November 2002

10th November 2002

"Kamtraya! It is better, is it not?"

Yes, it looks mostly the same, but underneath, this website is "Better, stronger, faster!" "We have the technology to build the world's first bionic -" website. Well, no, not really. It isn't bionic, just using a completely different bunch of software to generate it, and I've tidied things up and added a few other things along the way. For the gory details, look at the About This Site page.

The not-so-gory details are: the TopNav navigation now has its own background, and relies a bit more on CSS. Netscape 4 users aren't going to get things quite so pretty, as I've stopped compensating for some of the Netscape 4 bugs I was compensating for before. Mozilla users are getting a big bonus, though, because I've added Alternate Stylesheets. (Under the View menu, check out the Use Style sub-menu). This means that you can pick the "look" (as distinct from the layout) from a number of alternative sets -- like, make everything go rainbow like on the Refractions page, if you like! Internet Explorer users miss out, because Microsoft haven't bothered to implement this part of the W3 standard. I'm not aware of any other browsers beside Mozilla that do, actually. And presumably Netscape 7, since they have the same codebase.

The WorkStorm Archive has been revamped a bit, the data has been massaged so that one can look at the fanzine stories separately.

Also have uploaded a new version of AsciiDB::DeepFields including splitting off the XML stuff into a separate module, AsciiDB::DeepFields::XML.

Another niftiness; there is now a "print" stylesheet which will hide the navbar and footer when you want to print a page. This works with Mozilla, I don't know about other browsers, though.

(later...) I have also (tada!) replaced the old, worn, awful "Matt's Scripts" versions of the text-counter and the random-text generator with new versions from http://nms-cgi.sourceforge.net/ (though I have modified the rand-text CGI in the same way as I modified the Matts-Scripts version, so that one can pass in the name of the file to take the random text from.)

(later...) (sigh) Ah, Zeus, Zeus, Zeus... Zeus didn't like my "Validate Me!" links so I had to bang them on with a large hammer. (sigh)

11th November 2002

Ah the tweaking, the tweaking...

Now, we have regained the "smart" images, that is, automatic width and height calculations for all images. That should make the pages load smoother.

Also, I have made all the KatSpace logos consistent by replacing the 3D-ish logos (which were at Refractions Digging Up The Stargate and Sentinel and Guide) by a black "Alien Neon" logo with a transparent background. Unfortunately, if your browser doesn't support transparent PNG files, then you will see it as a white background, but then you will have been having that problem all along with the page titles which are images anyway...

13th November 2002

Added a Known Problems section to the About This Site page. Also added a link to it from the FAQ page.

16th November 2002

I've been messing around with Netscape-4-related things, trying to work around some bugs without kowtowing to the browser, and as a result, there is now a "Netscape 4 theme" which all Netscape 4 viewers will see, regardless of what page they're on. It is a trimmed-down version of the main default theme.

The other result of this is that I have changed the SideNav menu to go back to the ancient practice of using a List, because various things work better with Lists (including Netscape4) and also because I have discovered how to reduce the indent of lists, thanks to the info at this informative page.

I have also been looking into IE (Internet Exploder 8-P) bugginess, thanks to various sites on the web, and I have made what I think should be a non Exploding IE layout stylesheet.

I have also updated/added a fair few links, here and there, as well as some revision of the About This Site page.

17th November 2002

I've been having fun with advanced CSS and I've made a new Alternate stylesheet called "Lavender" (only Mozilla users need pay attention to this notice) which, thanks to the info given in this article, has "buttons" instead of list items for the SideNav menu. The beauty of it is that the list items are still there, they've just been made to look like buttons with CSS. Cool!

I've also changed the styling of the logo so it's done by stylesheet instead of being hard-coded.

Released a new version ofHTML::GenToc which fixes the bug which caused the navbar style to revert to the default when one clicked on a link on a table-of-contents which linked inside the given file. Not that I know whether people are using the alternative navbar styles or not...

(hours later) Thanks to a bug report by Mark Hampton, I fixed a bug in HTML::TextToHTML and while I was doing that, I realized how I could make the conversion more XHTML-conformant, so I did it! Whee! New version is up.

20th November 2002

You hopefully won't notice much (if any) difference; I've been tweaking my report-generating files, and tweaking the logo on pages that have it.

(later) New versions of HTML::GenToc and HTML::TextToHTML because the CPAN testers seem to have a problem with AppConfig. I think I shall have to rewrite both of these to stop using that module, but not today.

(even later) I've messed with the logos again, now there are only two logos altogether: they both have a transparent background; one has a black foreground, and one has a white foreground. Those browsers which can't do PNG transparency at all will see just black and white logos; those which can't cope with partial transparency (like, apparently, Konqueror) will see the logo with only two ragged bands around it, rather than the nifty fading-away look. Oh well.

23rd November 2002

Tweaking the themes so that the hover behaviour is a bit nicer. Tweaking some of the formatting of Kathryn A's poems.

24th November 2002

Added a new page on Web Design to the Computers page, because I realized that I keep on repeating myself about what I find to be Good Things and Bad Things with web pages, so I figured I might as well put it down in one place.

29th November 2002

Got a notice from Annie Hamilton today to say that all the SAAB Enarrare zines have ceased production.