Updates: December 2007
December 29, 2007 at 6:50PM EST
After the last
update, I expected to abandon this project for several more months (at least).
Well, I surprised myself! Although this update may have less to do with me
actually being motivated about getting this little restoration off the ground
and more to do with me having three days off work without anyone in State
College to entertain me, I still consider it victorious proof that I am awesome.
As I planned in the last update, I have rebuilt and uploaded the Website Information
page. The next update? No clue...Penn State is playing in the Alamo
Bowl in a little more than an hour, I am hoping to be in the Baltimore area
tomorrow, I have work Monday and Tuesday, and I am tentatively going to
Philadelphia on Wednesday. As to what the next update will include, well,
I don't have much of an answer for that either. I have decided against
reviving the About Mike and Links pages for now because both of those pages are
entirely inaccurate--so I guess we can rule those out of the picture.
Wait, that means the next update actually has to be some sort of content update,
now doesn't it? Exciting!
December 19, 2007 at 9:45PM EST
Two updates in one
day? Wow, I've gone and flabbergasted myself! Seriously, this is
utterly amazing. Well, as I indicated earlier, I have brought the old
updates back online. Simply removing the <p> and </p> tags from each page
wouldn't have taken that long, but since I really fiddled around with the CSS
controls quite a lot, there was much more work to be done than I had originally
anticipated. Brining everything up to snuff only took a few hours however.
In addition to fixing the Updates Archive, I completely rebuilt (and uploaded)
the Contact Mike and form submission Thank You pages. As always, if you
come across any problems, please let me know. The next update will likely
be the Site Information page, and after that I may post some new content before
grinding out all the HTML modifications for the fanfics.
December 19, 2007 at 12:10PM EST
Well, I only
missed three years; I guess that isn't too terribly bad. In short,
a lot has happened in the intervening one-thousand-ish days since the last
update, and with that settled, I shall forge ahead with this update. Once
again, I have decided to re-work the code for this website, although I do have a
rather legitimate excuse this time: Firefox, my web browser of choice
since the last time I was actively working on MSROCAI,
wasn't very fond of how I had things coded. Specifically, Firefox was
exaggerating the vertical spacing around certain parts of the layout to the point that
everything looked just a bit goofy. Not that this problem alone brought
about my hiatus, but it was annoying enough
that, until I finally solved it last night, I couldn't justify working on any
part of
this place. (I'm a perfectionist, but you probably knew that from my
frequent revisions of everything.)
What was the
problem? Firefox apparently augments the space above and below paragraph
tags, <p> and </p>, and since I use these little guys ubiquitously, there was
certainly a little issue. After I realized that this was the source of my
problem through some random tinkering last night, I simply replaced <p> and </p>
with <div> and </div>. Of course, this "simple" fix means that I have to
change the HTML for every page of this website, and doing so will take me quite
some time. I have already cleaned up the HTML in the JavaScript files that
provide the layout for each page, but I haven't gotten around to anything else
yet. Well, I did tweak the Cascading Style Sheets that I use, but that's a
cosmetic project that I had been working on for a while (if you use Internet
Explorer, you may have noticed that I am no longer making your scrollbar
exciting colors).
Since I haven't
fixed the HTML on any page other than this one, and since, quite frankly, the
content on all of those other pages is grossly outdated, I have temporarily
disabled the links in the navigation menu. Honestly, I'm probably
going to rebuild every page from the ground up, so don't expect this to be a
fast process. Almost every page is outdated, inaccurate, or too pathetic
to resuscitate. I have already rebuilt the Main Page (if you didn't
notice); this little design, devoid of all the colorful garbage floating around
the bottom, has actually been sitting on my computer for a couple of years, but,
well, you know how I work. Next, I will restore the archive of updates,
but after that, I don't have a specific plan of action.
This may be just
another coding update, but I have a lot of new content to put up, most of which
has absolutely nothing to do with fanfiction. While I do still dabble in
it to keep my writing skills as sharp as possible (and because Dragon War
seemingly has become one of my personal wars), I have other interests that I
would like to share with the world.