Gallery Generator Is Done, Again...

I've managed to completely update my gallery generation script again, and as a result I've pushed an updated version of my website live. Other than some relatively subtle things on the main page and a massive change in font for many of you - abandoning IE's default Times Roman font for the much more readable Ariel - most of the changes aren't all that visible. But to me, they're a big improvement.

It's now much easier to add new entries to the gallery, and that was important. I've incorporated some use of style sheets too, and cleaned up the navigation bar a bit to make it more friendly to spiders.

In all, it was a very necessary update, but not one that most people will notice. Having to rewrite the gallery generator twice was less than fun, but such is life. It's good that I got this done before going back to work, as I will be less inclined to sit in front of the computer at home for hours at a time once I start doing that again every day at work.

In any event, please feel free to send me any comments you may have about the revised web site. Anything at all. I'm afraid it will always be a work in progress, but your comments to help me figure out what to do next, so don't be shy. Thanks much!

Computers and Fast Stupidity

I believe it was Scott Adams - creator of Dilbert - that once claimed we are all - every last one of us - stupid. A few minutes ago I refreshed my memory on that point. I am stupid. The loveliness of it in this case is that I used a computer to accomplish my stupidity, and therefore did it very quickly.

I am in the middle of a major set of updates to my website, and a big part of that website is my sculpture gallery. I wrote a program to create that gallery some years ago. Over the past month I'd made a slew of changes to that program, tested them, and was just about done. This morning I thought of one more change I wanted to make, so I started in on it.

That change required me to create a bunch of new files from a template. I created the first file and copied it over into all the other directories where I needed it. It was that copy that did me in. I automated the command and didn't test my automation carefully enough before running it. My 20K script for creating the gallery got written over with a copy of the new, one line, text file.

And before anyone tells me to go out and use some utility to get it back, I live on Linux, not Windows, and the file was overwritten, not simply deleted. The data blocks have been reused.
It's gone for good.

I have a copy of the script from before all my recent changes, at least. That gives me a starting point and saves a lot of time, but I still get to make the changes all over again. That's not even all that hard, really, as I know this stuff pretty well. But it does use time I could have spent on other things.

Oh well. Live and learn - and test carefully before running stupid, four line scripts that copy or delete files!

I'm off to start work on putting things right again.

Another Long Overdue Website Update

I know this isn't art related, but I've finally gotten around to organizing and uploading pictures at (or as a result of) some of the local fires in the past couple of years. These supplement the old Croy Fire photos I had on the website before. Anyone curious about them can click here.

Table formatting issue resolved

Yesterday saw me find the source of the issue in table formatting, and it is now fixed. It only took half an hour or so of google searches to find the answer, test it out, and get it running properly. The problem is a subtle one.

Something about DOCTYPE certain statements causes tables to decide that images are to be printed in text rather than block context. Fixes are being discussed by the HTML and style definition folks, but that's long term. For now, there's a way to override the issue, and since what I am doing is pretty limited in scope, it worked.

What am I doing? Reworking the navigation headers on my website, again. I know, I just finished installing them the other day (mostly - the gallery is automatically generated and I haven't had the time to fix that yet) but once I did it all I found they blended in with the rest of the page too well. They needed to be bit distinctive so that visitors know what they are and could concentrate on the rest of the page.

To accomplish that they needed to use a different background color, and that lead to putting them into a table, and that lead to finding the bug, and so on.

I'm slowly updating all the pages to use the new navigation header format now. It will take several days to get it all done, but the most forward and visited pages are now updated, so things are getting better.

I'm always interested in feedback on my website, so feel free to contact me about it.

Where does all the time go?

You cannot imagine how much time disappears down the rat hole that is page formatting for web browsers. And I have this fundamental issue - I dislike using PDF to format pages.

Yes, I understand that I could get perfect layout using PDFs, but I want my pages to load quickly. PDF files are huge, load slowly, and every browser I use asks before downloading them. Sometimes they don't even display within the browser window.

And beyond that, I don't really like style sheets. I've seen way too many sites that setup some area for text to appear in, but the text doesn't fit in that area, so it runs over onto something else (usually other text, rendering both illegible) or it disappears under something else. Not good.

Nope. I use tables. Everyone hates them but me, I know, but even that may be changing.

Right now I'm chasing down a table formatting issue that I don't understand. Tell the row that it's a certain height. Tell the cells they are the same height. Tell the image tag the image is the same height, and yet the row is still taller than the image, and nothing I can find fixes that. At this point I don't even know if it's Firefox that is causing it, some subtle bug in my HTML, or something else. I'm down to asking people with other browsers to send me screen shots of the page so I can figure it out.

I think I need to do something else for a while.

The Distractions of Web Hosting

I'm starting a very gradual update of my website- bangtherockstogether.com. You may note that some pages have a title/navigation bar across the top while others don't yet. That's a part of it. It's needed to unify the site and make it easier to get around, but it sure does take time to get it right.

If you find anything not functioning properly on the site, please let me know about that. I hope to keep that to a minimum, but it may happen as I tweak things around.