Dateline: 2003年5月27日 Austin, Texas
File this under "If it's not one thing, it's another." First AJM's computer died. He bought a new motherboard and case and some other bits and pieces. So the last 5 days the living room has looked like this.
Then, on Saturday morning, the circuit breaker pops and the microwave, refrigerator, and bathroom lights are out. So we take a 5 hour break to try to track down the problem. When it gets too hot to be in the attic crawlspace, we give up. AJM returns to the computer project, but when he tries to install software, the new machine doesn't recognize his mouse. Has to go and get a different mouse. More fiddling.
Finally, AJM has a computer again--for about 2 hours. Then something goes wrong with the new motherboard. He goes to Frye's for supplies. Still doesn't work. Gives up for a bit and returns to Frye's first thing Monday morning. Somewhere on Monday evening he gets it working. We clean up most of the electronic equipment and discover that we do indeed have a living room under it all.
Today, with both boys out of the house, I'm able to track down the blown circuit to a faulty switch and replace it. Now we can start our holiday weekend. Except it's over and we're almost halfway through the week.
I want my weekend back!
Dateline: 2003年1月11日
The site might look odd over the weekend. I'm trying to work around the error on the individual pages when viewed in Safari. Actually, this is just an excuse to optimize the format. It was the first one I did and it's cobbled together from pieces I created in the days before I started using Movable Type and Cascading Style Sheets. Solution: start completely over from scratch. I'm also going to change the language encoding to "ja" and the character set to "shift_JIS."
Differences in font displays across browsers, even on my machine, are driving me crazy. I can't imagine the trouble I'm going to have with PC support.
Safari and Omniweb display the fonts as I intended. (Click on the screenshot above for a larger view.)
However, IE 5.2.1 for Mac OS X seems to ignore the fonts specified in the style sheet. It insists on using the default proportional font I have set in Preferences, even though it reads the style sheet for everything else. (Click on the screenshot above for a larger view.)
Update 2003年1月13日
Thanks to a cold and rainy weeked, I was able to migrate almost all the pages at nipponDAZE to XHTML 1.0 Strict. Little errors creep in. Then, not knowing what was wrong, I bandaided fixes without addressing the underlying problem. Starting over cleaned the slate of the hacks. Does it validate? Sometimes. The MT Trackback feature doesn't; I need to read up on that.
I also reorganized the page design so that the category pages (some of which had a lot of entries) have less text and photos. And now the individual pages show correctly in Safari. Omniweb looks about the same. IE for the Mac is readable, but not perfect.
I still feel like I'm hacking through the font issues. Should I use pt or px? What about the differences in pt size across fonts of the same family? And now that I've specified the charset as shift_JIS, some things are only going to look right if you have a Japanese font installed.
Finally, I haven't addressed the XML/RSS template at all. I know that some people (like Kurt and Jeremy) use newsfeeds. I need to do more research before I get to that. So much to learn; so little time.
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens
May 27, 2003
Comments
Actually the problem with IE turned out to be my fault. I didn't cascade correctly and was inheriting attributes from the wrong parent.
Comment by: M. Posted January 12, 2003 10:42 AM.
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