September 2002

1st September 2002

Added a few more tips to my Linux Tips & Tricks page.

2nd September 2002

Minor bugfixes to HTML::TextToHTML perl module.

8th September 2002

Added reviews of "Hazard" by Rimilod "Hide and Seek", "To Run, To Chase" & "Blame Game" by Jael Lynn and "Inverse" by Brook Henson to the Net-Fic Reviews page.

9th September 2002

Added a review of "Function" by Brook Henson to the Net-Fic Reviews page.

10th September 2002

Added reviews of "Think Outside the Box" by Jael Lynn "Inchoate" by Carikube to the Net-Fic Reviews page.

15th September 2002

Added reviews of "Yesterday's Eyes" by Brook Henson "The Road To Nowhere" by Maria M "Sentinels" by Sheila Paulson (and link to the zine review of her "The Limits of Trust") and "White-Knuckle Grip" by Kim Heggen to the Net-Fic Reviews page.

17th September 2002

Added reviews of "Payback's A Banana" by Gil Hale and "Who Am I?" by Rebel to the Net-Fic Reviews page.

18th September 2002

Added a review of "Certain Things" by Brook Henson to the Net-Fic Reviews page.

21st September 2002

Added reviews of the "Changing of the Guard" series #2, #3, #4 and #5 by Ecolea to the Net-Fic Reviews page.

22nd September 2002

Now that this server has been upgraded to Zeus 4.1, I can now let loose and put in conditional statements in my SSI. So I've gone and done that. Now much of the common stuff is farmed off to included files, and the navigation is more dynamic. There will also be advanced CSS in play, now that I have browser-detection. For most folks, the site will look exactly the same, but for those browsers which I have determined can deal correctly with advanced CSS, things may be a bit more interesting and pretty (well I think so).

24th September 2002

More tweaking with the site; fixing up those navigation bars which were individualized and thus overlooked initially; in the course of doing that, I revamped some of the navbar stuff, and reintroduced the long lost next-prev navigation (you know, that thing with the << | < | > | >> stuff). I also tweaked the browser-detection bit. Right at this moment, it detects Gecko-based browsers (Mozilla, Galeon et al) and gives them a frame-like browsing experience for the "vertical" style of pages (bet you didn't know you could simulate frames with CSS!); it detects Konqueror and makes the vertical margin go all the way down (I think that looks prettier) and it detects MSIE 5 (and 5.5) and makes the vertical navbar scroll (it was supposed to behave like the Gecko version, but M$ never obeys the standards). Since I don't have MSIE 6, I'm not game to add extra things for it, in case something breaks that I can't test for. I may experiment with things more later, like making the top navbars behave like frames, perhaps. Feedback, please!

(later...) (sigh) Ah, the perils of moving too quickly. Didn't test it on Zeus, did I? Worked fine on Apache, but the things I'd put in place to try to get around some bugs in Zeus... didn't. It's a pernicious bug which I now realize I'd already failed to get around before -- to wit, Zeus (even Zeus 4.1) clobbers the DOCUMENT_URI variable in included SSI files. For example, if I include a footer file, say #include virtual="/ssi_include/footer.shtml", into a file, say "fred.shtml", and inside that footer file, check the DOCUMENT_URI variable, in Apache, it very sensibly leaves the variable alone, so that it retains the value of the parent file which #included the footer.shtml file, in this case, "/fred.shtml". But Zeus, for no fathomable reason, changes the DOCUMENT_URI variable to be the name of the included file! (In this case, "/ssi_include/footer.shtml") What could have possessed them? It's not as if any included file is going to be a legitimate URI, is it? (sigh)
So why am I so het up on this DOCUMENT_URI variable? Well, it's because that's what I use when I'm making all my navbars. That and DOCUMENT_NAME, which Zeus doesn't set at all. Naturally, I'm not using either of them any more. (sigh)

I've removed the MSIE 5 tweaking, I think it looked too ugly.

25th September 2002

Ah, now we're cooking with gas! I have revamped the side-navigation so that is more compact, and I have introduced Sub-Menus on selected pages. Since the sub-menus have to be done by hand, while the default menus are automatically generated, you can understand why they aren't everywhere. Besides, only some pages are suited to sub-menus anyway.

The other strange and nifty thing I have added is user-configured navigation choices! If you don't like the side-navigation on a page, click on the TopNav link and you'll get top navigation! If that takes up too much space, click on the MinNav and you'll only get one minimal line of links at the top. And if you prefer the side navigation when you didn't get any, then click on the SideNav link, and you'll get the side navigation! Really dynamic content, thanks to conditional Server-Side-Includes which can actually check the ? arguments in a URL. And, yes, I tested it on Zeus this time.

I have also tried out my pages with MSIE 6, and it is even more dire MSIE 5.5 (unless I got a particularly buggy demo version). So if you use MSIE 6, side navigation is off by default; it uses top navigation on all pages. If you want to try the side navigation, you can turn it on as described above.

26th September 2002

More tweaking. Moved a few things around, got rid of some redundant code. Whoops! Fixed up an error with Netscape also. (Write out a hundred times: I shall not upload after a major change without checking with all browsers. Well, all the ones I have access to.)

I also reduced the size of the KaSp logos, since for most viewers, they're probably too wide for the width of the side navigation, which either pushes the width wider than expected, or puts an unsightly scrollbar there that we didn't really want... I've also increased the width of the side navigation bar by 2%, because it looks as if some pages really needed it that little bit wider.

I've also changed a few more pages to use sub-menus, and tweaked the submenu styles a bit. And re-arranged the order of a number of the default page-indexes. I also changed the look of the Cat-Out-Of-The-Bag Productions page a bit.

27th September 2002

New version of AsciiDB:DeepFields module (and by golly, I was expecting I'd never need to enhance it again... and then I discovered XML).

29th September 2002

Yet another new version of AsciiDB:DeepFields module, this time the data format has changed slightly, so check carefully to see what you need to change if you use this new version.