Never seems to be enough time, but I did make a note of those and will check 'em out the next chance I get. I've been pretty busy the past couple of days with an update (mostly adding more info) to my "parts pages" (see this link and the pages linked off of it -- it'd been about a month and a half and I collected a whole pile more info, and wanted to get that in there before the year ended, for some reason.
There is never enough time ever......
Are you doing that all in plain ole HTML?
Yep. It's slightly trimmed from the version I serve up locally on the LAN here, which also includes an Apache graphic at the bottom of each page. :-)
I took a look and that is a ton of info to have to deal with, are you using any sort of content management software?
I'm using a text editor. :-)
If not I may be able to hook you up. That is if you would be interested. I could imagine having to deal with all that time after time after time when I need to edit stuff. Ive gone soft at gotten used to writing code via php and SQL.
I started out with _one_ big transistor chart, but it got too unwieldy, and wasn't something I'd want to expect folks to download, particularly over a dialup connection (what I've got). So I split it up that way. I'm not too sure how a content-management system of some sort would work for me, though I have nothing against the idea of checking it out. The thing that got me started with HTML was that when I'd installed Slackware in the first place (1999) there were some program docs that came that way, and so I started some small pages to try and tie them together and link to them easier. Much of that isn't working right any more because it seems that with each upgrade some of the HOWTOs go away and some of the new ones have different names, but I still have a whole mess of stuff that I've snagged off the 'net plugged into a local HTML tree, just for ease of access. It's gotten a LOT easier since I started using Firefox, which saves all the bits that you need, images and whatnot, as compared to before when I was using Konqueror. But I now have MUCH more of that stuff sitting in my download tree waiting for me to plug it into the setup than I have in the setup, and there never seems to be time to deal with that, either.
Putting the stuff online was more a matter of "some of you may find this information useful", basically what I said in the several posts that I made yesterday announcing the updating of the pages after I'd gotten them uploaded. And indeed some folks seem to find it useful. I had no idea until I put the hit counters in there, and now I seem to get roughly 400 hits a week, consistently, and have a few folks listing a link to the pages.
So what's the advantage of using these?
Well the main advantage is if you have a predefined 'style' for your text and then you want to cahnge colors or font size etc. you would go to your style sheet and find the definition you want to change. and change the color from red to green for example. Instead of having to open everyone of your HTML pages and make adjustments to each and every place that you told it to make the color red. Does that make any sense?
Sure, but for the little I use much of that sort of thing it's not that big a deal to me to change stuff. There's one line in each file that talks about link colors and one other area where I use colors besides the defaults, all of them reading
<TR BGCOLOR="CCCCFF">
And if I ever needed to change those it's only in maybe half a dozen files or so -- I could use sed to do that job easily enough. Other than that I don't screw around much with font sizes, styles, colors for things, stuff like that, and in fact have been known to take that sort of thing out for a lot of stuff that I've downloaded copies of, to simplify it. Some of _those_ files see a size reduction of as much as 80% once I get all the crap out, but even 50% isn't all that uncommon, particularly since I also strip out a lot of comments, javascript, and m$-specific nonsense.
I must be missing something here. I don't use <div> all that much either, mostly.
Well div is only one way there are numerous definitions that you can create. You can even give some of the standard HTML tags a definition in the style sheet. Say for instance you have 2 different styles of paragreaphs that you want to use for your site. Lets say one is the main style that you want all of your text to look like, then we have the '/fine print' so would define <p> tags
p.main {
font-size:16px;
color:#000000;
}
p.fine {
font-size:8px;
color:#555555;
}
then in your HTML file you would use them like
<p class="main">your main text goes in here</p>
<p class="fine">your fine print goes in here</p>
Those sizes actually specified in pixels? That's something I've bumped into a few times, which is also something I generally try to avoid, because it may end up looking good at one resolution (the one the author uses :-) and lousy at others. The whole point of the use of HTML and a browser in the first place is that it should look equally good on a variety of setups, different browsers, and different screen resolutions, and if it doesn't the page author is doing something wrong.
You can define your <hr> as an image
hr {
background:url('images/hrimage.gif');
}
then when ever you put the <hr> tag in your page it would display the mige you specified. and again it makes it easier to make adjustment site wide so if you wanted to change the image you used you would only need to edit your stylesheet instead of hunting through every single HTML file to make the chages.
I've seen a few places that do that, too, either use something like a line with a lot of colors in it or an image that just happens to be long and narrow, and I don't see much point to that either. I hardly ever use the width specification that goes with that anyhow. But when I do it's always a percentage and not some number of pixels.
I don't have a problem getting techy, or asking questions about points I don't understand. But my education in pretty much all of this stuff (heavy emphasis on electronics to start with, morphing into computer stuff later on, some fiddling around with programming, and some other areas I won't get into now) are _all_ self-taught, so there are times when it's a little spotty.
Well it wasnt so much the techie I was meaning just sometimes I dont speak/type all that clearly.
Oh. Well, if there was something I didn't understand I'd ask about it. Dunno about some other folks...
I have a background in electronics as well (3 hrs from a degree for the past 8 yrs. Itll never happen) But I also had a background in computers that is almost completely self taught. I started when I was in 5th grade in 82 with a C=64 and started to prgram in basic.
Side note: I'm looking for c64s (and 128s) to scrap, I have people that are interested in certain chips...
But I digress. From looking at your site you arent overly concerned with flashy bells nad whistles just plain ole data/info and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
That about sums it up pretty accurately. Though this may change if there's ever any prospect of employment doing that sort of thing, if I can find somebody that doesn't insist that I have to do things in a m$ environment. :-)
And as far as teh div/table debate goes when your data is tabular such as your parts page, there is no reason to not use a table and making that layout in divs could be a nightmare. Just something to throw out there. But if you arent using some sort of content management tool I would suggest you at least look into it. If your host offers php/sql I could help set that up so that all you had to do was just enter the data/content and the rest would be taken care of automatically.
I don't think they do, nor scripts or much else, it's just the 5MB or so (5120KB is what they said) that I get that comes along with having a dialup account with those folks. I'm not overly concerned about it at this point, since even with my stuff on there (and a few other odd files that I've uploaded and linked to here and there) I'm only using about half that. I wouldn't mind seeing what could be done with some of those tools, though, locally.
