Stylesheet Tweaks
I decided that today was a good day to fiddle around with my employer’s website.
We recently got a flurry of messages from Network Solutions about their PHP upgrade. Several emails to my not-so-tech-savvy Marketing Director admonishing us to check our PHP scripts for compatibility. What a laugh. They probably didn’t even bother to check if we used any. Heck, most of the Perl scripts I have stashed on the server are not invoked for any reason anymore. I tried out PHP for the 2007 Holiday Gift Guide, but it was really simple modular text substitution and one or two quick SQL lookups. Nothing I thought would be Fragile or Version Dependent. So I occasionally have to fend off these anxiety attacks with a deadpan “We aren’t using any PHP.”
It was in this spirit that I decided I had better make some PHP scripts. Again, like the gift guide, it’s just going to be a lot of file includes and such. I copied out the stylesheet I was using and spent most of the day tweaking it for a better layout without affecting any of the existing pages. I called the project “Aurora”. For a little while this afternoon, I think the server was putting out the PHP version of the main page, because I thought the HTML version would superceed it. I was wrong. A little knowledge is dangerous, and after all that reading about config files, I just sort of assumed that I knew the old file would mask the new one. At NetSol, it’s probably in the global file to serve up the PHP version first, if present.
I had some event feature changes to make now that there are three rock bands playing at the Dupont Store on Saturday for “Record Store Day”. And the banner ad on the RSD site was moved, so it had to be re-sourced on my page code. How annoying.
I hope the new version is better. I had one positive response. (I had one response total.) It incorporates a bunch of stylesheet stuff I’ve been meaning to do for a while, and it should be more convenient to make site updates, but the real work is ahead of me: If I choose to force that design on the whole site (and it’s not drastically different in color and layout), then I might try some more drastic reuse of code. We’ll see. I need to get another day of inspiration and energy.
Posted by Evan Bittner Tue, 15 Apr 2008 23:34:00 GMT
