09/22/07
I got energetic this afternoon and decided it was time to freshen the design of argonotes.com, the website of Argonotes - just Argonotes, not The Argonotes, thank you very much. Argonotes has been the official band of the Canadian Football League's Toronto Argonauts since away back in June of 1995. We think this makes us one of the oldest continually operating bands in the CFL.
A few years ago I took over the operation of the public website and it was starting to show it's age. The thing that finally spurred me into action was my desire to integrate the image galleries that I have been using iGal to create into the overall site design. iGal is a great program for making image galleries. The old Argonotes website design relied on tables to position the design elements which is an old technique that was used before CSS became widely implemented. The old design was a two column layout with a fixed header. I decided to stick with the same format with an fixed footer to include out contact information. I found a nice simple example of this layout on http://www.456bereastreet.com/. I spent most of the afternoon tweaking and tuning it. Argonotes.com already made extensive use of php includes to pull in the repetitive design elements across the different pages. After getting everything looking nice in Firefox I realized that it wasn't rendering the same way in IE, the main column was getting pushed up against the left side of the page instead of being centred properly. I traced the problem to the DOCTYPE declaration, if I used <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> IE didn't render the page the same way as Firefox did, I found that I had to use <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> to get it to render properly. Along the way I also learned how to find easily find the document base using php to include my fixed design elements. My page template looks like this:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html lang="en">>
<HEAD>
<title>Title goes here</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=">
<?php include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/top.html"); ?>
<div id=main>
Content goes here
</div>
<?php include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/bottom.html"); ?>
The $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] tells you where your document is based so that you can use the include statement in pages that aren't in the same directory as the file you want to include.
Another useful thing I learned was how to position things on the left and right side of a particular element. This is the CSS code required
.container {
position: relative;
height: 90px;
}
.left-element {
position: absolute;
left: 0;
width: 50%;
}
.right-element {
position: absolute;
right: 0;
width: 50%;
text-align: right; /* depends on element width */
}
and this is the HTML required:
<div class="container">
<div class="left-element">
Content in left item
</div>
<div class="right-element">
Content in right item
</div>
</div>
I found this information at Do You Want To Do That With CSS? — Align Elements Left and Right. You might be asking why I am bothering to blog about this at all. There are three reasons, I want you to go and look and tell me what you think and because I use my blog to archive things I want to remember and because I hope that by psoting this I may make it easier for someone else to find the information. I just realized that I have to fix up some more errors in my HTML that are making the pages render differently in Explorer and Direfox. that's it, there is no more.
09/17/07
My neighbours salt shaker pyramid. I was too shy to ask him what it was for.
My lawn may be bad but my other neighbour's is worse. If I was him I'd ask for my money back from the lawn care guys he has hired. My lawn is the green one on the right, his is the brown one on the left.
09/15/07
My two youngest sons and I went to the baseball game today. I can't remember when I last attended A Blue Jays game. We had a lunch and a game package courtesy of my employer, the lunch didn't include drinks other than tea or coffee. The two beers and four pops we had cost almost $28 so I'm glad that my boss was picking up the lunch tab. It was a cool fall day so the dome was closed which was a bit disappointing as we had brought jackets, sweaters and sunscreen. Other than that it was pretty much what I remembered. Baseball has it's own flow and speed that takes a bit of getting used to after five years of watching football. I missed the old mascot, Ace is OK but he's no B.J. Birdy.
After the game I stopped by Canada Computers to get a new USB to digital camera cable, my old one seems to have mysteriously disappeared. I also considered buying a new 500 Gb hard drive as my computer is chronically short of disk space. The prices on the hard drive was the same as Tiger Direct but I ended up leaving the store with neither hard drive or cable because I wasn't prepared to join the extremely slow moving line up of at least eight customers waiting to pay for their purchases. Saturday afternoon and only one cash register operating? I'm not that patient.
I spent the last two weeks driving out to Oakville and the daily trip across the 401 reminded me of when I lived in North York and worked in Etobicoke. At least once a week I'd come home shaking because of the scary driving and drivers I would see. On Friday a car almost passed me on the shoulder as I took the ramp from the 401 East to 400 North. The guy thought better of it but I watched as he rocketed through traffic and into the distance.
09/09/07
Two weeks since I last blogged, yikes. Am I just to busy or have I been struck by the inertia of possibilities? So much to write about, how to choose. Let's try a chronological entry where I explain why I have been to busy to blog. Last weekend was labour day weekend and on Saturday I slept in, Sunday it was down to Ward's island to lay on the beach and watch the CNE airshow. Before departing I strolled up to the north end of the beach to gawk at those on display on the clothing optional part of the beach. The only naked people I saw were middle aged men who looked like me. Not a pretty sight let me tell you. Monday it was off to Hamilton with the Argonotes for the Labour Day Classic. Like last year I played the bass drum because none of our other bass drum players decided to make the trip to Hamilton. I was a great day for football, warm and sunny. The Hamilton fans were only slightly abusive, with their typical "Argos Sucks!" battle cry. Didn't help much, the Argos still whipped the Ticats.
