Spanner Wingnut's Muddleware Lab

Adjusting Blog Style Information

2007-06-12T10:36:00.000-07:00

Technorati Tags: orcmid, Blogging, CSS Styles, blog text size, blog accessibility

» Choosing the right document type for Web pages | Programming and Development | TechRepublic.com. I am preparing to manipulate styles of the Muddleware Labs template. The objective is to make this and my other blogs more accessibility friendly with regard to control of fonts and text sizes by the user.

Choice of DOCTYPE

I have successfully changed the Blogger-supplied template (Rounder 3) from XHTML 1.0 Strict (which was simply wrong) to HTML 4.01 Transitional. This is the latest stable regular HTML DOCTYPE. I also verified that I am using the proper DOCTYPE entry encouraged by the W3C. This recent Tony Patton article explains the differences and how the choice matters for validation of the web page.

The HTML 4.01 Transitional form allows all of the standard HTML presentation tags (including tables) along with the CSS markup that many prefer. The ability to mix the two in practical ways is exactly where I want to be. It also overcomes the fact that Windows LiveWriter (and other tools), Blogger posting, and Blogger comment posting cannot be counted on to enforce any XHTML DTD.

This is also the DOCTYPE that I use in all of my own web-site pages that use my latest uniform styles.

Fiddling the Styles: Resources

It is time for me to figure out how to use CSS styles and modify the ones in the template. I will do that by modifying elements that are relatively simple and safe to fool with until I have a better sense of how omitting certain styles as well as modifying others influences the layout of the blog. I am going to start with the Rounder 3 template of Muddleware Lab, but the idea is to ultimately achieve a form much like my other blogs but using CSS in an efficient way as part of the HTML 4.01 Transitional formatting.

I have the following resources at hand:

Niederst, Jennifer. HTML Pocket Reference, 2nd edition, O'Reilly 2002. This little reference doesn't provide anything on style sheets or style attributes. I use it as a quick reference and for its list of character entities.
Musciano, Chuck., Kennedy, Bill. HTML and XHTML: The Definitive Guide, 4th edition, O'Reilly 2000. I have trouble with the organization of this material and the scattered handling of styles throughout the book. I've learned enough of it to be able to use the Appendix Quick Reference on Style Sheet Properties, though. The promised on-line compliance document that provides the latest information on what browsers do with styles is not available. This book is now in its 6th edition. I can use my edition for ideas to try, but I need something more definitive.
W3C, Cascading Style Sheets, level 1, W3C Recommendation 17 Dec 1996, revised 11 Jan 1999. This is the definitive source. There's also an errata.
W3C, Cascading Style Sheets Home Page. Here's the latest. I notice that CSS 2.1 is a recent version (2006) that is still in Working Draft. I won't rely on that. The CSS2 W3C Recommendation was produced in 1998. CSS1 works in CSS2 "with a few exceptions." It appears easy to use CSS1 in a way that is compatible with CSS2. I will endeavor to accomplish that.

Changing from XHTML 1.0 to HTML 4.01

2007-06-09T21:49:00.000-07:00

Technorati Tags: orcmid, Blogger template, Windows LiveWriter, XHTML 1.0, HTML 4.01

The first change I am making is to update the template to have an HTML 4.01 DTD and to be plain HTML (no xmlns or other attributes inside the <html> tag).

I can imaging this causing a problem with the <style> element in the header, although there is no ECMAScript or anything that should create much of a problem.

And we'll see.

This post is the one that will cause the modified template to be applied for the first time.

Solving a Text Size Problem

2007-06-09T17:40:00.000-07:00

I need to see what template modifications on my Blogger sites will allow browser View | Text Size alterations to work. As I finally noticed (after almost 5 years of blogging), my blog posts do not have text that is resizable. I want that.

Before I can Start

Although the Muddleware Lab is reserved for experimental verification of blog modifications before I make them to my "production" blogs, I don't seem to have ever saved the current Blogger template.

My first step is to log into Blogger, open the template for this blog, and save a copy next to the default page as default.asp.template.txt. I have those for my production blogs. Here's the current master for the template that currently applies to Orcmid's Lair. (This may render as a web page even though it is delivered as a text file. If necessary, use View | Source to see the text of the template.)

