I decided to make myself a blog (contraction of web log). Everyone seemed to be doing it. Not a good reason to add yet another. However having some place to take and backup (to a web site) notes for my own future use did seem a good reason.
No tools for writing blogs, and I wanted them on my own site, not someplace like blogger or live journal. Quickest and easiest solution, repurpose some existing html and css files, and write the html with a text editor. When I get time, redo the css file to change the appearance. Meanwhile, when I get time, seek out some better tools for generating the html. Real Soon Now.
Realise that taking notes is all very well, but actually having a plan for how to handle archives is even better. I'd been copying my notes to the index file. Made the name of the current blog index so that anyone looking in blog automatically got the latest version. At the end of the month, start a new index file, and rename the first one something blindingly simple like 200503. At least it will be easy to figure the names of past postings.
I needed to refer to a past entry because an email mentioned it. I had to retrofit a name to all the daily entries, and ensure that I do this on all future days. I made the name simply the date, and hope that is acceptable html. Note, unearth Eric Mayer or some likely text, and check. Or maybe even read the standard. No, who has time to understand the standard? I really should be looking at an html editor for writing these entries.
Realise that being away from home most days in a month isn't a good match to actually posting daily entries on the internet, even if you manage to write them. However without daily internet access, I'm not sure there is any solution.
I still haven't got around to finding an HTML editor with which to write these pages.
Spent a month or so attempting and failing to find any sort of HTML editor that solved the problems of making web pages. Any such editor is fine for writing a web page, if you already know what you want to do. However if you already know what you want to do, then any editor, HTML oriented or not, is fine. For example, I am writing this in TextEdit, not in any of the almost 30 editors I evaluated.
The major result is that I now know that I really do need a web site content generation and content management system. One obvious approach is to use an existing blogging package. Blog software tends to offer multiple tools, for which I mostly can't see any purpose.
Blogs also seem to have permalinks, permanent locations for content. A lot of that seems to relate to the obvious use of single page topic entries for search engine positioning. Unless I automate, I'm not interested in moving from a month at a time format to a day at a time format. I changed my internal page links to yyyymmdd so that at least dated entries are always unambiguous, complete, and unique. Luckily I didn't have too many pages to retrofit. I thought about timestamps, and decided marking by the day would suffice. I have no interest in dealing with spans of time less than a day. Computers are good at nanoseconds, and I gladly leave such time slicing to them.
I also didn't particularly enjoy reading inverse dated material. I grew up in a culture in which documents are read from top to bottom, so having the newest material at the top seems to me akin to top posting. I hate it. I am not going to do it.
Multiple authors are not needed. I am doing a diary, not a forum.
I still haven't thought of what to do about topic entries. Can't see a great deal of point to only having navigation by date. However until you have written material, you don't know under what categories it should be filed. Decided that having a few hundred daily entries to review should surely provide some idea of what categories would be appropriate to my notes. Decided to put the category hooks in the title attribute of the h3 headers, for want of a better idea.
Somewhere I saw something saying blogs are easy to update. Actually I find composing anything in a web form infuriates me, so I want to use a regular editor. So I wrote a little brute force script to upload my blogs (well, actually it is general purpose, so it uploads anything) to my web site. I have another script to organise validation of the html. I still can't find time to style my pages, but I have a few hooks in for style sheets. I should perhaps add a few more style hooks.
Tried adding <meta name="viewport" content="width=480"> in the head to my fluid design. This meta tag is used only by Safari and WebKit on an iPhone. It avoids Mobile Safari using its default min-width setting of 980 pixels. An iPhone resizes the resulting image to suit its 320 pixel or 480 pixel display. However this means very small text on many sites. This change should mean that on an iPhone, the blog will be fairly readable before you double tap to adjust the size.
Alas, instead of a pixel figure, it works better with width=device-width and height=device-height. Makes sense. A future Webkit based iPhone, iPod Touch or other device may well have very different display pixel counts. Better for them to figure out what size is best, rather than me setting a size.
Changed all the obsolete a name anchors into id anchors on the h2 and h3 elements. This decision is looking more and more like a cluster fuck. I can't imagine writing this number of pages manually could possibly leave them in good enough shape to get away with a global search and replace. If it were not that Internet Explorer can not handle correctly served XHTML, I might be able to find some sort of tool to do my web pages.
Internet Explorer is the village idiot of web browsers. As far as I know, the only browser unable to display correctly served, totally valid XHTML. Readers of this blog (if I have any) should note that Internet Explorer will not work. This is due to an IE bug I am no longer willing to work around. To view my web pages, use any standards based web browser. Alternate web browsers include Opera, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox, plus numerous others.
Microsoft, this is your problem, not mine. Internet Explorer may be the 800 pound gorilla in the web access room, but IE is not my gorilla, and Microsoft's broken version of web access is not in my room.
ericlindsay.com -> blog -> makeblog