in all the decorative elements: the background, border, table, finally the multiple column…and it all works!!

So why doesn’t it work on the index?? I start to add in the actual copy (bidding farewell to the trusty lorem ipsum) piece by piece and it finally dawns on me that the javascript for the slideshow is conflicting with the javascript for the hover rewrite. At first I thought it was due to some IE6 weirdness about mixing inline and external js (the slideshow has some elements that must be inline because the perl script generates the values on the fly) but that wasn’t the case. I finally tracked it down to a conflict over the onLoad in windows. Seems that IE6 doesn’t like two of them. When I combined the calls in a single function, it demonstrated its further fussiness by working only when the two were called in a certain order. (I tested this in IE7, by the way, and it worked without the javascript: hallelujia, praise the lord and pass the ammunition.)

So, it was very wrong of me to blame all the problems on the css. I’ve learned that lesson…

Looks like whenever I play around with the main content format, it generates a new feed copy of the message! Yipes. So to all of my hundreds of feed subscribers: sorry! *ahem* Well now I understand why sometimes there seems to be a lot of duplication in my own feed subscriptions. Once I have all the tweaks I want done, it should be better. I’ve gone quite a ways from the Ocadia theme, so I’ve now declared the theme derived from and highly indebted to Ocadia, but of course no longer Ocadia. Any eye-jarring theme induced wincing is strictly my fault: I’ve just been following my own whims as to what I like in layout and decorative elements…

Anyhow, for those of you remotely interested, I’ve used www.dreamhost.com as my web hosting, and I must say I’m extremely impressed with what’s available and how well set up and usable it all is. I’m going to test out a few more things, and then probably recommend to SCLRR that they use this site. Cos I’ve about had it with their current site admins not responding to any of my queries — some of which include pricing lists for properly hosting the domain instead of forwarding to a shell account! (NB to web hosting admins…never, ever delay on actual requests for pricing info from one of your users interested in upgrading…)

Anyway, today is a day for backups: on my computer, and on my various websites (DR for the first time!) so I’ll leave you, dear readers, for another day…

I’ve created and maintained a website for a nonprofit group for about seven years now. I’ve done it in my spare time, and of course there were periods of time when I was largely absent from it (always available in emergencies of course, but I like to think I constructed this well enough that that wasn’t much of an issue, ha).

I’ve been back at it and working on it fairly steadily since about February, a few hours a week, more or less. I fixed a number of things “under the hood” (there’s an extensive volunteers only section that lets the volunteers manage information on the dogs and applications that come in) but now I need to redesign the entry page because quite frankly, it’s so 1999. Not to mention that several volunteers with access to the html files did some rather outre markup — the kind that really just does not hold up well over time, although it doubtless served the purpose at the time (I did immediately change the fuscia link hover color to red back in February; there are some things I won’t tolerate ).

I’ve got changes ongoing over here. The most obvious change is of course the switch to css. (There is NO css markup in the current version of the site; I plan to change this.) The other thing is that I didn’t know of the Perl::CGI module when I initially wrote the scripts, so everything is pretty much done by hand. I’ll have to work on that aspect of it more slowly. The immediate goal here is to get the website “freshened up”.

To that end, the index file has been getting a makeover, and at present looks like this. This is an html-only mockup, I’ll be creating new perl routines for the headers and footers now that I think I have the layout where I want it.