Now That's Interesting

The template that I've always used on Muddleware Lab is Douglas Bowman's Rounders 3. I see some very useful characteristics:

It's texts can be fully resized larger or smaller in a browser.
It appears that the use of %-values in font-size styles is the trick. It also appears that the effect of <small> is also undesirable. It looks like LiveWriter has some part in this particular outcome, but it may be following something in the Rounders 3 styling.
The template is completely self-contained: There are no links to style-sheets elsewhere, an improvement over the older template that is customized on Orcmid's Lair and elsewhere.

Some Challenges

Along with the appealing bits, there are also some serious challenges:

This template declares my blog pages to be strict XHTML 1.0. I know that is not true. Blogger does not filter nor transform the posts to ensure conformance with that DTD. Furthermore, unclosed <p> and <br> tags show up everywhere. I suspect <img> is unclosed also.
I don't really like this template, and I need to make one that is more aligned with the style I use for the public blogs. That would make this a more-realistic laboratory and the results would be more applicable to the other blogs. I can work on that a little at a time, once I solve the problem that has me be working over here today.
When I make template changes, some of the examples and remarks on earlier posts won't make sense if they are reposted under a modified template. I like the idea of having them stay the way they started out. This may be possible with the archive pages, although the current main page will have wacky versions. I need to mull this over.

Mulling Things Over

While I ponder how I can overcome the challenges, I am going to see what happens when I change the template DTD to my favorite: HTML 4.01 Transitional.

Technorati Tags: orcmid, Blogger, templates, blog text size, HTML styles

A little reality check ...

2006-10-29T12:49:00.000-08:00

I am having FTP failures between Blogger and my official blog locations. They were all working on 10-27 and yesterday too, as you can tell from this post. But today, nothing has gone through.

This post is to see this is specific to http://orcmid.com/ blogs or not. If this one fails, I must also check Numbering Peano.

So, this is just a test post, exactly the sort of thing you should expect to find here.

[update 2006-10-29-20:46Z Well, this isn't working either. I don't know if it is just the three Orcmid's hosted blogs or not.]

[update 2006-10-29-22:07Z I'm not doing any better on any of my Blogger-managed blogs. The only thing I can do is attempt to repost this one every so often until there's a change.]

[update 2006-10-30-00:28Z I'm still trying, will follow up immediately when one works.]

[update 2006-10-30-01:08Z Well, here we are. It is time to bring the other blogs current too.]

Stepping Onto Uncharted Territory

2006-10-27T19:58:00.000-07:00

If you see this post on the site, and there is no follow-on post declaring that Spanner has arrived on a distant shore, you are looking at the old hosted site for Spanner Wingnut’s Muddleware Lab. If for some reason you are subscribed to the site feed and you see this post without a follow-on post, the same answer applies. The fresh pages and the fresh feeds to go with them have been moved.

The active creation of this blog is being moved to the new home of Orcmid’s Lair at URL http://orcmid.com. Although the old URL will eventually follow along to the new home, that may not be for a while. It is really better to fix your bookmarks, feed readers, and other connections, though.

The same dislocation is about to happen with the other blogs: Orcmid’s Lair, As usual, the movement process will be checked out by Spanner Wingnut first because, let’s face it, the bloke is expendable.

See you on the other side …

[update 2006-10-27-22:24 Now that the other side has been reached, I need a way to force this entry to repost, because Blogger has no reason to post it again on the new site unless I tell it to. I am not republishing the site, just changing the rules for how site entries are FTP’d to the proper server. I migrated all older material before this particular message was posted, so it got lost in the gap. The same will happen when I now move the other blogs, since their content has already been migrated.]

... Reaching the Distant Shore

2006-10-27T22:08:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, that’s just a step into the next room. Or the laptop on the nearby worktable that holds my development IIS server and Visual Source Safe repository, and the site images that I use with ftp for synchronizing my web sites on their public hosting services.

If I have correctly changed my Blogger settings, this post will appear at the http://orcmid.com/BlunderDome/wingnut URL, and it will not be reflected at http://nfoCentrale.net/orcmid/BlunderDome/wingnut.

