This Is Not A
BLOG!
Date: 05/03/05
An Explanation
You may have been wondering, so I'd better tell you the reason why
so little has been added to this site in the last few weeks.
I decided that it was time I made this site a bit more consistent
in its layout, and at the same time to make it compliant with
internationally-recognised standards.
In this, I've been greatly helped by a program called NVu. It's a program for
writing web pages, is based on the Mozilla project (see Software Central for
more) and
is free.
When I set out to put this site together in early 2003, there was
only one program I knew anything about which would do this in a way
that web-virgins such as myself could understand - Microsoft's Front
Page™. And so, that's what I used until late last year.
Then, as part of my consciousness-raising on the subject of
open-source software, I decided to look around for something more
suited to that moral landscape. Thus it was that I discovered NVu.
It must be said that it's quite a cranky program (at least, in my
experience). Much of this stems from the fact that it's still in its
early stages (version 1.0 hasn't arrived yet!), so it does crash a fair
bit, and there are some other unpleasing little glitches in it. But
everything has to start somewhere, and NVu is already quite a long way
down the road to being very useful.
For a time, then, this site was mostly composed in Front Page, but
increasingly in NVu as new material was added.
This situation couldn't last, though, if only because it was
starting to bug my tidy-mindedness. So I took the decision a few weeks
ago to recreate every page in the new program.
It has taken longer than I'd expected. This is partly because of
lack of time (the redecoration work is still going on), partly because
of NVu's lack of robustness, but also partly because of Front Page™'s
habit of writing non-standard code. This is why the scroller on the
front page of this site, which was previously done in Front Page™ as a
marquee, is now in JavaScript.
Now, however, the task has been completed. Every page on this site
is now made with NVu and (barring something better) will continue to
be. That is why you will see the NVu logo on the front page of this
site and the Web Standards Compliance logo at the bottom right of each
page (NVu contains a function which allows you to upload your page to a
site which tells you whether the page is standards-compliant).
Regular updates (in as much as there ever were regular
updates) may not be resumed just yet, though. The sister site at www.ybarnwr.me.uk
needs the same work (although as that's much smaller, it shouldn't take
quite as long), and then I'm going to try to learn CSS to make
maintaining and updating the sites a bit easier.
Stay tuned!
