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21-Aug-2010

Validating

I’ve started validating all my webpages so I can put them in a portfoiio without cause for embarrassment. It’s fun! Seeing validator.w3.org turn from red to green is exhilarating, especially when lots of errors go away with very small adjustments. The angry “72 errors” I had on the FAQ on House Between the Worlds turned out to be one <h2>something</h3>, two <p>…</li> and a spurious </a>.

Many of the errors the validator finds are in forms and scripts that I didn’t make: the statcounter script has a target="_blank" that’s never used because the counter is invisible, and anyway I wouldn’t want to use it even if the counter wasn’t invisible because I don’t approve of it (here’s a good explanation why). The mail forms I use are horrible, because no value is in quotes and I have to do that all by hand. On the to-do list: learn to make my own mail forms. Oh, and any page with an embedded map needs to be Transitional, not Strict, because even if there is a way to edit the map script to validate as Strict it’s probably too much work.

WTF moment: The detected DOCTYPE Declaration "<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">" has been suppressed and the DOCTYPE for "HTML 4.01 Strict" inserted instead, but even if no errors are shown below the document will not be Valid until you update it to reflect this new DOCTYPE. So, I did X instead of X, and the validator doesn’t like that and wants me to do X instead? On second thoughts I know what caused this: I’d validated the map page as Transitional to see if that would work (and it did), and then set the validator back to Strict instead of autodetect. Of course it registered that I’d changed it, but not what I’d changed it from or to.

I’m learning a lot from validating. That <form> … </form> isn’t a containing element in itself but needs <p> or <div> or <table> inside it; that you can’t have headings inside a list (well, I already kind of knew that but I’d been getting away with it); and, perhaps most importantly, the confidence that I already write nice neat HTML without making glaring mistakes other than typos and cut-and-paste glitches.

And all my CSS validates on the first try. Woohoo! But I don’t dare try the blog…

30-Jul-2010

Don’t be evil?

In the not so distant past, Google had a nifty feature: when you searched for something that was rather like something else more common or more popular, it asked you “Did you mean [whatever else]?”, but searched for your literal query anyway. Sometimes the [whatever else] helpfully corrected a typo or a misremembered name, but more often it was wildly and sometimes hilariously off.

Apparently they thought it wasn’t good enough, or their users were too stupid, so they changed it. When you searched for something that wasn’t common or popular, it showed you the first couple of results for what they thought you wanted, and a <hr>, and then your actual search results. Of course, the first results were the same as the former “Did you mean X?” and so, usually, wildly and hilariously off. The times I’ve screamed “No! I did NOT mean X! If I’d meant X I would have typed X! Stupid Google!” can’t be counted on the fingers of one hand any more.

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23-Jul-2010

And now with added giraffes

If you haven’t heard of One Million Giraffes, this is your chance to help someone make history. This person is going to prove to a friend that they can collect one million giraffes by 2011, not made on a computer or store-bought, but anything else goes.

When I’d sent in mine, made of cinnamon bread —excellent for making giraffes, it bakes to the right colour scheme— I got email saying “Your giraffe is now out on the field playing around with the other 921 992 giraffes.” Now there are 922 349, including the one Secunda made out of her end-of-term test papers.

24-Mar-2010

Mieke

For Ada Lovelace Day 2010. An overdose of Real Life precluded my Plan A (too busy when I ought to have been doing the groundwork) but fortunately I had a Plan B.

Fake tag for search engines: ALD10

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22-Oct-2009

Boom de yada

Repost, because there’s a new really awesome version: the xkcd comic animated by Noam Raby and sung by Olga Nunes.

Discovery Channel loves the world (and for the video-challenged, here is the whole thing in text).

ETA: Here’s a Star Wars version. The galaxy is awesome!

ETA: And a Harry Potter version, too.

xkcd loves the Discovery Channel.

These people love xkcd.

It’s been around for some time, but I rediscovered it by accident and thought I’d share it in case you haven’t seen it yet. I love the blogosphere, too.

12-Oct-2009

Help?

I have an embryonic business web page at irinarempt.eu. It has a standard footer as a server-side include, to be expanded with more relevant information later. For now it contains a small blurb and the last-modified date as <!--#echo var="LAST_MODIFIED" --> .

It works perfectly one level down (on both of my mail-form pages) where it reads

Optimised for Konqueror and Firefox | Last updated: October 12, 2009

but not on the main page, where the timefmt directive doesn’t seem to work, so it reads

Optimised for Konqueror and Firefox | Last updated: Monday, 12-Oct-2009 20:39:05 CEST

WTF? I copied the relevant line (<!--#include virtual="/include/footer.html" -->) from one file to another, so it can’t be a typo in the text; it can’t be a typo in the footer itself either, because it appears as it should in the mail forms. It’s reading the file, because the “Optimised” part does appear, and when I add something arbitrary to the include that appears on the offending main page as well. It’s only this directive that works in the subdirectory but not in the root:

<!--#config timefmt="%B %e, %Y" -->

This should give “October 12, 2009” and indeed does in the subdirectory.

Is there anything about timefmt that makes it not work in the document root? Am I missing something glaringly obvious? Should I give the main page a different footer and dispense with the server-side include there?

28-Sep-2009

The gift of bilocation

No, I don’t have it, but my website does: I registered irinarempt.eu for corporate purposes and I’ve convinced our Apache server that it’s called that and to find it where in fact it is, at http://rempt.xs4all.nl/irina/zaak. And also at http://www.valdyas.org/irina/zaak, because valdyas.org is an alias for rempt.xs4all.nl (but the server has nothing to do with that, it’s administered elsewhere, in a place I haven’t gone yet). The web site isn’t much yet, slightly more than a placeholder, but at least it’s there.

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14-Jun-2009

Auf Los geht’s los!

Finally, I fully realise what a “cult classic” is, because now I’ve found some of my own. Warning: most of the links are to German-language pages and video clips. I’ll mark the language with a mouseover title.

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11-Jun-2009

WTF?

No paper this morning. Trying to tell the paper that on their Improved Service Page (which needed re-registration, a bit of a hassle with my cold-clogged sinuses) had this result:

trouw error message

I was about to mail them the screenshot instead when it occurred to me to try with Firefox instead of Konqueror, which worked perfectly. Now who do I send a bug report— the Konqueror maintainers, or the paper because they ought to make it work in all browsers, or both?

24-Mar-2009

Sketch portrait of a science teacher

Or: biology is easy, physics is crunchy

(Blosxom doesn’t do tagging, at least not without a plugin that would destroy other things. Faking it:)

Tags: AdaLovelaceDay09, #ALD09


The school is in a sad state of rebuilding, not only renovation but also much structural work. There is hardly a classroom, hallway or common-room that doesn’t sport boarded-up bits or is covered in plastic. All except the new science wing with combined theory-and-lab classrooms.

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Afterthought

Orthodox Christians should write and paint and sing and dance. We should make movies and television shows. We should make clothes and produce textiles as art as well (the fullness of culture is itself too large to describe in a sentence, a paragraph or even a book). And in all these activities, they will be expressive of the fullness of our humanity without having to stick an icon on everything to prove its Orthodoxy.

—Father Stephen in Glory to God for All Things

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If you've come here via your RSS feed and all you can see is a page with header, sidebar and footer but no post, you probably suffer from the RSS bug that lops off the extension from the filename. You can get around it by adding ".html" to the URL in your title bar.

I know about this bug (no need to report it), and I intend to fix it, but last time I tried that the blog stopped working completely.