This was accomplished by changing the FTP settings. For me to see the changes in the feed, I will need to delete my old feed and begin reading from the new location, http://orcmid.com/BlunderDome/wingnut/wing-atom.xml

I expect there may be some breakage with regard to the blog-page template, especially with regard to images. I will repair all of those next.

This experiment is specifically to learn about all of the necessary steps and the additional corrections that must be made.

[2006-10-27-22:04 update. The first posting attempt for this message didn't seem to end up on any blog, new site or old site. I ftp'd to the new location and by the time I arrived, so had the new post.

Although the main page, the archive page, and the Atom feed are correct on the new site, the preceding post's individual page isn't here, so there are broken links to it. Blogger didn't have any basis for concluding that page needed to be reposted. I will fix that now.]

BlunderDome Disruption

2006-10-11T13:21:00.000-07:00

I’m consolidating all of the nfoCentrale web sites (this blog is on one of them) on a single web hosting account at A2 Hosting. I have already moved most of my sites to that account, with only minor breakage around Apache case sensitivity. Sites that have blogs or that have e-mail accounts are trickier to move and I have saved those for last. Today, the movers are coming to Orcmid’s Lair, the BlunderDome, and Professor von Clueless. And of course, neither last nor least, Spanner Wingnut’s Muddleware Lab.

{tags: orcmid A2 Hosting nfoCentrale web hosting Apache system incoherence confirmable experience Ed Bott}

What this means for the readers of these blogs is that the best reception will be found at URLs like http://orcmid.com/BlunderDome/clueless and not http://nfocentrale.net/orcmid/BlunderDome/clueless. In fact, the second URL and the site feed at the same location will be not see any more blog updates for several weeks. So what else is new, you say? Change to use the new location when I say “ready” over there and we’ll see.

The Professor von Clueless blog and feed at http://orcmid.com/BlunderDome/clueless will see little or no interruption. There may be some breakage, with templates, links, images, and archive pages having problems until the construction crew can straighten things out.

The longer-term benefit is that URLs like http://orcmid.com will no longer forward to a different URL. Instead, all nfoCentrale sites will have full-size, grown-up, first-class, independent domains with sites to match. Now bookmarks made to pages found through orcmid.com follow the site wherever it may happen to be hosted in the future.

Well, what does all of this have to do with Spanner Wingnut? Naturally, this blog is the place where momentous changes to the nfoCentrale blogs are supposed to happen first. And that is how it will go.

First, the orcmid.com site (now showing at nfoCentrale.net/orcmid) will be completely backed up, including all three blogs on that site: Orcmid’s Lair, Professor von Clueless, and your humble Spanner Wingnut’s Muddleware Lab.

All of that material will be dropped off at a new anchor site location, nfoCentrale.com/orcmid. Yes indeed, I registered a new domain just to pull all of this off. And no, the orcmid directory isn’t there just yet. Patience, pulleeeze.

Then, after nosing around to make sure nothing terribly bad happens in the new site (mainly related to case-sensitivity differences between Apache and the Microsoft Internet Information Server, IIS), orcmid.com will be hosted as its own full-fledged domain that happens to get its content from, ahem, orcmid.nfocentrale.com (also not there yet, but keep watching) which, if you haven’t already guessed, gets its content from nfocentrale.com/orcmid. Tricky but effective.

I’m so excited! I’ve been waiting for years to accomplish what I just learned is called add-on domain hosting. And now I can. All because Ed Bott gave a testimonial to A2 Hosting on his blog page.

Oh, here we are

2004-08-26T23:58:00.000-07:00

The last post wasn't expected to work, so I wasn't prepared when it did. I forgot that I never locked-down Spanner Wingnut, so the first attempted post went through. That's fine, there will be other times to confirm what the Blogger behavior is when access to the upload site is denied.

Meanwhile, I have completed my live tests and will unlock the other blogs one-by-one as I install fire extinguishers and smoke alarms on each one. I am also being careful to back everything up as I resume posting.

