Web Design Log
Log of corrections & modifications
Latest on top
8/22/23 - It's amazing what you'll miss when you post material on your web pages: On my Letters Page, the "index" of the letters on the left-hand side of the page, had what I thought was a consistent format: The title of the letter as a link with a key word in bold. On the next line would be the date the article/letter was posted.
On looking anew at the page I noticed that in many pages, the date was on the same line as the title. This had happened, evidently, because the title was short and I hadn't added a "hard" carriage return.
To fix this, I created a PDF file of the page, printed it (just long enough to see the index) and then I could see the misformatted lines and then laboriously went about adding the hard returns, hitting SAVE, over and over again.
That's what happens when you're not careful when you look at your work and assume what you see is what everyone will see - forever.
2/14/23 - Discovered that the sharing that must be done on Shutterfly doesn't work on iPhones. In a back-and-forth with them to solve this problem.
2/7/2023 - Oh, fun! After setting all the
photo albums to share from Shutterfly, they worked fine on my desktop but on my
phone, every "share" took me to a log in to Shutterfly.
I'll have to call them on this.
2/3/2023 - I've started updating the Shutterfly links.
1/30/2023 - Major change happening with Shutterfly - where I "hang" all my pictures: no more sites with unique URLs. I will still be able to link to my albums on it but only if I "share" the album.
This will entail changing the links on all my albums.
I discovered this as I realized that I didn't post any of our trips pre-2008 and started uploading the pics then tried to create a site but couldn't.
While I was at it, I substituted the pic taken by a former student at the dedication of the shopping center at the site of the old Edison for the pic that was from 2006.
7/14/2022 - I noticed that the thumbnails on my Photos page were very small. To fix them all was a pain as I had to redo each thumbnail, redo the space around the pic and upload all the new small pics.
Took about an hour.
3/9/2022 - Inserted the new link to the widening css and it seems to have worked the first time I tried it!
Miracle of miracles!
3/5/2022 - Noticed that my screen was still a bit small in that it didn't fill the screen like most modern sites. I checked out my css files and noticed they were specific pixel widths v a percentage of the screen. I created a new, temporary css file that changed the widths to 100% - the sub-windows already are percentages - and tested it with a temporary page and it seems to work in all the browsers + my phone.
Before I make a complete change I'm going to check it out further.
1/3/2022 - I made a slight change to my Photos page: introduced a chart with links to specific years so that you don't have to scroll down to a specific year.
11/5/2021 - Had an exciting experience last night as I sought to update my Blog page: in the process of adding a post I blew up the formatting of the table. Not surprisingly, I couldn't fix it as the table has a jumbled combination of 1, 2 and 3 columns. The bollix ended up with 1 column being 75% of the table instead of the desired 50%. This would've have been enough if it only included the 1 row but it changed all the 2-colum rows.
Fortunately, I had a back up of the original page and was able to bring in the untouched page, then carefully make the edition and without screwing it up again.
7/24/2021 - After having my machine blow up - TWICE - I was able to recover my files and in the process I discovered a bunch of articles I had written for the PACS Databus so I included them in my Blog section.
4/19/2020 - Had the same difficulty as in the past loading the pages from this site & getting them to run. Discovered I've been loading them into the wrong folder.
Also, noticed the strange order of blog entries: were based on when I uploaded them. Changed the order to the date they occurred.
4/18/2020 - Divided the old Sites page by taking the numerous Blog pages off to a new Blog page. The reason there has been such a gap in work here has been the complete rebuilding of the WissahickonDems page in WordPress.
While I didn't do the heavy lifting on this - it was a commercial house - there was a lot of modifications, additional pages, links & an entire recreation of the way pictures are handled in it - we're using Flickr instead of the old album creator I've been using since the beginning which took an enormous amount of time.
10/27/2019 - Fixed - finally - the narrow Log page problem noticed 10/18.
10/18/2019 - I added links to my blog
though my Sites page. It's getting long enough that it probably deserves its own
page.
May do it shortly.
Just noticed the Log page isn't wide like all the others - another job to do!
9/10/2019 - Revised the way the links to
my blog looks on the Sites page.
