still working on it

I just did a few more things with the page. I got a little fancier with the layout on the left column, and I pulled most of the stuff in that column out of the Blogger template, and put it into a couple of SSI files. This way, all that code isn’t repeated in every page, and I don’t need to regen all the pages every time I change something over there. The one slight problem there is that I had to turn on SSI processing for all files. I added “AddHandler server-parsed .html” to the .htaccess file, so all the archive files and individual page files will be passed through the SSI parser. If theory, it’s not a good idea to pass every page through SSI, but it’s probably a worse idea to have a big chunk of the same code in every file. There’s a useful page on this at apache.org, by the way.

more CSS fun

I just did some fixup work on the CSS, and I think the blog looks OK in both Firefox and IE now. I know so little about CSS, I really screwed a few things up. For instance, I was under the impression that a pound sign at the beginning of a line worked as a comment. That actually works in Firefox, if only by accident, but in IE, the pound sign is ignored and the line is parsed anyway. Oh well. I think I’ve got things to the point where they’re at least presentable.

CSS and Blogger links

Here are a few of the pages I referenced in re-doing the design on this site:

For CSS Stuff:

  • glish.com — some useful layouts.
  • The Layout Reservoir — the design I’m using right now is a variation on their 2-column with left menu design.

    For Blogger template help:

  • Templates
  • Template Walkthrough
  • Template Tag list
  • Template Tags: defined
  • messing around

    I set some stuff up tonight to allow me to easily add Technorati tags to blog entries. I used this Greasemonkey script to mod the Blogger posting page under Firefox 1.5. Not a big deal, but kind of fun.

    I also messed around with some style-related stuff on this page. There’s actually some CSS being used now. No major change, but at least I’m starting to play with CSS.

    VS.NET 2005

    I just got done installing VS.NET 2005 on my new desktop machine at home. I’m still working my way through ASP.NET 2.0: A Developer’s Notebook. I’m just starting the Data Access chapter. The limited version of SQL Server that comes with VS.NET does not have the pubs or Northwind databases installed by default. If you want to install them, you can find setup scripts for them under “C:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio 8SDKv2.0SamplesSetup”, named InstPubs.sql and InstNwnd.sql. To run the scripts, do this:

    sqlcmd -S .SQLEXPRESS -i InstPubs.sql
    sqlcmd -S .SQLEXPRESS -i InstNwnd.sql

    That seemed to be worth writing down, just in case I need to do it again…