Slightly Revised Version
3/7/2004 12:53:42 PM GMT
Did a very big make over of the site, though it appears not much has changed. I am not an HTML guru or even consider myself a Web Designer, I am a programmer who has a lot of experience in front-end design and from time to time gets the urge to be creative; unfortunately, this is not one of them!. But when I either have the time or the urge I search through the Internet and checkout what the guru's have been upto. And what I learned is that the new rage in HTML development is the migration to XHTML and to Div's. Since I have been doing some simpler web screens on some of my my consulting projects, that I would try it in a complex manner like my previous home page layout.
I will add some updates and other my thoughts about this topic in the comments section.
During my deployment, I am seeing tons of errors, so there will probably be a lot of comments! Internet and checkout what the guru's have been upto. And what I learned is that the new rage in HTML development is the migration to XHTML and to Div's. Since I have been doing some simpler web screens on some of my my consulting projects, that I would try it in a complex manner like my previous home page layout.
Site Administrator
Mostly Complete of Site Rewrite
8/10/2007 11:28:10 AM GMT
About done with rewrite, but still need to update this 4 year old markup! I was adding stuff to my resume this morning and noticed cla** callouts for every list tag; silly of me!
Anyways, all that is left is chop up about 60 images for the "NEW" header which will work with or without JavaScript based upon the day and hour of the user's locale, as well as, really need to create a new template for this site; it has gotten out of control!
Added AJAX
7/13/2007 4:17:49 AM GMT
Just Added some AJAX to the Stock Page. I am starting to like AJAX after working with it in a college course because the whole page does not postback; thus no page flicker, just a cute image displaying a command is processing.
A New Design Has Begun
3/11/2007 5:14:50 AM GMT
Yea, I have posted some new stuff because I am sick of looking at this. But firstly I have added SPAM blocker so no more garbage can be posted unless you type in the numbers in the yellow box!
I will be doing more enhancements soon, I have a whole list, but need some sleep because it is Daylight Savings Time weekend.
A New Design is Needed
10/11/2006 7:53:42 AM GMT
Yes, I need a new design PRONTO! I have been getting SPAMMED by robots that leave stupid advertisments on my site, up to 50 per day for the past week or so. The problem is that my hard drive died about a month ago, hence I lost everything. I lost everything, much of my college work, a ton of pictures from my past, and of course my blog software. Though I have needed to redo this for quite sometime, I just can not write a quick patch to stop them. The source to the domain are gone, just client and datastores remain. Hopefully, once this class is over, I will have a little time to get some stuff done; oh wait, I am buying a house - we'll have to see if I have the time!
Added More SPAM Killer
4/25/2006 2:27:04 PM GMT
I had to write a little string function to take the first character of one of these form fields and check for a <; then after that wasn't enough I had to check if any of the form fields were empty or not.
These SPAMMERS will use spiders which ignore .Net, because 1.1 uses only JScript, not JavaScript, plus those spiders don't always acknowledge .js to begin with, hence I keep getting slammed with garbage. But now I think I have got them, though they are forcing me to use more server, the end result should be the elimination of SPAM.
Added SPAM Killer
4/3/2006 4:18:08 PM GMT
My little blog here was getting SPAMMED really bad for the last couple of weeks, so I finally got the time to rectify it. Used the String Class to sniff out their posts.
Hopefully my schedule will let up a bit so I can redo this site in .Net 2005 and C#. Probably will get to it this summer, once my spring course is complete.
Content Rater
6/6/2005 11:21:57 PM GMT
Just added a Content Rater, similar to Microsoft's which they have at the end of articles on MSDN.
It was a pain to make; I got the idea from Scott Mitchell of 4guysfromrolla, but as usual, it not only needed extreme modification, but almost an entire recode; all except for the chart!
That's it, now it is time to study PL/SQL and get ready to start the degree.