Made it a separate table on the Sites page. As the blog grows, I may have to
create a separate page just for it - though that's in the future.
7/25/2019 - Did some work on the phone 'problem' noted in the 6/25/2019 post & created a file junk.html that looks no different on a desktop but on a phone 'stacks' the menu items. This is done automatically as the browser on the phone loads the file.
Interestingly, when the phone is shifted to horizontal mode, it flips to appear just as it did on the desktop.
My next job is to try to do this with all my pages [moan!] so I don't have to modify EVERY page I have in the universe.
You can see this page here & is also listed on the menus as Experimental.
You see the effect, even on a desktop, by making the screen smaller - you'll be amazed as the screen 'pops' from one mode to the other.
6/25/2019 - Discovered the cause of the 'flop-over' - seems that it was the fault of a URL I purposely broke up so it WOULDN'T flop-over.
Note: this ONLY happened on a phone.
When I eliminated it via a link, all is well.
While I was trying to fix this, I contacted some Gurus from PACS & one suggestion was to use an alternate CSS page that would 'sense' the device connected to my page & put the Menu at the top instead of on the right.
This 'sensing' requires a 'media query' that
would shift to another CSS list.
I'll try this & we'll see what
happens.
6/15/2019 - In the midst of posting 2 new letters I discovered the text was washing over the edge of the box.
After lengthy studying & trial & error - LOTS of error - I fixed it.
I have no idea how long the page was screw up
but it's fixed now.
I'm also experimenting using MicroSoft Expression
again. I'll get it down some day.
6/15/2019 (Later) - Yikes! Just looked at Letters on my phone - TOTALLY messed up. Back to the drawing boards. :-(
8/31/2018 - Posted the pics from our trip to Nova Scotia.
1/30/2018 - The 'conversion' of Rose of Sharon went amazingly fast. Looks like I'm finally learning something.
However, (there's ALWAYS an 'however' :-( ) there are a few snags - almost all on the phone side of it.
On my iPhone the pages are all hugging the left margin v spreading across as the other sites.
I'm going to check for a missing 'auto' or something like that.
Additionally, the Blog Archives isn't even approaching 'wide' & looks like nothing has been done.
1/28/2018 - How embarrassing! At PACS today I was showing my sig the effect of the <title> command. Then I noticed that the index page here still had the 'Contact' title left over from the widening project.
Now fixed.
1/22/2018 -
Beginning to 'widen' the Rose
of Sharon website. As usual, there are some strange things happening as
it is wide on the test page on both phone & desktop but on the phone it is
hugging the left margin while it's centered nicely on my desktop as it was on
both platforms in the 'narrow' design.
As usual, a call was sent out to Reed.
12/31/2017 - "Widened" WissahickonDems. It was NOT easy as strange spaces began to appear in strange places. The 'fix' followed the old programmer tale: "90% of the time is spent on 10% of the work." In this case it was the Archives page.
12/24/2017 - Have been working on
WissahickonDems site. Mostly done but there are some strange(!) movements of the
sidebar.
Just as I'm shutting down, I discovered there doesn't seem to be a <body>
declaration in most or all of the pages.
Next! :-{
Just noticed the menu in RonStoloff.net is small - an 'easy' fix.
12/12/2017 - Next Project? THIS page. Like everything else it seemed easier going in than it actually was.
I finally learned the key is picking the smallest text (content) page & fixing it. In this case it was Contact.
After I did that I tried the rest but discovered it was rather labor intensive until I realized the was to go was to constantly go back to Contact, then copy & paste the content of the 'narrow' page into Contact.
Wow! Did that speed up the process!
To see what the 'old' version looked like, click here.
Successfully uploaded the pages so we're wide on 2 sites.
Next is WissDems which is likely to take quite a while because of the number of pages.
5/5/2017 - I've been wanting to 'update' my sites for some time now. By 'update' I mean use more modern looking formats. The most obvious - & I thought the 'easiest' - was letting the site fill the page regardless of the screen size the viewer was using, even if that meant a phone.
It turned out a lot more complicated than I thought - but what doesn't?
