Site technical notes
(Updated 30/10/09 to reflect XHMTL Strict throughout, added Chrome3 and Opera10)
I have written this site myself, using knowledge picked up from just trying things, breaking things and fixing them, as well as from reading numerous web articles and message boards. A selection of the sites I have found useful is shown at the bottom of this page.
In general I have not copied it from other sources as I really don’t like doing things without understanding them.
This site has been tested in:
- Firefox 2/3
- IE6/IE7/IE8
- Opera 9.63/10
- Chrome 1/2/3
- Safari 4
all on Windows. I think it displays correctly in all these browsers. If it doesn’t feel free to drop me a comment below. It won’t be right in IE5.5 or earlier. I took the decision not to try and cope with the bugs in this browser as so few people use it now. Internet Explorer caused all the issues I came across with inconsistent display, most of these, but not all, caused by IE6.
The site contains xhtml validated as XHTML 1.0 Strict or XHTML 1.0 Transitional. The css is valid apart from a little trick to make hover work in IE6. I’ve used conditional comments to apply a slightly modified css file to IE6 to cope with a number of the bugs in its css rendering; I’m wary of overcomplicated hacks to cope with browser anomalies and in most cases I have just worked around these rather than employing a hack. Ultimately this has perhaps kept the code a little simpler than it might have been otherwise.
I have introduced php to simplify keeping the menu updated, as it stood I needed to update 28 files and reload them on the server just to add a menu item. Now I’m just using an include to pick the menu up, so just one file needs updating.
There is not a great deal of javascript on this site for two reasons. One, I didn’t see much requirement for it, and two, I initially didn’t really understand it well enough to write it. However, the newly added insect photo slideshow and hex/rgb converter both use extensive javascript.
The blog is now powered by Wordpress.