Shiromi’s Diary

I finally started "putting in production" the pages I was working on for the last few days.
It took me about 3 days to understand the basics of css:
- the first night,I wanted to know what it was and what it was doing... but it looked a little painful to read (several references to different files, etc. (it was after work, I was tired, ok ? )
- the second night, I actually starting studying a little more and found some interesting references on the Internet to leaern quickly about css (see the links)
- the 3rd night, I did the tutorials and I started changing my own pages ...

I still need to modify the design, I'm still not satisfied by the way it looks (colors, background, etc.) but at least, I now have the layout and any change in the css will be applied to all pages at the same time
I'm still in the process of migrating all pages so it might take a while before everything is homogeneous ! In the meantime, please bear with my old non standard HTML pages !

One last thing: if you ever have to do the same thing as I am doing, I would recommend to use a nice editor such as emacs and work on the source code directly instead of letting yourself get confused with your editor (GoLive, DreamWeaver, Frontpage): it will be more difficult to control what you do and to keep a clean HTML if you let those programs rewrite the code for you ...

Finally, my last remark:
If you see some grey boxes in the banner which don't look really good, ask yourself whether you are using a browser which respects the norms ... (Microsoft Internet Explorer ... hmm ?...).
Those files are PNG files and should have a transparent background but only the browsers which respect the standards will properly display them. Try Mozilla which will also help you get rid of the irritating popup windows generated by javascripts of some pages...

I started working on the design of my homepage again but this time, I really wanted to go deeper than just the look of the site. I was actually a little upset that the search engines only return the frame where the keyword is in (how could they do it otherwise?...) instead of the whole page as it was orinally designed.
In parallel, Bruno started talking to me about valid HTML, CSS and other stuff for which I didn't care before but I tried the validator (see at the bottom of this page, and it was actually very frustrating to get errors (my geek's soul is speaking) !

I am now back to the root and writing my homepage with emacs and checking its validity with the W3C's validator.
I am also getting rid of all the java scripts, which I don't find useful after all and which pollute the code, in my humble opinion.
It's actually very fulfilling to have a clean code, written by yourself and it doesn't take as long as you would expect, once you understand how CSS works ...
I still have to 'migrate' the other pages though but now that the design is ready, it should be quite straight forward ... hopefully !

It's been a while since I wanted to put up those pictures, but I never really had time to do so ...
The pictures were taken during my trip to Australia (Sydney, Brisbane). I have separated the pictures into two parts, as the ones taken in Brisbane are pictures of my sister's family.
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