What’s New : 2002

30 December 2002

There is a totally revamped XHTML 1.0 Strict base for structure (except on the main page where the presence of the name= attribute in the eXTReMe Tracking script requires the use of XHTML 1.0 Transitional) and a conversion from numbered to named entities throughout. Every page modified so far (with extension .html) is identified as using the Unicode (UTF-8) character set which should facilitate the inclusion of other languages in the future.

16 November 2002

Are you disappointed there’s nothing new at the site? So am I. Read about it.

25 September 2002

Found an error in a link on the Q&A page and corrected it. Added links to that page and to the Diversions page.

10 September 2002

A few tweaks to the Diversions page, pretty much just so I’d have a semi-recent entry on this page.

20 June 2002

You snooze, you lose. The listing of the contents of the garage has gotten shorter. I attempted to implement a custom 404 File Not Found page that used server-side includes.

19 June 2002

I have tried to implement a custom 404 File Not Found page. More and more pages are going to link to favicon.ico.

15 June 2002

A new question and a revised answer on the Q&A page. The link in the answer to the new question starts the conversion of this web space to development on the Macintosh platform. The browser assessment script on the home page is revised in view of the installation and testing of Opera 6.01 Windows and Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 Windows. A rather lengthy dispatch about the situation.

23 April 2002

New banners are apparent on the Tools and Diversions pages, thanks to a new vector graphics software program purchase.

31 March 2002

I let the changes accumulate a little before uploading. Be sure to check the movie reviews for March since I saw five in the last week.

14 March 2002

Some new photographs of me by someone else, from the meeting of WAMALUG last Sunday, have appeared on Brickshelf. Direct links to all such photographs on the Photographs page.

20 February 2002

An extraordinarily small update to the Q&A page.

13 February 2002

The failure to update the redirection from the home page to the current month of movie reviews has been corrected. There are no movie reviews so far this month.

22 January 2002

With the concluding broadcast of the series Daria (the episode Is It College Yet? yesterday on MTV in the US) and the fact that I skipped last Wednesday’s episode of Enterprise without missing it, so to speak, I saw an opportunity to revise the Q&A page. I’ve added a few links on the Diversions page to help me keep up with the criticism of each episode of Enterprise. A pinch of an update to my commentary on The Lord of the Rings The Fellowship of the Ring. More and more pages have a link to my copyright page, currently usable in Opera and Mozilla.

15 January 2002

Maybe not. I have decided that the prospect of changing all these files and trying to edit them as *.shtml files is too much. I’ll stick to static HTML (actually XHTML) for now. The number of redirect pages will remain as before. However, they will now state Redirecting... in the title bar of the browser window.

13 January 2002

I have confirmed that the server for this web space, [users.erols.com], provides server side includes (SSI). So I have started to implement SSI on pages in this web space to display the menu at the top of the page and report the date of last modification for certain files over at the site map. However, the increasingly aged and inadequate program for editing HTML files running on the Windows platform that I am currently using is a problem. The File Dialog box defaults to the extensions *.htm and *.html, for example, which previously made it difficult to retrieve JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheet files, and now makes it quite a pain to retrieve *.shtml files. BBEdit 6 for MacOS 9 and 10 looks more and more appealing. Expect a flurry of redirect pages (with the yellow background) as I bring page by page over to SSI.

10 January 2002

The release of Opera 5.0 Final for the Macintosh hit the Austrian press yesterday—indeed, the same newspaper’s web site that led to so much trouble last year—and I downloaded and installed the Norweigan program. With its standards compliance confirmed, my script for assessing browser performance in displaying my web space was getting a little long, so I’ve made it an external program. I’ve also modified once again the script for the tracking program. I’m trying to maintain XHTML compliance, so I can’t use the language="JavaScript1.2" attribute to hide the references to the screen property which was not defined in earlier versions of the scripting language. Users of Netscape 3 should now get an alert box instead of the dreaded error box. Opera 5.0 Final for the Macintosh already provides the functionality for the <LINK> tags that is promised for the next version of Netscape 6 that I discussed earlier, so I’ll be adding links to my copyright page using the tag.

04 January 2002

When I sought XHTML 1.0 compliance for the pages of this web space, the character entity &#151; representing the em dash had to go. I have now discovered that &#8212; is the compliant way to represent the em dash and have been trying to replace the lame double hyphens I had been using as a substitute. A few changes in the links on the diversions page. The monitor of solar x ray activity and geomagnetic field activity I had on the home page for a day is gone, I explain more on the Dispatches page.

03 January 2002

Oops. I left out a quotation mark to close the XML namespace attribute to the HTML tag in many of the pages at this web space. What a pain. A few tweaks to the Q&A page to reflect the passage of time. I have adjusted the decision tree script leading to a document.write command on the home page to reflect the standards-compliance of Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.1 for the Macintosh.

Entries subject to editing at any time. Last edited on: 29-Jan-2007