Web site news

Da Blog in LA

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Tomorrow, I’ll be flying to Los Angeles for a week and a half with my dad. I hope to post regular blog posts about my experience there under the label “Da Blog in LA”. I’ll probably be bored out of my skull there, but what the hey.

Meanwhile, if you want my NFL picks every week, they should be available here every early Tuesday morning. Please keep in mind at all times that I know nothing about football.

All the college football lineal titleholders have retained so far, with only BYU still playing.

The Around the Horn Drinking Game!

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As some people who read Da Blog already know, one of my pasttimes is watching ESPN’s “show of competitive banter” Around the Horn. As entertaining and informative as it is, it does have a tendency to rely on certain jokes and other repetitive elements… so much so that it seems to just beg for a drinking game.

Note: I know this has been tried at least once before, but to my knowledge, it’s no longer available on the Internet. This attempt was done independently. Also, I do not support impulse drinking; remember, this is Just For Fun.

Changes to Da Blog that also affect Da Web Site (and other musings)

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Very few people who visit Da Blog appear to be going from there to my web site. In a related story, my sidebar has become rather cluttered.

Therefore, I’ve added a link to the web site to the right side and booted Da Counter to the bottom, since it’s the element of Da Blog you’re probably least interested in.

Have you noticed that I have a lot of rather short posts? And that I tend to talk a lot about Da Blog and my web site, and not about actual, substantial things? Seriously, Technorati says my most common tags are “blog news” and “web site news” followed by “my comments on the news”. Just shows how much I need you to help give Da Blog direction.

Of course, in a sense you could say I need direction.

This summer, for me, has become dominated by the Greatest Movies Project. I’ve been writing 1-2 entries a day and goofing off the rest of the day. I’ve gotten a bit better at writing entries on movies I haven’t seen as I’ve gone along. As I write this I have about 28 entries written, two more written in incomplete form, and some ideas on entries I haven’t written. Six or seven of the entries are, in my opinion, rather great – up to about one-fourth from about one-eighth a few days ago. Most of the entries are from 1953 and earlier; the rest pretty much is composed of films at the very beginning of the list. At a rate of two a day, I could finish in 36 days by myself. That would get me a ways into September, and I could probably start posting entries before I’d completely finished. I’d probably rather get them done a little quicker, though. I have one person lined up to help write entries but I’m still open to any other movie fans who want to lend their expertise. I may post a list of off-limits films later this week.

In early September I’ll be taking a trip to Los Angeles to visit my dad. At the pace I’m on, I would hit 50 entries right as the trip started. I’m hoping to hit 50 before then and 100 by the end of the trip. Then when I came back, most of the work would involve formatting it for the site.

I’ll have more on things I’m looking for when I post on the Project again later this week.

My gripe with CSS

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CSS allows you to have every format rule defined for later use (here “format”
means how things appear). So if you are writing a large website and you want a
consistent appearance for every title, sub-title, how examples of code appear,
how paragraphs are aligned, (I could go on, CSS covers a wide range of
presentation options) then CSS is the way to go.

Let’s say you have a 1200 page website that took you months to complete. Your
current boss gets a promotion and another person fills his place. Your new boss
says to change the font, the size, the background, the appearance of tables,
etc. everywhere on your 1200-page site to comply with some corporate policy. If
you engineered your site appropriately with CSS, you could do this by editing
your CSS file that has all your appearance (format) rules in one place.
(Assuming you used linked stylesheets.)

Or you could do it the hard way, and hammer the appearance changes on each
and every of your 1200 pages. Remember sleep? Your constitutional rights allow
you to take the hard way (this is meant as humor, not an insult).

The above is taken from http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/CSS_Programming. CSS is used by most modern web sites to give all pages on it a consistent look and feel, with all the information needed for formatting in a single file.

If it’s so great for formatting, why isn’t it so great for other things? Why should so many sites repeat the same info on every page for elements, like navigation, that are repeated on every page? Suppose, to take Wikibooks’ example, you were told to add a new item to the navigation bar of the site. If the nav bar is in HTML (not Flash), you would have to “hammer the [navigation] changes on each and every of your 1200 pages.”

I should, instead, be able to change a single piece of HTML or CSS and have the changes occur on all pages automatically. Instead, at best you have to rig up some Javascript to apply the changes.

What am I missing here? Is there some easy way to do this (please don’t say “frames”) that I (and evidently a number of others) don’t know about? Is there some reason why formatting should be updated dynamically but other sitewide elements shouldn’t? What’s going on here?

Some recent events – and what they mean for YOU

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I recently had a minor adventure to get a cell phone and get it working.

Yesterday I went to an AT&T store and got a cell phone. It worked fine in the store and when I got home I was quick to try out all the features.

Well, the problem was, when I tried to make a call, it told me I could make “emergency calls only”. I had done nothing to wreck it and nothing I tried fixed it. So today it was back to the AT&T store (I went to one fairly near where I live but got referred to the one I originally went to), got a part changed, and now my phone is making calls.

And the end result is… my web site is now up.

The URL is morganwick.freehostia.com, for those who want to look at it. Yes, I did end up picking FreeHostia over other options including ZendURL.

The hosting poll is over; the project poll is ongoing, though it probably won’t be for long. As you can see, there’s not much on the site right now. Tomorrow, or perhaps later tonight, I’ll try to get something more substantial on there. A while back, in the late 90’s, I fiddled around a lot with HTML and I think I got fairly good at it, but you know what they say about how fast technology knowledge obsoletes, and now I’m completely lost with this newfangled CSS stuff. (I could create web pages with Microsoft Word, but I’d like to get some hot CSS action in to give all or most of my web pages a consistent look. Word would become nearly irrelevant at that point because it probably wouldn’t be able to figure out that I’m going to be shoehorning some prefab CSS in there.)

Also, I still need your input to help build The Best Web Site On The Internet. The generic topic poll will be going up soon. I may decide to stick with Bravenet for it, or I may decide to go someplace else. The 100 Greatest Movies project will probably be one of the first things put up, but I’m not sure if it’s going to be the first. Also, expect some various football-related things to go up over the course of the next month, mostly focused on Da Blog.

As always, if you have suggestions, vote or reply to this post!