eTraxx.com :: Websiteology

Websiteology

This is the Websiteology Page
website stuff

Because of my unrelenting love of humanity .. because of my desire to share what I have learned with all of my friends ... ok ok .. because ... partly, I'm going "See what I did ..." .. probably .. but .. MOSTLY .. uhhh .. the sharing thing. (of course, part of that sharing thing with open source means I can pick the brains of others ...). Anyhoo .. this is the "How/Why I did it" section.

Now this is in no special order. I suppose, at some point I'll re-arrange everything (assuming that I publish enough to have something to actually re-arrange. That's ok, it's the Thought that Counts .. so they say).

Software
I use

Cascading Style Sheets

When I started to re-work the website I decided to implement CSS. There are two levels of CSS. Cascading Style Sheets, Level 1 (CSS1), which was made a full W3C Recommendation in 1996 and a more advanced specification, Cascading Style Sheets, Level 2 (CSS2) was made a full Recommendation in 1998. Support for CSS1 (never mind CSS2) have been poorly implemented in the past. Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.x and Netscape Navigator 4.x are so bad that we may well not even consider them as CSS-supporting at all. With IE 4.x and 5.x things improved. Opera 3.5 did quite well with 3.6 fixing almost all the bugs. Netscape 4.7 isn'ty better at CSS-support then 4.0, although less crash-prone. That said .. the advantages of using CSS are too great to ignore. Sooo ... I won't.

For a good book on CSS (I have it in front of me now), Cascading Style Sheets by Eric A. Meyer.

The Quotes Code

Note: I have this code removed but am keeping this explaination as it was my first php coding. Besides, may put it back some day.

This is my own take on having a random quote appear on a page (Home page here). I added a small graphic of the author.

The Volume Version Code

I was surfing the net one day and had stopped by The Onion. I noticed that they have the Volume and Issue at the top of the page. Since The Onion is/was a printed ... uhhh ... paper (I hesitate to call it a Newspaper), this isn't surprising. Anyhoo ... I said to myself .. "Self, why not use something like that on the website?". No underlying reason or need for each page to display Volume and Issue (or Version as it turned out). It seemed like it might be something to add .. then .. when I thought about generating it using PHP .. fun to code.

Comments Add Comments

Comments Code

eTraxx (23:11 26 Feb 2007) : I may add the code for this comment section. I\'m quite proud of it .. in it\'s simplicity

escapes

eTraxx (23:16 26 Feb 2007) : Just noticed the \\ .. hmmm. Wonder if it has anything to do with the strip_tags() function? Will have to check that out.

Magic Quotes

eTraxx (20:37 27 Feb 2007) : Great .. [quote]Magic Quotes is a process that automagically escapes incoming data to the PHP script. It\'s preferred to code with magic quotes off and to instead escape the data at runtime, as needed. What are Magic Quotes When on, all \' (single-quote), \" (double quote), \\ (backslash) and NULL characters are escaped with a backslash automatically. This is identical to what addslashes() does. [/quote] Great .. now gotta figure out how to work around this

Test

eTraxx (07:36 28 Feb 2007) : Ok *sigh* .. there is a function called stripcslashes() .. which is for .. stripping out the backslashes from a string. See what happens when I used that when writing strings ... test 'this is a quoted string'.

Test Results

eTraxx (07:51 28 Feb 2007) : Ah Ha! .. THAT seems to have worked. Of course .. 'seems to have worked' .. sometimes 'seems to have worked' when it doesn't. Hopefully .. it does.

Sharing

ambigu0us (21:07 01 Mar 2007) : Sharing is good. It means you care.