Friday in Monsoon Season
Posted by Patrick on Friday, October 14, 2005I've got today off, which makes me a happy camper. I dropped off Kate at work, and got some new tires put on her car, and here I am back at Rockland Ave. It's raining out, again. By "again" I mean, all this week. It's not raining out as much as it is where my sister is, but damp none the less.
Unrelated to the rain, I've been trying to redesign Rockland-ave.com, but it hasn't been going well. I've got the design down, but can't seem to get the design working in the pages themselves.
See back in the day (at the end of the last century), when you made a website, you could use code called a "table" to put all the parts of the page in place. These "tables" worked well for putting things together, but tended to make the size of page too large, so it took longer to appear on the user's computer, plus updating it was cumbersome. Think of it like using Excel to write a book. You can do it, but what a pain.
In recent years, the idea of using a "style sheet" to form the structure of the page was made popular. Not only was it easier to update the content of a page, but now you could set a style for an entire website and control it in a single file. It was weird to change from tables to style sheets, but works well. You could change one little setting and change the font for the entire site.
Rockland Ave.com uses one of these style sheets (often called a Cascading Style Sheet) to control the layout and design of the site. For the way the site is set up now, this system works well.
One of the downsides of these Cascading Style Sheets is that they are interpreted in different ways on different computers. They might look great on my iBook, but when I load up the page on my desktop PC, the layout is totally messed up. So then I go back and change stuff so it displays correctly on the desktop, and it then looks bad on the iBook. Further causing headaches, the new design calls for a sort of non-standard layout, not just the even columns of the the current site.
So I keep on trucking. The site's been like this for a while and it needs to be changed. Really I should be doing something constructive like making a portfolio website for myself, but I see Rockland-ave.com every day and I'm always compelled to try and improve it.
I'm also compelled to play this new computer game I just got called Half Life 2, so that's getting in the way of progress, too.
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