BilikFamily.com

Site redesign - In the interest in making the site more HTML compliant and faster loading I did two things today. I added a plugin to Movable Type to make sure that all web links were properly formed. Most browsers have enough error recovery coding to "do what you mean" but when the page went through a strict HTML parser and validator, it would always complain about the improper format of the URLs. Pages of warnings that made it hard to tell if there were any catastrophic HTML failures. OK, so you probably don't care about that, but it was one of those annoying things to me as a developer...

The second thing I did was remove the three pulldown menus. First, those menus were not valid HTML and there wasn't any obvious way to make them so. Second, those three menus were a large portion of downloading the front page. It was a lot of code considering most of the time you don't even use the pulldown menus. So I moved the content those menus represented into separately generated pages and used the "tabs" along the top of the page to represent links to those pages. It took an hour or two but I like the change. If the menus at the top show up as a bulleted list rather than tabs, force your browser to do a refresh. It's a browser bug that is caused by certain browsers using old cached code for the style sheet. At least for today the entire page is valid HTML (XHTML 1.0 Transitional to be precise) . Whether it can stay that way is another story...

Politics central - In you hadn't heard because you live under a rock, the Iowa caucuses are behind us. Kerry 1st, Edwards 2nd, Dean 3rd, and Gephardt 4th (now dropped out). Did you hear Dean's laughter in the sound bite where he talked about moving on to the next several states? That man did not sound stable! Get back on your medication! I'll give him some benefit of the doubt and assume he was just overtired from campaigning so hard. Still, I hope Kerry and Edwards continue to do well so that the election has some chance of being interesting. So for the near future, the "center of the political universe" has shifted to New Hampshire. Oh joy! Commercial air time is saturated with ads. Media everywhere. And once the primary is over, the state feels dumped like an old girlfriend. "Call me?!"

Winnie the Pooh - Before going to bed, Claire and I read another chapter of Winnie the Pooh. This was the story where Pooh goes to visit Rabbit, has too much to eat, and gets stuck in Rabbit's front door on the way out. Pooh has to fast for a week until he gets thinner. Then Christopher Robin, Rabbit, and his relatives pitch in to pop Pooh out from his predicament like a cork. It's a classic. We even have a pair of bookends in the boys' room that represents this scene. I'm really enjoying A. A. Milne's writing style. Reading the stories is more fun (to me anyways) than watching the classic cartoon renditions. Claire laughs frequently as we read the way Milne used language and the funny thoughts of Pooh.