Just thought I’d update that I was able to get the folks’ wall-phone working with the DSL filter. I had to take the phone apart and remove the sliding male connector on the back and cutting the wires going to it. I then cut a phone cord and stripped all the wires and spliced the like colored wires together. I was then able to plug this connector into the DSL filter plate and then attach the phone. Their DSL installation is now complete! 🙂
After many years of 24K Dial-Up, my folks are finally on broadband. Last week I ordered AT&T DSL for them and I set it up for them today (ok, technically yesterday since it’s 2:00am now). They are using the lowest speed offering of 768 Kbps down/128 Kbps up. Following is a speedtest result:
Something tells me the upload speed is more like the 384 KBps setting. My mom is pretty much blown away by the improvement. What’s even better, the cost is less than what the dial-up was! 🙂 The only thing left to do is figure a way to get the DSL filter for the wall-phone to work properly. The female connector on the plate does not protude out far enough to make contact with the male connector on the back of the phone. 😕 Argh!!
Since they are now on broadband, I downloaded and installed all the Windows XP updates and IE7 on their system as well as the latest version of the JAVA runtime.
Well, I believe that I have converted all my pages to be in Standards mode now. Along the way, a fair amount of code was cleaned up and corrected. I have also removed any dead links that I came across and tried to find alternative links if possible. Man, I had a couple pages that had some really messed up code in them. I was surprised they rendered correctly.
While I was reading the If you had the chance to own any domain name thread at my webhost’s forum, I thought about markrh.com since I use MarkRH as a username in just about every forum and website I register on. Went to godaddy.com to check it out and whattya know, it was available. So, I now have www.markrh.com which is parked at www.markheadrick.com.
My next challenge with my site is to figure out how I can get rid of these frames and still have an embedded media player that doesn’t reload with everypage. I tried IFRAMEs before but that didn’t work. If I somehow figured out a way, I’ll of course have to change every page in my site ❗
Ack!! I forgot about my DVD Movie pages LOL. Okay, so I’m not done yet.
Update: I finished all my DVD Movie pages. I also realized I was using the wrong DOCTYPE so I corrected it on all my pages including at www.pelicar.info They are all now (let’s see if I can remember the method for showing this code):
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
I really like that WordPress Plug-In, makes displaying in-line code much easier and neat looking.
Update October 25, 2016: Unfortunately Technorati is no longer accepting blog submissions. You can read more here: Welcome to the new Technorati.
I am creating this post to claim my blog on Technorati. I noticed that it showed my MySpace with 2 links to this blog, which is correct. Here’s the bit I have to add to get my blog claimed on there:
Well, (why I do I start everything I start talking about with “Well”.. well, I don’t know) I decided this week to try and convert the www.pelicar.info site from using frames for its presentation to DIV containers and CSS to achieve the same thing as best I could. In the end, I think I have achieved this. The website still has a left-hand menu that stays in place while scrolling the main contents. Also, the address bar will actually show the proper URL for the page and if you do a browser refresh, the current page will display again and not go back to the home page. Before, to refresh the main content, you had right-click within that frame and then choose refresh. Most folks are not accustomed to doing that, however. This also makes bookmarking a specific page much easier and is a bit more compatible with search engines.
Luckily, no-one is using older browsers such as IE5 or at least very few. When they scroll on the page the menu will go up along with everything else. Another thing that changes are some layout/rendering differences. The reason.. it has to do with the difference between Quirks and Standards mode. In fact, depending on the DOCTYPE of the page, IE6 and 7 can be made to function in Quirks mode or Standards mode. Following are a couple resources that explain the differences:
So, in Quirks mode the border and padding are inside the Width you give an element which means you are giving it the width that everything should take up, while in Standards mode the border and padding are outside the Width you give to an element. Here you are specifying the width of the content only.
This difference in the box model caused some issues dealing with paragraphs that contain italicized text. I kept noticing some pages had a horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of the page for apparently no reason that would only scroll for a couple pixels… nothing was extending past the right edge. I was going nuts . I also noticed that as I narrowed the browser window where a paragraph contained some italics and was flowing around a picture, the picture would sometimes jump below the paragraph! (Here’s that page) Googling around, I stumbled upon this article: IE and Italics. I had to add a style to combat it:
/* Doing overflow:hidden to correct IE and italics rendering issues */
P { overflow:hidden; }
There might be a better way as this does cause it to chop the text off.. but it stopped the weird behavior for now. Changing the padding on my divs might solve it but I was tired of messing with it after that worked.
Another thing I changed was to use relative font sizing instead of fixed point or pt sizing. Well, this opened up another can of worms I wasn’t expecting. There was a page that contained several table (the New Creatures page) and I had defined the TD element with this style:
TD, TH {font-family: Arial;font-size:0.80em;}
Which makes the font 80% smaller than the main body font which is 1.0em (by the way em refers to the size that a capitol letter “M” takes up). But, the text in one table looked much smaller than it should. Well, as it turns out, that table had a table within a table on the left, and the right had text explaining the items in the table. The text everywhere was too small. Turned out to be a problem of inheritance. This page explains it: Relative font sizes and inheritance. Since the font of the first TD was reduced by 80%, that is now considered the base font size for everything in that element. The nested table caused its text to be further reduced another 20%. I fixed the problem with the nested table by doing the following:
This keeps the nested TD element with the same base TD size of 0.80em instead of reducing it again. To fix the normal text that I did not want to be reduced in size by the initial 80% I made its TD element like this:
<tdSTYLE="font-family: Times New Roman; font-size:1.0em;">
Problems solved! 😀
I am also in the middle of changing my main website to run in Standards mode as well and cleaning up some of the 15 year old coding in some places… like closing paragraph tags and other things LOL. I don’t know if I can keep it looking the same if I get rid of the frames, namely due to the embedded media player in the bottom-left frame. Just don’t think there’s a way without frames to keep a song playing around while browsing, unless the player is loaded in a separate pop-up or browser window which I don’t really like. Hmmmm.. Anyway, all for now I guess.
. I also noticed that as I narrowed the browser window where a paragraph contained some italics and was flowing around a picture, the picture would sometimes jump below the paragraph! (