Yesterday was the rematch where the Ticats came to Toronto to exact some payback. I took the barbecue apart, bought some precooked M&M burgers and headed down to the first Argonotes tailgate party of the season. Only two burgers were consigned to the the pavement when they spent too long on the grill. I spent last week in Oakville at a testing lab so was forced to refill the propane tank at Canadian Tire on Friday and it cost $14.99 plus tax. Usually I go to Unitec which is close to IST's office. Unitec used to refill a twenty pound tank for $8 but I think is up to $12 now with the rise in gas prices. There was plenty of food and beverages at the tailgate party, potato salad, chips and salsa, salad and Mishi corn.
After the tailgate barbecue the Argonotes ambled to the dome via Harbourfront stopping a few times alone the way to entertain the tourists. I put the remaining Mishi corn in my canvas bag and draped it over the bell of my sax in case some of the Argonotes got hungry during the game. The game was great, Toronto trounced Hamilton for the second time in two weeks. Too bad we can't play Hamilton every week. After rising uncharacteristically early for a Saturday to run around and buy the food I was exhausted when I got home. It was my youngest sons birthday so we had cake and frozen yogurt. For some unknown reason I developed a significant headache so I took a couple of ibuprofen and headed off to bed early.
This morning was our welcome back barbecue at church, more charred meat, potato salad and desserts. Next entry, the trials and tribulations of my neighbour and his lawn. My other neighbour is taking pictures of salt shakers on his patio table, I wonder if I should ask him why.
08/26/07
When will I learn? I spent a couple of hours on and off writing this blog post yesterday and when I clicked on the publish button it disappeared. Save and save often has got to become my blog writing mantra.
I promised some Summerfolk pictures and here they are. Friday night was very windy As can be seen in this picture of James Hill the ukulele virtuoso and Anne Davision who accompanied him on the cello. Note how Anne's hair is blowing across her face. Clicking on the picture will take you to my Flickr photostream where you can see more of my Summerfolk pictures.
This year's concert was better than last year, there wasn't one act that I saw that disappointed me. This next picture was taken on Saturday and shows Muna Mingole and John Simosi performing at a workshop.
Shortly after this picture was taken Muna came down into the assembled crowd and cajoled me into dancing with her. My wife was blissfully unaware of this because she was lying on her back trying to relieve the discomfort that she says was a result of sleeping on the motel bed but I suspect is more from her advancing years. Again this year we rose at 6 a.m. to be in line by 6:15 to ensure that we got a prime spot for our chairs in the amphitheatre when the gates opened at 10:30. Next year we may follow the example of the two people who slept in line, they went straight from the beer tent to the line, this allowed them to sleep a couple of hours longer since they didn't have to get up to join the line.
Yesterday I went to Yorkdale for the first time in many years. When we first got married, and didn't have kids, and live only about five kilometres away we would go a couple of times a week to escape our small basement apartment and eat or watch a movie. Many, many of the stores have changed and the mall was packed with people. I made the trip because I wanted to go to the Apple Store. I am jonesing for some new tech. My last major purchase was my video iPod. The Apple store was zoo, but a nice zoo. There were plenty of easily identifiable Apple employees to help people and I got a chance to play with all of the Apple products. After catching my breath from the sticker shock my impression of the various Mac's I saw was that OS X is really, really cool. It only took me a few seconds to figure it out and other than the goofy one button mouse everything worked very well. Someone had said that a Mac mini might be too underpowered for me but I was playing two videos simultaneously without any visible problems or degradation in system response. Now the question is Mackbook for my wife to help her when she goes back to school or Mac Mini to replace the old Dell. Of course one of the new iMac's would look pretty good in our family room.
After leaving the Apple Store I went to the Bose store. I have seen the ads for the Wave radio for years and when I saw the Bose store I went in to finally hear one. The sales guy demoed the system with the integrated CD player probably because he knew that radio would not provide listening experience that would sell the system. It sounded very good, but $700 dollars? The there is the $170 for the pod connection kit. I need a tech fix but I don't know if I need it that bad.
Before going to Yorkdale I dropped by Newmarket to visit my older brother. He took me to the Crow's Nest pub in Newmarket. A very nice place with a good selection of beers and naughty British postcards in the bathroom which fit in well with the English pub theme.
Random photo
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