About my website (OT)
Buck Rogers
Posts: 2,185
Hello!
Those of you who're complaining that my website is unreachable from where they are located, I've issued a temporary fix. The registration records contained a broken key, removing it and replacing it with a working one enabled it to work. Or its supposed to. I urge all of you to try it.
The big fix is currently sitting on an AWS EC2 image quietly counting the picoseconds before it can take over.
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Strange. Erco what's your robot doing here in NYC doing snow removal with four shovels in four hands?
Those of you who're complaining that my website is unreachable from where they are located, I've issued a temporary fix. The registration records contained a broken key, removing it and replacing it with a working one enabled it to work. Or its supposed to. I urge all of you to try it.
The big fix is currently sitting on an AWS EC2 image quietly counting the picoseconds before it can take over.
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Strange. Erco what's your robot doing here in NYC doing snow removal with four shovels in four hands?
Comments
-Phil
Try it again in about twelve hours.
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Odd. Now why Erco is your robot inside the PABT buying a bus ticket for a further destination?
I myself cannot, as Hannibal Lecter said.
One thing that I find very odd is how you have used nearly 500 lines of code to display such simple and basic web page.
Yes, now I see it "for the first time in forever".
Depending on where you live, Rick, go to Redmond and thank a random lifeform who works for Microsoft.
Why Erco, its the same robot you finished last year about the time that hitchhiker fell victim to the US curse of doing that. And right now he's in Canada making his way to Nova Scotia. He then expects to be in Greenland.
(Or, if that's your tool of choice, there are some cleanup macros you can use that will turn the inline CSS Word uses into a more streamlined HTML/CSS combo, while also fixing some of the CSS Word generates that's not cross platform-safe.)
Rick, if using NoScript, how do the sites that use JavaScript for responsive (desktop, mobile) designs look? Do you get a jumble, or are there exceptions for certain scripts, such as JQuery? Except for some CSS hacks that aren't guaranteed to work across browsers and platforms, there aren't many other client-side methods to create a responsive site other than to use ye olde JavaScript.
No third party scripts will run, but there are not that many of those here (just ajax.googleapis.com and facebook.net), and Ghostery blocks gravatar, but that only shows up when viewing categories, not within threads. Some sites will have 15-20 or more 3rd party scripts, mostly for advertising. TV station, radio, and newspaper sites seem to be the worst for some reason.
I don't have any problem with JavaScript itself, but unfortunately it's used to deliver the vast majority of internet advertising.
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Erco why would your robot be thrown out of Sweden? Because that's where he went. He was last seen there trying to buy some drinks for some new friends, and his cards were not accepted.
VBscript�, or Jscript�, or Active-X�
Now I know, it was a Word document! Arghhh...
I'm with Gordon. Word is not a good way to generate even plain text for the web.
It would be better to just write the HTML by hand. You only have to get the hang of a few tags to do what is on that page. <h1>, <h2>, <p>, <b>, <a>, <span>, <div>, <script>...
Include some ready made CSS and use it's classes for some nice fonts and layouts. See below...
@Gordon, One does not need JavaScript for a responsive design.
"Responsive" here means automatically adjusting layout to suite different sized screens, even dynamically as you resize a browser window on a desktop machine. It is not to do with responding to user input. In case anyone is unclear about this.
Anyway, a responsive layout can be created without JS using CSS. For example:
http://tympanus.net/codrops/2012/06/12/css-only-responsive-layout-with-smooth-transitions/
One of the best ways to get started is to use the bootstrap CSS library. In does a very good job of "normalizing" CSS difference between browsers, provides great font's and typography, has great grid system for laying out headers, columns and so on. bootstrap does require JS if you want to use it's plug-ins but I have never used that, I just use it for styling.
My experimental dashboard prototype uses bootstrap for responsiveness. Log into it here https://xn--2-umb.net/ using the password it suggests. Then make you browser window small and smaller, see how it rearranges itself to fit.
Note: That dashboard has a ton of JS in it. It will render but will be totally dead without JS enabled.
Edit: Historically there has been a lot of pain getting CSS working nicely across all the browsers. My take on this is that I just don't care. Things like bootstrap do a good job of papering over the differences. Pretty much everything I throw together works on FireFox, Chrome, later IE, Edge Safari. That will do me.
Now fifteen-to-sixteen years earlier things get sticky. Yes Heater you're right regarding the Unicode translations. That's a legacy of the past, I'll probably update that page accordingly. And Heater your choice of beverages is on me, have two. (Or more.)
