Updates: January 2001
January 7, 2001 at 4:40PM Eastern Time
Hello, everyone. My first update of the new millenium
(-: I had planned on posting something several minutes after midnight New
Year's, but I never got around to it...or much else for that matter. So, a
week after my last update I make another.
Since the week before Thanksgiving, I have
been very busy. Since then I have had numerous large projects to do for
school, greater than normal amounts of homework, family things to go to, and a
whole bunch else. Since about Christmas, I have been helping Chelsee make
her website and have been trying to pull something off. The number of
things coming in from contributors has slowed, so I haven't had too much to post
in the time I have had.
Now, Chelsee's
website is up and running,
the Holiday madness is over, school is easing back to normal, save for exams in
a week. So, my life is becoming less chaotic and I am getting for time to
work on the site.
For the better part of the past month, I have
been looking for a way to improve the navigation of MSROCAI. As some of
you may recall, I once had this site in frames. the problem was that the
frames were annoying and one culd not type in the exact address of, say,
Consuming Madness, and get to the page while retaining the menu. So I got
rid of the frames with the site overhaul about four months ago, resulting in the
contents table. Problem with that was in order to add or remove any
section of the site, I had to modify the table on the hundreds of pages that
compose this site, then FTP all of them back to Tripod, a job that took a total
of over four hours each time. So, I set out on a quest to find a better
method of navigation. I tried using a simple text+link Java Script, but I
found that I would have to paste the code into each page, and change each page
each time the code changed: just like the table. I decided to
try and find out if one could save a script to its own file and open it up with
a command, like you do with images: frame menu with table layout.
You can, but I can't make it work. So, I kept looking. I
stumbled upon several huge JavaScript archives a few days ago, and came across a
bunch of awesome navigation codes. I found some that I liked, and made
several versions of a new menu. After a lot of mixing and changing, I had
one awesome menu. Yet another problem arose: not only would I
have to paste it into every page as with the contents table, but I would have to
reformat evrery page so it showed up how I wanted it to. So, last night,
being desperate, I came across my savior: "The remote-control
script."
This script is now working with several other
to provide the navigation for MSROCAI. See the gray butotn at the top of
every page, "Open MSROCAI Menu"? Click on that, and the menu pops up like
a pop-up ad. All the links to the sections of MSROCAI are there, and
if you place your cursor over anyone, a descritption of what is found at that
link pops up in a table. Click the link, and off you go. The menu
closes, and you are sent to the new page. This button is at the top
of every page on the site, so you can call up the menu whenever you want.
I had modified the script so the menu would stay open, but when I did that, you
clicked the link, and the menu was covered up by the other page of HTML.
Click the button to bring it back up, and it basically refreshed the menu
without uncovering it. Therefore, to get the problem ground to dust, it
auto closes. Don't fret: the menu opens FAST.