Thank you.

Bessie, Cocoa, Nico & Pablo

Cocoa holidaying with her friends

Thank you to all who responded to my announcement.

Mango & Cocoa
Cocoa when she was a puppy with her Uncle Mango

A Bit Technical

If you have been looking at our website you will have noticed a few more changes.

The home page is now even less cluttered. Some may say that in its original form it was like some old fashioned children's book. Dare I say it, perhaps it now looks more contemporary.

A major contributor to this de-cluttering is the introduction of an 'accordion' courtesy of Taco HTML Edit. This allows the page content to change at the click of a heading.

The page opens with membership information. A click on the EVENTS heading below, up pops event information and so on.

However, cosmetics apart, the most radical changes are unseen. The homepage has been totally recoded.

The site was originally built using a now defunct program from Microsoft, Front Page. This is a much maligned but quite brilliant program that, providing they are kept fairly simple, allows pages to be built from scratch without any need to look at the underlying code, thus making it all very easy without the need for language learning. But if you want to introduce anything out of the 'ordinary' then, unlike the Apple equivalent, iWeb, it allows you to get into the code and make changes there. Thus the drop down menu system  and the slide shows etc..

However the code that Front Page produces is poor in the extreme, producing as it does huge files full of unnecessary repeated instruction. This doesn't matter really except that the bigger the file the longer it takes to download and when it comes to making those tweaks hunting through swathes of repetitive code is a real bore, especially when the tweak is to be made throughout the entire site.

So although Front Page still has its uses, the home page has been rewritten  from scratch without it, digging deeper into code than ever before. I have also written a separate style script driving the page's format, the font, colour, element positioning etc.. Something I have been trying to learn for some time but which for some reason has 'till now always proved a step too far.

This I intend to develop as the hub of the entire site providing a site wide uniformity and the ability to make change by just adjusting the style sheet without touching any page. So, for example, the background colour of every page could be changed with just a one word change in the style sheet.

I thought this breakthrough fantastic but I have also managed to write a separate javascript routine that can be called to insert the pictorial side menu that appears on every page. This means should it need adjusting I can make the change in just one file with the effect appearing in every page instantaneously.

The same can be done for any piece of code that appears in all or many pages.

This is no doubt all old hat for professional website designers but not bad I think for a self taught, washed up old .... like me.

Facebook

This week's summary for the Facebook page of the

South East Branch

of the Basset Hound Club

223 monthly active users. Down 16 since last week.

663 people like this. Up 6 since last week.

10 wall posts or comments this week. Down  7  since last week.

64 visits this week. Down 28 since last week.

Web Design

Design? Blunder more like.

Photo from the-eleventh.com

After long and tedious experimentation trying to make the menu and heading float,  that is detach them from the rest of the page so that when scrolling down they stay at the top, success! So now to change more of the one hundred and seventy two other pages, must make them all look and act the same.

Testing fine. Everything LOOKS good. Change the most important page on the site, change the EVENTS page. Done. Looks good. Works fine. Hang on, no it doesn't, none of the links to pages showing event details work! Same on the HOME page, some links work, some don't.

What have I done? Its after midnight.

A night spent wondering what on earth had gone wrong to make most of the links on my web pages cease to work. What had I done in the name of design. All I wanted was for the site heading and the menus to stay visible when scrolling down long, interminably long some might say, pages.

So up in the morning. Take another look before breakfast. Take a look using a Microsoft based machine. That's what most people use isn't it. They work! All the links work!

What a relief. Well if you use a Microsoft based machine it might be, usually I don't.

 All the links work using Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP machine. What if it is a Windows 7 machine with Microsoft Internet Explorer 9. Do they work then? Test this on the Apple using Parallels Desktop. Yes fine.

Take another look on the Apple in native OSX mode. They don't work. Why?

Barney & Krishna

If you have an Apple, I'm working on it. That is I'm scratching my brains out over it.......... All is not lost as the drop down menu at the top of the EVENTS page still provides links to current and future events.

So it works with one browser but not the rest. Why?

On the other hand my new Member's Hound Gallery works just fine on the Apple but in Internet Explorer the drop down menus disappear behind it. Currently the only way to see all of the drop down menus is to first go to another page or simply click on the header menu to bring up a page for that category.

Photos of Member's Hounds with names, yours and the hound's, wanted for inclusion. 

Chris Cooper sent me the two excellent photos above.

Also new, a calendar of events courtesy of Google. This is shown of the EVENTS page and the SHOWS page and attempts to show all Basset related events in or within striking distance of our area, including dog shows, not of interest to all but we try to cater for everyone.

All, or rather most, LOWDOWN pages now in colour. Some page files lacked the information to retrieve the original colour. Just too much prior manipulation by Tony our editor, manipulated to good effect in the magazine I should add, simply no colour information left in the Word files.

Other minor changes.

• Dark blue links changing to red when the cursor passes over them.
• Layout of most pages tightened up and simplified to give a more uniform look.

Should I have left well alone? Would have been easier.

Its now just after 5 pm and all is solved or at least working, working on the Apple and the PC. Still not sure exactly why. It seems that my attempt to include a page heading that stayed in place when scrolling down was a step too far. Taking one step backwards to a header that disappears when scrolling but leaving the menus to firmly attached to the top, somehow reinstated all missing links. I would prefer a heading that did what it was told without interfering with the rest of the page but ......... Any ideas anyone?

Mozilla Firefox

Although as yet I can find no remedy for the problem with the Member's Hound Gallery if using Microsoft Internet Explorer there is a solution, use Mozilla Firefox instead. This can be downloaded free by clicking here and is available in versions for Windows, Apple and Linux.