However.... The fix is in, as they say. And it works. That's what is important.
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Strange. Erco he's still in Scandinavia.
I see, a blast from the past!
Please don't take the criticism badly.
I'm no web monkey. In fact I have concluded that getting a web page to actually do what you want whilst also not looking like a pigs ear is not at all simple. "Real programmers" have sneered a web monkeys for decades, I don't think they realize what a problem the web monkeys are up against.
Raw HTML into a browser ends up looking different in every browser and universally ugly.
So you need some CSS get everything neat and tidy. But who on earth wants to learn the insane contortions of CSS? Not me. And it still come out different in different browsers.
Enter bootstrap. Simply including that on a page makes everything look better even if you do nothing else. Start using it's grid classes and you are in business.
Then you find a page cannot do anything. Every input from the user requires a page reload and some funky PHP in the server to generate the response as a whole new page. Gak.
Enter AJAX and "web apps".
But now you need Javascript. And to save a lot of pain a JS library or "framework" to help.
Enter, jQuery, Angular, React, and a billion other frameworks. Seems a new is coming every week. It can take an eternity to investigate them and figure out what suits your needs.
Then we have a security problem. Cross Site Scripting (XSS), Cross site Request Forgery (CSRF) and Man in the Middle attacks. User Authentication, password hashing, problems, cookie hijacking And a ton of others.
I must have spent all my free time for half a year genning up on all those security vulnerabilities and how to protect against them.
One can never be sure one has everything required to be secure. Makes you crazy.
All of that, is embodied in that demo on xn--2-umb.net.
And it does not do anything useful yet!
Since this page uses Modernizr.js it's hard to know what's being applied on the fly. It would be a better demonstrator if they weren't calling this library, but in any case, I do agree that it's possible to respond using only media queries and other CSS, depending on the desired functionality of the page. The fancier the design (more than just width breaks) the less likely CSS only will look good across devices. For example, those fold-up menus when you reduce to phone width.
My main Website, for my consulting business, only uses JavaScript in a conditional for IE9 and earlier. My logs show these files are seldom used, so I'll eventually remove the check together. (The site does not use the infamous HTML shiv for IE.) While the site is responsive, it's very simple, and because of this, somewhat plain in its feature set. It at least is readable on mobile devices, and Google accepts the pages as mobile friendly. That was the main thing.
I do also use JS in an email obfuscator. I could use an image, but that's not clickable. I could use a server-side script to turn a blind link into a real mailto: address, but that's just another type of security hole waiting to happen.
I recently redid some pages on another site, and was horrified to see that a few of them still contained the "Generator=FrontPage" meta tag! Oh the pain!! I last used that was over 17 years ago.
But I know what you mean.
I have the advantage of not giving a damn about any IE support.
I was somewhat amazed a few years back when I demoed some 3d data visualization to potential customers of our company. I pointed out that it probably only worked under Chrome. IE did not support webgl and one had to dick around to enable it on Apple. They did not flinch. At that point I decided never to worry about legacy browser support again.
Oddly enough, browser difference still catch us out. Neither FireFox or the new MS Edge browser handle the security features I want correctly if you are using internationalized domain names like xn--2-umb.net which is actually 2π.net
http://budgetrobotics.com/
Resize to mobile width or view on a phone or tablet. Click the funky button and the menu pulls out. At least in this theme it's done in JavaScript. If it can be done in CSS only that would be cool.
This particular site uses skel, which is similar to Bootstrap, which I've used on some others. I tend to find finished themes that have the appearance and functionality I want, then tweak heavily, rather than start with the basic framework. Too impatient for that. I'm still working on fixing the SEO. (As with many freebies, they don't give it much thought -- this theme used an <h1> heading in the repeating "logo" section of the page, meaning all pages would have the same <h1> heading.)
Hello!
Gordon? That's a nicely written site. And it promotes some nice gear, even though they aren't Parallax gizmo driven.
Anyway folks what matters is that my site is living away from home.
Heater what's that strange robot doing in your place drinking something and watching the telly with you?
There is no telly in this house.
Come to that there are no robots here either. Well perhaps one. He's lost in a packing create some place.
There is now. That's the one that escaped from Erco, and was last seen making his away across the Canadian Maritime Provinces. The telly he bought and then brought with him together with six of his friends to install it. They are outside picking up snow from the roads and dumping it someplace.
No problem. It's original purpose was long since filled. We can return to long scheduled program and arguments.