Facebook Activity

Here is this week's summary for the Branch's Facebook Pages:

South East Basset Hound Club New Likes Talking About This Weekly Total Reach 3 51 +264.3% 373 +65.8%

Puppy with no name

the hand-over

On the 7th November we collected our new puppy.

It has taken us 7 months to find a girl to fill the gap left by Cocoa's departure.

After a little fretting when first we set off, she soon settled down to sleep on Miranda's lap whilst we headed south.

The kitchen had been prepared late the night before. A cage kindly lent by Frankie and Tony was set up ready to provide a safe refuge at night. Away from any tempting chewing material (although I had also made sure that access beyond the immediate and pretty safe area of the kitchen was virtually impossible, at least until she grows a little).

settling in at home

a welcome lap complete with commanding view

Miranda couldn't resist providing a new toy and Frankie and Tony, who equally couldn't resist coming to visit the next day, brought with them another, a rather strange cross between a sheep and Father Christmas. The puppy is delighted with both.

Puppy's first visit (with us that is) to the vet was met  by all the staff with cries of delight. They had grown to love Cocoa and were very happy to welcome the new arrival. Then followed a totally positive check over, lots of advice and her first injection.

 

time to rest - it's been a big day

Those in the know will know that we struggle to agree a name.

Of course she does have a kennel name, Malrich Doris. For her pet name, to continue the precedents set by Mango and Cocoa, various exotic fruits have been offered as candidates - Pawpaw, Grenadilla, Papaya, even Ugly fruit! (that had to be a joke, didn't it?) - others, perhaps less exotic - Honey melon, Tangerine - some stray from the brief with - Camilla and Gorgonzola. Miranda wavers in favour of Papaya, I continue to wave my veto.

What about Veto, not a fruit but a topical choice.

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.