A lot of little (hardly noticeble) stuff going on here at the web site now.
For one thing I have been spending a lot of time trying to chase away comment spammers from my bulletin board
Dec. 2009
The massive amount of work I made for myself in
June 2009 is finally over.
The disasterous
iFrames template has been completely removed from this web site and my expectation is
you will now find very few iframe loading errors like those which were occuring during the rebuild.
Isn't that the way it is with this world though?
One day you have a new vision. You are full of excitement for the wonderful improvements you will make,
only to discover later you have spent too much time;
weeks, months, ... maybe even years of your life ... running down a cal-de-sac in a
chase after something elusive, maybe even non-existant, that had glinted in the corner of your eye
and distracted you from the primary goal.
The first part of this year I began experiancing an uneasiness, even a boredom, with my work here on the website and I
was having difficulty placing my finger on the cause of this unease until I awoke this summer in the middle of the
night. The TV was on and I by chance heard Roger Ebert discussing the career of
James Toback.
I will have to paraphrase Rodger's words. He said:
Some directors make movies in order to pursue a vision
while others make movies in order to pursue money. The first is truely a director. The second is simply a caterer.
So ... there you have it!
I had been catering. Least I feel like I had been catering.
And I return now.
After another brief sojourn into the land of commercialization, I am chastised.
With a renewed determination to
attend to the first things
I return to my roots. Otherwise; hell, my time here working on the web site will remain what it had become, a daily exercise in drudgery.
I never had the inclination, attitude or resources to run head to head with the corporate monster anyway.
I have put this website through a lot of changes since mid-summer when I came up with two major initiatives
- was to set up a
web forum in order to try (again) to establish a
closer relationship between myself and my visitors and to let you take a more active part in my goal to create a better
tomorrow. And,
- was to create an iframes template which would allow me to load and display all of my
differant web site content pages within that single iframe template.
While both initiatives seemed like a good ideas at the time,
I now consider both to have been primarily unsuccessful learning experiances.
The web site forum right away began to experiance a flood of drive-by spammers. Practically no one appeared to be
serious individuals with goals compatible with my expectation for the development of a viable, helpful and enthusiastic web community.
As a result I decided to limited access to most of the forum to registered members only, this in the expectation
it would cut down on the number of spammers.
And It did - with a vengence.
Suddenly I had no, or very few, posts at all.
The 'iframes template' idea was especially bad. Although, as an idea it worked pretty well, an unexpected side effect was
my web pages became completely delisted from the various
internet search engines.
My thinking was as follows:
if I were able to load my content pages
into a default iframes template the content pages could smaller and less complex
and therefore easier for me to maintain.
Fortunately, the roll-back to the original presentation style is almost complete. The loading errors
which were occuring during the roll-back should be over.
In DHTML programmingJavascript
(a safe and secure client-side programming language) is used to manipulate the
CSS properties
of various web page elements. DHTML programming allows for
extensive alteration of the web page presentation without any need for
communication of data between you, the client, and the web server.