Instead of using this site to experiment with I used my Wissahickon School District site that I was assembling: GreatSchoolTeam.org
My first attempt ended in a complete mess & I had to start again & it became a 2-step process:
make it like every other site I made previously - narrow, just floating in the an abyss with huge amounts of space on either side.
once the content was installed I proceeded to plop in the wide controls.
I used alternate names, such a index1.shtml, so I could have both versions online at the same time until the 'wide' version was running properly. At that point, all I had to do was upload the wide version with the 'old' names.
Most importantly, it actually worked - eventually.
The next site I'll attack will be this one & I'll hopefully develop an easier technique than the first attempt.
This will have to wait, however, as I'm in the midst of an election campaign.
Fun, FUN!
1/19/2017 - Decided to give the stark, automatic, background a color.
The biggest problem was remembering which WebService the various sites dwelled
in. When I finally figured that out, it went fairly quickly. My first choice for
this site is a light gray but it seems to vary.
I'll be slowly modifying the other sites similarly.
1/18/2017 - Just discovered this site is 6 years old!
1/2/2017 - Put our Italian trip up. Others had gone before. Italy, because of the large number of pics required a 5-part menu.
5/27/2016 - Posted the older campaign Great School Team sites of 2013 & '15 with thumbnails.
7/4/2015 - Posted the pictures from our riverboat cruise from Basel, Switzerland to Amsterdam, Holland
7/2/2015 - After a session at PACS, I inserted a Goggle Calendar into the calendar page of the WissahickonDems web site. Hopefully this will make the job of keeping the schedule easier & solve the problem with the change in color of the bullets.
11/15/2014 - Updated photo sections & went a little nuts getting 1 picture to load properly. I redid it about 10,000 times. It finally worked for no reason that I can acertain.
8/9/2014 - Updated & added Photo page to include Eastern Europe & Cabo.
6/21/2014 - Added a page for the PACS HTML SIG to hold files for the sig.
2/21/2014 - Re: 1/24 problem. With the help of Reed solved the new tab
problem with FAQ. He noticed a stray _blank command. No telling how long or how
that had been there.
Also fixed the lack of sidebar on Letters & Volunteer page but Volunteers
still doesn't work as a table.
2/14/2014 - Started looking at the 1/24 problem with no luck.
Did discover 2 other problems: an odd font call on one page - fixed and no sidebar on the Letters page - not fixed.
Tried to fix the new tab problem but will have to cut & paste a large section into Letters & I'll wait until I have more time.
Some odd stuff going on.
1/24/2014 - Discovered something odd! On WissahickonDems.com site when
going from Index to another page just opens in the same tab. However,
when going from Voting Forms to Pictures opens a new tab but
doesn't seem to do it when going from other pages. When I looked at the Sidebar
inclusion section, I discovered some major differences that really shouldn't be
there.
This will take some major research & pleas for help from my mavens.
Tune in for the exciting conclusion!
12/31/2013 - For the last act of 2013 added a Shutterfly album of our campaign for Wissahickon School Board.
6/24/2013 - The Web Design Sig at PACS did a 'fix you site on the fly' session & I volunteered my sites.
Interesting, we found a chronic error in the HTML: The use of the command <titlfe>.
I always closed it but the only problem is there is no <titlfe>
command. As John said, "There is no F'in title."
Problem is it was in most of my sites & pages. I have to open every site
& page & upload the corrections.
5/31/2013 - Added Hyde Park, NY pictures and moved the 'dead' Bridge to Action site from the Web to inside this site.
2/7/2013 - Added the South Africa pictures - nearly 400. I used the model of the Israel/Jordan trip instead of lumping everything in 1 album.
1/11/2013 - While updating the Rose of Sharon site, I noticed that the navigation bar was on the right side instead of the left. After looking at that page & one that looked correct, I detected an extra style="float: left". The odd thing - gee, isn't that a new statement about html!? - when I removed it, the navigation bar moved from right to left.
Don't you just love it?
12/23/2012 - Noticed I didn't have the photo slide shows for all the albums I have on Shutterfly posted on my Photos page. Did Cape Cod & Punta Cana.
