This Is Not A
BLOG!
Date: 22/04/07
Where Am I?
I suppose an update is in order...
I'm still working on the redesign of the site, and still hope to
have it in place by the middle of June.
It's not been going as smoothly as I'd hoped, though, or indeed as
smoothly as it looked like going. I thought that I'd got the
Cascading Style Sheets sorted, having realised that I'd need two sets;
one for Internet Exploiter and another for more standards-compliant
browsers.
So, having got things just about the way I wanted them, I made the
mistake of asking for comments from people whose experience and
opinions I valued.
I say 'mistake', but no blame attaches to those who gave me
feedback (thanks to kwatq, Len Oil, Jeroen Wenting and esmi - all of alt.fan.pratchett. The mistake was
mine in thinking that I'd got it right. esmi wisely pointed out that,
although I'd clearly designed the site for use at a window size of
1024x768 pixels, there were still a lot of people using, say, 800x600,
and that the new design didn't look too good at that size.
Suitably chastened at forgetting such a basic point of
interoperability, I went back and tried to redesign the style sheets so
that they'd work at least tolerably well at the smaller size.
This has not been a happy experience. It's been like watching two
lepers arm-wrestling: push the wrong thing and everything
crumbles. It has put me in deep grump for over a week now (at a time
when the arrival of Spring should be making me mildly euphoric), and
has no doubt caused the elderly couple next door to wonder precisely
what it is which causes me to shout things like, "No, you f***ing
t##t! What are you doing that for?!!", and (in particularly
bad moments), "Oh, s*** my d***, you f***ing b*****d!".
I'm not through with it yet, but I suspect that I'll have to make
do with an unsatisfactory design at least until such time as I can
learn more about CSS and why no browser seems properly to support
everything in it. All I hope is that people who still have their
display set to 800x600 like scrollbars a lot...
As I mentioned, it's Spring. This means that my garden has started
once more to command my attention like a hyperactive three-year-old. I
spent all Saturday afternoon cutting the grass, because the weather
forecast for the week ahead wasn't very encouraging. I've never cut it
this early in the year before, and while I was watching the front lawn
through the drizzle this afternoon, I swear I could see the bloody
thing growing again before my eyes.
In other news: I may be about to have an article published on a
very prestigious television and radio history website. More on this
nearer the time.
And finally: congratulations to my colleagues Stuart and Sharon on
the birth of child number two (a boy called Ianto), who was born last
Thursday. As you can see from here, their daughter
weighed over nine pounds: this young feller weighed in at an incredible
eleven pounds and seven ounces!!! All I know is that, when the
news went round the office on Friday, all the men crossed their legs
and all the women's eyes started to water.
See you later...
