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Back to today's entry Archive August 2002 October 2002 |
Monday 2 September 2002 Spent the last few days making a start on my biography, see
The Author. Decided to try using SiteAid, downloaded
free from AmiaSoft.com .
This is an HTML editor, which allows you to insert tags automatically,
and also has wizards for such things as creating links, tables and lists, and inserting images, etc.
I suppose with practice this could save a little time on typing HTML tags
but, since you have to know what tags you need anyway, I think it's probably
just as easy to put them in yourself, as locating them in exactly the right
position can be a bit tricky. The wizards are quite helpful though. The
Help section is not terribly useful - it explains the SiteAid screen,
menu options and tools, but does not give any assistance with how to use
HTML. A tutorial in the online Help section would have been good. But
perhaps I expect too much from what is, after all, a freeware program. Changed the font face settings for homepage, Web Journal and Links, specifying font families to ensure good results in all browsers. Thursday 5 September 2002Played around with font sizes. Mostly just for the practice, but
it does separate the different areas of text more clearly. To further enhance
the distinction between separate topics/areas on a page, I also inserted
some lines with < HR >. Didn't have much time today as I'm doing some
editing work, but am determined to do a little each day just to keep
my hand in.
Made changes to text and background colours, using
browser-safe
colours . Also discovered how to display HTML tags, like <
and > on the page (View Source if you want to know how this is done).
Now that this journal is getting quite long (note, I'm really
sticking at it this time, aren't I?), it's time to think about reorganising
it. I've decided to make a daily journal entry, with a title describing
what I'm actually doing each day, as well as the date. So all the other
entries have to be archived. To do this, I used a table to hold the
archive links on the left, with the day's entry on the right. I'm quite pleased
with the way it's looking - and the fact that it actually seems to work!
Added tables of links to facilitate navigation round the various
pages of Web Log entries. This was quite tricky and the link tables didn't
turn out quite the way I expected. But they work, and I'll go back to
improve them when I get better at this.
I neatened up the table of links on the home page by putting them into a bulleted list. I also sharpened up the descriptions of the links with a definition list. Tidied up the home page generally, by putting a border round the top half of the page to separate it from the bottom half. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention - Uploading my web pages with
Cute FTP is an absolute breeze. It's so straightforward, just point and
click to select files, then select Transfer/Upload. The date of the last
modification is listed against each file, so you just have to select the
ones updated today. Easy.
Oh dear. Have just noticed today's Friday the 13th. Not a very auspicious date to embark on such a tricky business. But here goes. This is the really scary part - submitting the site to site engines, going public, exposing my site for the whole world to see. I'm making a start by building up my < meta > tags. Believe me, it's not easy to decide what to include for a site like this one, which is by its very nature a hotch potch of just about everything. So I have taken the easy way out by seeking help on the web. First I visited a couple of sites which offer advice on the search items used most often by people looking for similar sites. These were Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool and WordTracker . They both give lists of alternative words and expressions that people have typed into search engines when looking for similar types of site. Then I went to ScrubTheWeb's Meta Tag Analyzer and typed in the description and keywords I had chosen that seemed to best describe my own site. These were transformed instantly into the meta tags I needed to insert into my < HEAD > section. Think I'll sleep on it for now and get around to submitting to all
the search engines over the weekend.
Well, I did get around to submitting my site to some search engines and, hopefully, it will now get a bit more exposure. So I'd better start thinking about getting some more entertaining content on the air. Registering with the search engines was fairly easy. I just needed to fill in a short form for each one, mostly giving details about URL, category, description and my email address. I did, however, manage to pick up a virus en route, a danger everybody should be aware of and armed against. This was detected by the trusty Norton AntiVirus program and hastily disposed of. So all that remains is to get some really enticing material for you
to read. It's my birthday today (Thank you, thank you) so I hope you'll
forgive me for not spending too much time on it now. But great things
are coming. See you soon.
The men came to fix the buckling ceiling in the guest bedroom today. I couldn't move far from the PC, on account of the bedroom clutter filling the rest of the house. So I used the time to get some of my writing on to the site. Only one story and one poem so far - it all seemed to take an inordinately long time. Taking into consideration the links on all pages had to be changed, and so on. Still, it's a start and a token of my good intentions. My apologies to visitors using Netscape. The home page isn't displaying as it should. Don't know why this is, because I've forgotten how to find and use the console thingy that tells you where you've gone wrong in the coding. Moreover. when I try to View Source for the home page, it doesn't display text but some kind of binary computerese. Has anybody got any ideas? I'll get it sorted, but not today, I'm afraid. Sorry. The ceiling men have gone and the room looks much taller. I didn't
realise quite how bowed the ceiling had become. Nothing up there, though,
I'm relieved to say, apart from an old wasp nest. I now have to wait for
another man to come and decorate it. Probably not worth putting all the junk
back, so I'll be climbing over it for a few days yet.
I thought my homepage was not displaying quite the same in Netscape as in Internet Explorer. Imagine my horror at finding, when I checked the whole website, that my short story and poem, so proudly uploaded, didn't display at all. Just blank pages. So I just had to get my thinking cap on and try to find out what was going on. As I suspected it had something to do with the background and text colours stipulated in the body tag not being cross-browser-safe, I tried all sorts of different combinations. With the same result. At last I trawled right through my input with a fine tooth comb and found I had omitted to close the TABLE tag at the end. That was what was causing all the trouble. It worked okay in IE, which evidently isn't so fussy. I had heard that Netscape was less forgiving. Spooky, though, that this glitch appeared in my poem "Tag". |