August 20, 2000
Netscape is Evil
Pretend you're in California (or somewhere else in the Pacific time zone) if you aren't already. There. I updated before midnight. :-) Honestly, it's a wonder I updated at all, as the past 24 hours or so have been jampacked with little else but HTML. Still, I'm really proud of what I've gotten accomplished.
After a lot of waffling, and a lot of consideration of different scripts and such, I finally got around to switching the notify list away from Onelist and onto the server here. Once I got past a minor conflict with the browser at work, it was really easy to set up and customize. I started out irritated at Liquid Web's script, but ended up very happy with it. I was very proud of myself for figuring it out, but I spammed my notify list to hell and back while testing it, I'm afraid. Y'all are patient, understanding souls though.
Way back in April, Brand and I talked about switching his Changeling site over my domain, partly because he needed a better site and because I wanted to do a Changeling site, but knew I couldn't compete with the thoroughness of his. He also, we decided, was in need of a redesign. A couple months ago I finally transferred his site as is over onto my server (http://www.selkie.net/changeling/). I'll do the redesign later, I said. Well then we ended up getting the book contract, which kinda limited my time to work on HTML projects.
Brand asked about it last night, and I felt overwhelmed. The site was originally done on MS Publisher and so all of the code is horrific. Peek at the source if you think I'm kidding. It's a scary, scary place. I think Microsoft deliberately makes Publisher create such bloated, convoluted HTML to scare people away from learning how to code, which is really pretty easy. But if the Evil Empire makes it look complicated, people will be more likely to stay with Publisher. That's my theory, anyway.
I also was having a problem deciding what I wanted to do with it. In addition to using Publisher, the original site -- in proof of Brand's role as the Instigator of All That Is Evil -- didn't use any subdirectories. None. For hundreds of files. The first thing I did, back in April, was separate all of them out into subdirectories. Who cares about broken links just yet. Then, last night (or rather, early this morning), inspiration struck, and I knew what I wanted to do with the site.
As it was about 4 am at the time, I rather wisely decided to go to bed. I was up today by a little after noon and dived right in. I'd intended to work a couple of hours on the site, and then maybe to go one of the parks in town, where there was a mini-music festival going on. Or alternately, I was going to unpack the bedroom finally.
As you might have guessed, neither happened. I sat here and slogged my way through HTML and CSS for over nine hours. In the end, I was very pleased with what I came up with. Or I was, until I looked at the site with Netscape. I hate Netscape right now. A lot. The way Netscape handles tables means that what looks wonderful on Explorer looks very 'enh' on Netscape. I'm so tempted to just slap an "IE may be the Evil Empire, but it's better than Netscape" notice on the site and be done with it.
But anything I do, I'm definitely going to do tomorrow.
Posted by Lisa at August 20, 2000 02:06 AM
