Non table CSS layouts

I’ve been searching all over the Internet to figure out how to use div and p tags as the sole form of layout. My dream is to one day banish tables from all of my HTML. So far it doesn’t look like this is possible. Most of what I see pertains to CSS2, which MSIE does not support and Mozilla only supports partially. Does anyone out there have any possible solutions? My dream is to have my pages consist of solely the div, p, and a tags with a few abbr tags here and there. If you do have solutions or insight please email me.

Who are you?

I recently installed AWStats to parse my logs for this site. I was quite amazed to see the numbers. I average about 1,000 unique visitors a month. My only complaint thus far is that Apache was storing my logs in “common” format and not “combined” format. The “combined” format offers more information, such as browser and referral information. AWStats should also let me know what people are searching for when they find my site, which should be quite interesting. I shall know more after a few months of parsed “combined” logs. If you are into stats you can read all of mine on the output page. I’d also like to know who, other than friends and family, read this site. Email me at joe at joe stump dot net and tell me who you are and why you like my site.

Tips on CSS success

I migrated to XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 1.0. The good news is that the actual site is fully compliant. I have yet to migrate all of my news postings and I may not ever get to that. But I do have a few pointers. First off a brief explanation on how to get &’s to validate as XHTML. Next you will want to install ZVON’s CSS and XHTML reference bars for Mozilla. Before you do that you might want to migrate to my browser of choice, Mozilla. If you’re not sure why you would want to do that you should read 101 things Mozilla can do that IE can’t. I have yet to migrate to my link management tool, but I plan on doing that soon. Also coming soon will be an RSS feed, search, and maybe the photo albums again. I may just link to iPhoto albums or something simple like that since I have WebDAV working on my server now.

CNN doesn't archive

I’ve been working on not only migrating my news to be CSS compliant, but migrating all of the links found on this site to my new link manager. What I’ve recently found is that CNN.com doesn’t keep the news posted there live forever. My migration spider has found quite a few dead stories thus far. This makes the caching mechanism of of my link manager even more of an asset to the people who may browse this site in the future. The good news though is that PHP’s fopen function evidently reads headers, because it treats 404’s as invalid documents.

Link Management

One of the problems I’ve noticed while going through my news archives is that there are TONS of broken links. These broken links vary from pages I’ve had in the past that have since moved to other people’s pages that have been moved or deleted. I’ve been throwing around the idea for a while now to create a link manager. Basically I’d add any link to a central database and then reference those from within my news entries. I’ve begun the main part of this, which is the caching mechanism. It’s pretty complete thus far, even caching css files. I’ve tested it on CNN.com, YahoO!, this site, and a few others without incident. Since the caching script can be ran from a shell I might release it open source. This compounds my migration efforts to Version 5, but will pay off in the end.

CSS Coming Soon

Yes it’s taken me entirely way to long to join the 21st century. But, as far as I know, my website, for the most part, renders fine all the way back into Navigator 3.x series. I’m working on Version 5, yes I said five, of this site as we speak. The problem with moving to CSS is that I have to go through and migrate all of my anchor tags to include class definitions. I also have to do the same for other HTML present in my news postings (which is pretty much all of them). Considering I have 600’ish postings this will be quite an undertaking.

My own little world

I pick my nose. I admit it. I spend most of my time while driving looking for boogers, without a care in the world. After thinking about this I realized that a lot of people treat their cars as if they have the darkest tint and no one can see what their doing. Well drivers of America; you are wrong. I can see you picking your nose, eating, singing, dancing, arguing, talking on your phone, and doing your hair. So does everyone else.

Renewed sense of geekiness

Since starting at ACI I’ve been putting together big fun server farm complete with acronyms like RAID, NFS, RAIC, HA, and LVS. This has led me to revisit code I’ve created in the past. I have some fun stuff laying around and plan on working on it in the near future. Maybe I’ll release some of it.

The religious merit badge

Evidently freedom of religion does not extend to private organizations. A recent story on CNN.com tells about an Eagle Scout who could be booted for being an Atheist. This fits well with their other close minded policy stating gays cannot participate either. Maybe I’m the only one noticing a drastic shift in the mentality of our nation. This drastic shift to the right is directly related to 9/11 and the tanked economy in my opinion.