12/5/2012 - As I suspected, my difficulties in uploading revised pages had something to do with the new servers Dotster is now using. After getting through to them I discovered they've totally revised the way the site looks on their end - thus my difficulty. I had been uploading my new stuff to the old server.
Looks like it's working now.
11/26/2012 - Still setting up the Shutterfly pages & still no luck with uploading. No word from Dotster.com in response to my email.
Discovered an error in the All Class Reunion - link send to pictures of Senior Class visits. Fixed.
11/24/2012 - Creating new 'sites' on Shutterfly & linking them to this site. Tedious, to say the least because of all my photo albums that were on Kodak.
Re: the double naming of pictures: I found the solution - a simple click. Now if I can only remember where that click-box is.
Still no successful uploads to Dotster. I can see them on the site with FileZoom but the browser doesn't.
11/17/2012 - Long time since any changes here. Problem now is the demise of Kodak's site & movement to ShutterFly. Finally began creating albums there & it's not exactly intuitive.
Problem is that I get a double listing of the frame name for each picture. I sent an email to them & await their response.
Another odd problem [aren't they all?] is that I can't upload to Dotster. I presume this is caused by some glitch on their end.
We'll see.
11/21/2011 - I've finally started using the Blog we set up at the PACS meeting last year. So far, the content is commentary on the election and my hearing aid. This last is more amusing than the topic suggests. Trust me.
Also, after a conversation with Milt I discovered that links don't work the way I thought they would so I had to play in WordPress a bit until I figured it out. Check out the Sites page to see.
11/18/2011 - With the election over, I've updated by Sites page with links to the 2011 Great School Team.org version.
6/23/2011 - After the gurus located the problem - the <HR> command after the Nav buttons - we still didn't know how to fix the problem, other than removing it. I fiddled with it (beat my head against the wall) then tried to change it from 85%. It seems they were trying to put it 85% of the Container so it 'popped' over to the bottom of the page.
Still don't know which of them were really wrong: FireFox/IE or Chrome/Safari.
5/31/2011 - Just discovered that Safari and Chrome don't display GreatSchoolTeam.org's Home page properly: the pictures, instead of being below Navigation, are at the bottom. Odd. Even IE shows it right. Waiting on response from Reed, my Web guru.
5/19/2011 - Running for Wissahickon School Board again and therefore have to revamp the GreatSchoolTeam.org website. Fun returning to something I did 2 years ago and trying to remember what everything does!
3/15/2011 - Here's more fun! Added a new domain. Went through the usual complications. [This means I had no idea how to add it to my list of domains.] I called Dotster & the techie explained I had used up the number of domains in each space but if I upgraded my service there would be no problem. To top this off, it would actually be cheaper!
So I did.
Oops! There went their support for FrontPage. Don't laugh, I'm still using it but could no longer upload with it so I had to learn how to use FTP - a terror I'd be trying to avoid, successfully, up to that point.
I downloaded a free FTP file program - FileZilla - & began to bang around in my usual manner. And, two calls to Support later, I seem to have gotten it.
What a mess.
7/15/2010 - Discovered a problem with the link to Cancun picts on Kodak. Fixed.
7/10/2010 - Added link to Cancun picts on FaceBook and changed the 'look' of the size information.
6/25/2010 - Just noticed the Links page was titled 'About.' Fixed.
5/3/2010 - That will teach me about being careful while renaming files. I was 'neatening' the file names of the photo albums in WissahickonDems.com and ended up 'disconnecting' 3 entire albums and had to do them all over.
A real mess.
4/15/2010 - Inserted my resume in old, unused, About page.
4/12/2010 - Added a box in WissahickonDems.com/index.shtml to include date of the next meeting.
Had a problem when I tried to put it after the logo (Welcome) but when it is placed before, it's OK.
Also took out some MesoNormal formatting from the page though it was more trouble than it was worth. This came about because I cut/pasted it from a Word file instead of sending it via WordPad, as I do now.
Added Album from FB of old yearbook picts + made thumbnails - as I've done for all the other pages - of Obama's Christmas Card. This cut the download time in half.
4/5/2010 - Here's something odd: all but the Photos page has a space between the Masthead & the Top Nav. Wonder why?