Should be Faster
5/1/2005 4:00:33 PM GMT
The site should be much faster than before, seems to take only a second or two to get to the desired page; instead of 7 to 10 seconds, initially, and then 4 to 7 seconds, lately.
Still need to spend more time on the security aspect of this site, but have streamlined and speed things up significantly. It may seem to be a waste of time, but techologies and code I write for this site I use professionally.
I like the changing text color
4/18/2005 2:26:39 PM GMT
I like the changing text color when I move the mouth to the text. It's very neat. When I finished my exam, I might try to get you to help me in putting some fancy stuff on my website
Beginning Phase 3
4/11/2005 10:45:29 PM GMT
I believe that the Software Development community they call it Phase 3; or maybe not! But I am really sick of basically going through a new blog and having to copy and paste a bunch of code out of a previous one just to post something. And to make matters worst if I want to make a change, I have to go through each and every page as well as code behind; sounds like it is time try out some of these patterns I've been reading about.
Not only making this site more object oriented, but it is time to tackle the security problem. Since I know how the site is constructed, hacking it is not too difficult. I was at work a few days ago (during my lunch break) and noticed that I needed to make a quick change. Well it took me a total of 2 minutes to hack my site and to upload, FTP and FrontPage Extensions free, the needed changes. Even spending a little more time with the validation, currenlty I am using .Net's stuff, which only works in IE; maybe develop some classes on the server to do the job. So reworking it, focusing on Streamlining, Speed, and Security is now being designed. Notice the 3 S's, I invented that!
Imagine that the Phase 4 will be a hard coded C# migration, I need that job security as well as it wouldn't hurt to getting back to more C type languages. Considering that Phase 1 was basically a weekend job I put together as I was starting a new Consulting jig at the time.
My Initial Thoughts
3/17/2005 1:56:51 AM GMT
Well, it looks the way in which I envisioned, especially in FireFox 1.0. In IE it looks decent, except for the small amount of extra padding on the left menu. In Netscape 7.2 it looks decent, except for a bug in my menu; the divider between the resume and portfolio links mesh together for some odd reason, guess that is why they came out with FireFox!
But using only Div's is very difficult, it is like wrapping twine around wooden posts to create the illusion of columns and tables. Currently, there are no tables, everything that you see is wrapped all around eachother. The benefit of this approach is that blocks of tables, known as td's(table data) won't be moving around during the page creation. Also, since I created this part of the site, as well as much of the rest, in XHTML, each document takes on a tree structure, so it can be readily shared with many systems. The downside is that columns are not due outin CSS until version 3; and that is at least 3 years away, so I have been stuck creating everything the hard way.
Feel free to look at the code, may be of some interests. I did write a couple of statements, one called patch, the other called bug to fix a couple of visual bugs. If you look at the bugs you see why I called the one patch!
Web Service Problem
3/13/2005 6:33:33 PM GMT
If anyone is viewing my site around this time my web service provider is sticking an em tag in my "Quote of the Day" (QOD) without a closing tag. So every page with that quote will make the rest of the page italic; or atleast for a couple of hours!
Got the Stuff Up
3/13/2005 3:32:55 AM GMT
Yea, like I said it looks about the same, excpet this time there are no div tags and it's all XHTML; meaning it is XML compatible.
I have debugged the code and the data, but still need to validate it for XHTML. It stinks but might as well.
So I will debug for XHTML then I will add some new stuff, such as a font chooser for comments, server-side validation for the forms (MS's form validation is junk!) and probably rid Access and go straight with XML. For such a small site as this, XML is perfect and with .Net it is extremely powerful. I am pleased that the pages are downloading about twice as past as before, once I implement XML and XSLT that should be halved again; guess that is what happens when I don't plan ahead of time.
Just a Phase
3/8/2005 12:11:23 AM GMT
Yep, this is just a phase; I consider it phase 2. How many phases, oh I don't know, but this phase is to switch to all divs as well as try to speed up the processing
In the future, I will add all sorts of stuff.