My old
computer died -- at least I thought so at the time. It just refused to
boot and wouldn't mount no matter what I did -- not that I'm all that
good at administering Mac OS X. Anyways, it was a good excuse to buy a
new computer so I didn't really mind. Unfortunately I hadn't been
backing up for a good six months -- there were just too many problems
backing up from Mac OS X to a Mac OS 9 share. It's not as if a huge
amount of data was lost and practically nothing that I would really
miss. But I had just done a good 30 journal entries catching up on the
huge backlog that I had and that was all lost.
Despondently I decided to chuck it all and start over fresh. I don't
even want to look at my old site, so if I write things that contradict
what I wrote before... hopefully the new version is more correct. As
long as I was beginning anew there were a few things that I wanted to
improve upon or at least change.
One is that I want to put my stuff lists on the web. These are the
lists of everything I own that I care about as in "if I want to buy
something do I have it already?" But mere lists are not as useful
without pictures. That way when I'm browsing eBay and see some vaguely
worded item with a picture I can at least check to see if I have the
item or not, for I want to buy every edition of a product but most
people don't know enough to write down which edition they're selling.
The picture issue reverses one of the long-standing rules of my old web
site: absolutely no copyrighted material. This included pictures and
writings, which is why after a while I made sure that everything on my
site was my material. That rule was probably too strict since there are
lots of fair-use cases, but I wanted to make sure and I don't agree
with most of the fair-use cases. So now I'm being hypocritical and
posting lots of copyrighted pictures on my web site.
he second web site issue I wanted to address was the daily journal. My
daily journal was on one hand a great idea. It made me write and write
a whole lot about whatever I could. And yet I still got way behind -- I
just couldn't keep up. Not only that but I had very little time to
write other things for my web site. I was updating my web site and
putting the changes in both the daily journal and the pertinent web
site section, to fulfill my daily journal requirements. It was madness!
This time I'm not going to write every day. I'm hoping to write actual
journal topics two or three times a week, with the other days spent on
writing reviews and other things. The daily journal has in the new site
been split up into different sections to keep it more organized.
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You may have noticed that I now have
a navigation bar at the top. It's sized just for my computer (Mac OS X
with Mozilla) at 800 pixels wide. The whole web site has the navigation
bar and most pages have tables in them. Both big changes from the old
site. In the old site I wanted to keep maximum backwards compatibility
with older browsers and even Lynx. No frames and no tables also means
no worry for me about formatting my web pages to look great. So now I
do have those elements and I'm not going to worry about how bad it
looks on other people's web browsers.
The original purpose of the navigation bar was to separate site
organization from content. If you notice, every link goes to a frame
page which loads a navigation page and a main content page. The idea
was to have the ability to use the same content page in different areas
(like what I was doing on my old site towards the end). What about page
numbers? They're not seamless unless they're moved to the navigation
bar. That's easy enough to do but then you have the mail-to link at the
bottom of the page. That link has the page address encoded in it -- so
I can tell which page people are talking about if they're not specific
-- but I can't easily change that link to make it reflect the web site
structure. I can make it into a separate frame, moving the Created/Last
Modified information up into the main page since that's page specific.
But now I have three frames on the page and and 10% more files on my
web site.
Really, after I got about half of the initial site done I realized that
the frame/navigation thing is way too unwieldy. Database, that's what I
have to do the next time I do a reboot of my web site. That and JSP for
dynamic content and I will at least be able to go back to no frames. Oh
well, I wonder when this computer is going to die? Writing of which,
Dave realized that I probably only needed to boot into single user mode
and do an fsck to recover my lost partitions. Eh, like I knew to do
that at the time. At least I did recover the hard drive by booting into
Mac OS 9 and reformatting the drive.
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