I’ve added a CSS fix to the site to work around the Internet Explorer expanding box bug. In a nutshell, IE will incorrectly expand a fixed-width block element if the block is populated with oversized content. On this site, that means that the sidebar can drop below the enter content block.
I employed the overflow:hidden workaround on my left-hand content block as described in the linked article on Position Is Everything. Thanks go to Titus for reporting the problem.
As of approximately 9:30 PM this evening, the entire site is officially running on a combination of the Smarty template engine and the PEAR DB database abstraction layer. I expect productivity gains in the long term via cleaner, more portable code. I quickly found that Smarty is particularly effective at changing the way you think about scripting your pages. Thanks go to Titus for bringing Smarty and Pear to my attention.
In addition to the aforementioned changes, roughly half the site now feeds from a PostgreSQL backend rather than MySQL. The rest of the site will soon follow. I’ve planned the migration as a direct precursor to a comments system. Rejoice! (Or don’t.)
I picked up a couple tickets for the Cowboy Mouth concert at the Roxy Theatre on October 30th. Ticketmaster wanted an obscene 30% service charge online so I made a special trip to the Roxy’s box office this afternoon to save some money.
After trying to wade through complex examples in the Apache guide, I was able to grasp the basics of Apache’s mod_rewrite capabilities with the help of a straightforward guide at HTMLSource. I wrote and tested some simple rules on the development site before discovering an unforseen interaction with my web host’s preset rewriting rules.
I think it’s time to look for new hosting. My hosting expires at the end of this month, and I’m finding myself wanting more control over the internals of my site. BlueHost and 1&1 look interesting, but I need to do more research. I’m open for suggestions.
Progress on the site’s basic image browser functionality went well. (I’m about 95% of the way there.) I got past most of the stumbling blocks today. Images must be scaled to fit inside the DIV elements (otherwise, images extend beyond the boundaries of the DIV). Scaling the images in itself produced inconsistencies between browsers. The Mozilla and Safari browsers exhibited no apparent problems, but Internet Explorer failed to scale the image properly until the browser window was resized.
A severe thunderstorm rolled in abruptly in the late afternoon. A couple brief power failures put web development on hold until the evening. Mom was out running errands during the entire thing.
The time has come! I’ve finally transitioned the site to XHTML. After toiling over the blog entries for the better part of the last two days, all 252 entries validated for XHTML 1.0 Strict; it was a rather arduous process.
I started with a bunch of regular expressions to supplant HTML markup with Wiki markup. This took care of the bulk of the work. I finished the rest by hand (fixing inconsistencies and grammar along the way).
Perhaps the biggest hurdle involved special HTML entities like the em dash and the ellipsis. TextWiki inexplicably spat out these entities as plain text and I feared some unforeseen incompatibility. After some research and a little trial and error, I discovered that the problem, in fact, lie not with TextWiki but with PHP’s htmlentities() function, which apparently fails to include a lot of the higher ASCII characters. I was able to resolve the issue by writing my own simple function to restore these special entities after TextWiki and htmlentities() have run their course.
I also had to disable TextWiki’s anchor targets (e.g. target="_blank") to validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict. I don’t typically use the target attribute anyway and I was slightly irked that TextWiki took it upon itself to insert one. I couldn’t figure out how to disable the rule with TextWiki’s disableRule() so I just disabled it manually using:
unset($wiki->rules['url']['conf']['target']);
I’m still having issues with character set encoding that need to be resolved. The problem lies with child directories not inheriting the proper php.ini file. (Every since my hosting installed suEXEC it’s been all screwed up.) I’ll continuing working on this and any unresolved validation errors over the next few days.
