Farlops Industries

On March 13th around 5:55 in the morning, I had just finished installing MovableType.

It’s actually a well written piece of software, at least by my naive technician’s eyes, but, I simply don’t like the way the URLs are implemented. Some of directories MT creates don’t terminate in an index page. To me that’s a no-no in URL design. GM has ugly URLs too but at least their more friendly than MT’s. After languishing for a week or so, I restored a backup of my site.

Sigh. It looks like I’m just going to have to keep hacking GM beyond all recognition.

It’s been fun. It’s been nearly 4 years since I installed Greymatter and then extensively changed it to meet my needs. But now that I see that the Fish was able to install version 3.1 of MovableType and we share the same server, it’s time for me to explore this.

I’ve read that it has a restrictive license so, there really isn’t a community of people contributing code to it. But we’ll see how neat it is. If I don’t like it, I can always put my GM installation back.

With a small amount of help from me, Baka has been working on a layout-table-free, semantic and pure CSS facelift for his site. He had just sent his penultimate draft to me last night. I looked it over and it looks nearly perfect! It renders just fine in Firefox and even IE6 on Windows. Opera 7.54 still looks a little dodgy but I think that can be compensated for with the right hiding tricks. He still has to optimize things a bit for Safari but he’s very close to finished.

I’m really happy to hear this! I’ve been doing things this way for the last six or so years. It’s just nice to see more and more people find the enlightenment of a better way of web design.

Baka has done it! He’s gone purely semantic and valid! Plus he’s added a blog! Hooray!

As I’ve mentioned repeatedly, back in the late Nineties I was the webmaster for Microsoft’s accessibility pages. Back in those days IE for Windows was really the only game in town for CSS support but, I’d read about the WaSP, saw where the future was headed and became a true believer. But rather than repeat that story, I want to note that MSN’s latest facelift is apparently attempting to validate as XHTML 1 strict.

Hm. If my former employers are finally apprehending why web standards matter in terms of ease of maintenance, ease of development, reduction in server bandwidth and improvements in usability and accessibility, then perhaps it is time for me to come in from the cold. If I ever really was out in the cold.

I never really started to toot my horn about my time at Microsoft until recently. This was mostly because I was afraid I didn’t know enough. My time as a freelancer during the bust years taught me a lot but I still haven’t design web applications entirely from scratch. I think I have to start doing that.

Ah. I am just second guessing myself again. The decision I made back in the summer of 2000 was the correct one. It may have been an emotional hunch but sometimes that’s all you’ve got. I felt I was stagnating. I knew this would be bad for the team. I knew or at least felt that the only way to force myself to learn things is to throw myself into freefall. That’s what I did. I made the right choice.

My news feeds are getting out of hand. I now have more wonderful stuff to read than I have I have time. So in a effort to follow these things up later, when the Web hits a dry patch, I plan to save the links here with brief descriptions. This is mostly for my benefit as a web technician.

• A2 Hosting, Inc.: Web hosts in the States that support python and ruby! Good to keep in mind.
• Jake talks about advanced hypertext: Ted Nelson has been ranting for years about the shortcomings of the World Wide Web.
• Simple Tricks for More Usable Forms: Seems like something I should read since I make web applications.
• Web Application Form Design: Still more things I should study about forms.
• Web Application Form Layout: More of the same from the same guy.
• Invisible Form Prompts: Still more about designing web forms accessibly.
• Unobtrusive Javascript: How to design Javascript so that it degrades gracefully, is DOM compliant and is mostly accessible.
• Scrollable Table with Fixed Header: How to do this with CSS for compliant browsers and Javascript for IE6.
• ActiveWidgets: Similar to the previous bullet. UI gadgets built out of Javascript and server-side scripts. Should probably compare these to design standards of Unobtrusive Javascript.

So let’s see if I can add a new entry with the XStandard editor!

Yes, I can.

Later, upon entry revision, I see that if I add something to the extended area but later erase it, XStandard retains a nonbreaking space bounded by paragraph tags. Sigh. Still, much better than my javascript hack that I’ve been using to generate entries for these last 4 years.

Anyway–it’s been a long time since my last entry! I’ve been very busy with holidays and work and I’ve been dithering over whether to add XStandard as my editor for Greymatter. (I wonder if I should still be calling my blog script Greymatter. I’ve forked so far that it doesn’t really apply anymore.)

So a lot has happened:

• I’ve been talking the Fish. Giving him advice on CSS, accessibility and standards compliance for his site facelift–if he ever gets around to it.
• I’ve also been trying to convince him to install python on this server. If that get’s done, I plan port Greymatter into python. It will still generate static pages with no dynamic data access. I plan to clean the script up a bunch, make it more secure, more efficient.
• Either that or replace it entirely. My installation is getting overloaded with gadgetry installed on a rather messy code base.
• I finished and launched a new site for my latest customer.
• Considering how steady my work has been these last few months. It may be that my freelance career is finally firming up into a profitable business. We’ll see. It really depends on how deligent I am with my paperwork and networking.

I’ve also been collecting a lot of interesting pages from my news reader. I’ll post these in later entries.