*Discovered that Photos page used a <div class="tbnav"> while all other pages used <div id="tbnav"> Then checked & the id had the command clear: both which added a blank space.
Changed everything to class.
Finally discovered why Home & Letters had more words/line in the Motto [Anyone can fake....] than all the other pages: There was a stray <font> declaration. Now all is well - at least until I notice something else!
4/4/2010 - Figured out how to make FaceBook albums visible from outside without being a FB member.
3/28/2010 - Finished - all but 1! - of the 194 Interview pages. [Done!]
3/24/2010 - Rearranged menu in Letters page based on a keyword in the title.
3/23/2010 - Rearranged letters so that the latest is at the top. I'm not sure what order they are in the menu.... Looks like I have something else to do.
3/15/2010 - Continuing on the Oral History interviews. Discovered I already had a css file for it. Also, doesn't seem any way around updating the declaration line - for all 194 pages!
2/28/2010 - Such fun! Started just adding 2 css pieces [css link & wrapper] and ran into several problems: colors in Oral History pages had text color changes + sometimes just the 1st line of the interview.
Fixed this by changing the p def but still had to fix several 1st lines.
2/16/2010 - While I'm waiting to find out about the css problem I've decided to 'clean up' the Oral History interviews - 194! Hard to believe I missed so much stuff: mostly extra carriage returns and space at the top. Also continued my Thumbnail project for the pictures in Oral History.
2/15/2010 - More fun! I started 'fixing' the interviews in the Oral History Project by using the rs.css file and the Wrapper div. It worked fine in FireFox but when I tried it - after 10 pages! - in IE, there was no change. Back to the drawing boards.
2/14/2010 - "Solved" the problem of the "twitch" in a most inelegant manner: when I couldn't figure out what was wrong with the Volunteer sidebar copied the top, then bottom until the twitch disappeared. The problem was somewhere in the sidebar section but I'll never know where.
Moved this log from the Index page to its own - logical - Web Design Log page.
Also used thumbnails on Oral History site to reduce the time to download - often by 50%
2/10/2010 - Bottom nav done. Still concerned with those 'twitches.' Also created more extensive Archive pages. In RoseofSharonMinistriesLTD increased the use of thumbnails to speed the pages up.
Question to consider: with change of WissahickonDems to shtml, what will happen to people who find it with 'old' links that take them to html pages. Will try to produce an index.html file that will shift them over. Perhaps the idea of 'smart' 402 error pages??
Answer: Created a page, index.html, so that if they have an old link will give them the new .shtml page or just a link. Will create a .htm as well.
2/3/2010 - In WissahickonDems inserted shtml included menus. Still a few pages with a "twitch" that needs fixing. Also need to include bottom navigation. With the mod of WissahickonDems, all my sites now have shtml include files.
2/1/2010 - Continuing the overhaul of WissahickonDems - put new logos in improved css use in banner and graphic. Also, the reporting form seems to have been 'fixed.'
1/25/2010 - Beginning the major overhaul of WissahickonDems - did the
Wissahickon logo and removed the redundant box below it. Waiting approval on new
menu buttons.
Also, discovered problem with the Volunteer reporting form.
1/23/2010 - With what I learned & used here, I updated WissahickonDems with thumbnails. FrontPage claims 42% speed increase. Even if it's not that great - still worth it.
1/21/2010 - redid the Photo page with thumbnails.
1/20/2010 - redid the Sites page without the bevels on the thumbnails.
1/19/2010 - Changed the order on this page to latest on top. Also changed jpgs of portions of page to pdfs for full view.
1/18/2010 - Changed Sites page to use thumbnails for sites. Need to change thumbs, though - reduce the bevels.
Eliminated Alerts & About Ron since there's nothing in them along with the "*" since now everything is "live."
Fixed the link background problem in the Letters page.
Added a Letters page with an index but the color background is off on links - need to fix it.
All of the links "work" but some have no real content - just "place holders." Those with an * have content.
Since last time I've made several corrections -
especially in the footer and top navigation bars - but I was unable to include
the color bars in the top section. I'll work on that.