Once the primary blogs are operating again, I have some cosmetic cleanups and some Atom Feed experiments to conduct back here. But for now, I am leaving it quiet in the Muddleware Lab.

update: Well, a spell-checker would have caught "throught," but not "quite" instead of "quiet." Anderbill points out that comments are not enabled here on Muddleware labs. That's right. The results of work here shows up elsewhere. I will disable comments altogether, rather than have people fail in attempting to leave any. Hmm, something to make note of somewhere.

Troubles in FTP City

2004-07-02T15:31:00.000-07:00

[dh:2004-08-27-06:00Z Crossing My Fingers]

Well, I did most of my writing and development about this on the web site, and I'll provide links to a proper account later. Right now I am ready to start posting again. I'm ready with the firehose and a bucket of sand, for whatever might happen. First, I am expecting the first post of this message to fail. I haven't given Blogger.com any access to my web site yet (I think, It has been a while since I did the lockdown on July 2).

[dh:2004-07-18-19:40Z Taking Stock]

I haven't been here in a while, since I can't post anything yet. The blogs are still locked down and I don't have a roll-back procedure for Wingnut yet. I see, since I was here last, that Blogger has slip-streamed another update into the system and now the Edit procedure has changed a lot, with a WYSIWYG composing view and an Edit HTML view as well as a Preview selection. The default font appears to have changed too. It's just wonderful the way they do this [;<).

On the site forensics work, I have made some slow progress:

I have created manual entries in the Atom feeds that report the locked down status.
I have begun a blog status page and an incident tracking page that I will link on the default pages so that there is always access to status.

There are further actions to take before I am ready to turn on blogs, one at a time:

Add more manual information to the atom feed about what happens when a lock-down is relaxed and the site is brought into operation again.
Create persistent material that reflects the same information so that slam-down and roll-back procedures can point to that in the future.
Create an emergency roll-back procedure that slams warning pages into the default and atom feed files as soon as a failure is detected.
Create the drill for regular backups and roll-back following a "technical difficulties" slam-down. The idea is to capture failed pages quickly, replace them with the slam-down warning pages, then calmly collect incident material and restore to the roll-back point. Any lock-down notice gets added to the roll-back, so that readers are protected from corrupt material and they have accurate information about the incident being addressed. Then, once readers are taken care of and the incident data is sequestered, the incident information is reported to blogger.com.

This is going to be a standard crime-scene and forensics approach that I will apply to other situations, including for software on my local system. There are further nuances, such as atom feeds on the incident reports (!) and other accountability measures. These are all great topics for Professor von Clueless.

Listening to:
Richie Havens "Freedom," Canned Heat "A Change Is Gonna Come," Sha-Na-Na "At the Hop!" Woodstock: The Director's Cut Warner Brothers (1969, 1970, 1994, 1997) DVD edition.

[dh:2004-07-10-17:41Z Notices Posted - Reviewing Options]

On July 8, I updated all of the blog default pages to reflect the current lockdown situation. I am now on Wingnut cleaning up and getting to where I might try posting this note, but only after I have a set of rollback pages ready to go if this posting fails. I am also reviewing Atom information to see if there is a notice I can put in my atom feeds to let people know about the lockdown without actually posting via Blogger. I am in the middle of course work and may not do more on this until Sunday (2004-07-11) after I have all of my course assignments up to date.

[dh:2004-07-03-00:00Z LockDown Accomplished]

The lockdown is completed and the only access rights that Blogger now has to my host site is FTP access to orcmid/BlunderDome/wingnut/. This may inconvenience someone who wants to leave a comment, but I am going to leave it for now until I have delivered on some other commitments. What I have now is that

Blogger can only access wingnut/.
All of my other blogs are locked down against updating by anyone but me.
All blogs are backed-up on a site image that I keep, on my IIS/FrontPage development site, and in Visual Source Safe.

I am comfortable for now.

A new consideration is that the administration interface for my hosted site requires me to allow scripts to run and also accept running of ActiveX components. Although I have it listed as a trusted site for Internet Explorer, I also have my Internet Options set high for scripts and components because of a series of exploits that involve intrusion via scripts from subverted Microsoft IIS web sites. It is white-knuckle time.

[dh:2004-07-02-23:16Z Locking Down Blogger]

The first step, I realize, is to lock down my blog sites so that, in case Blogger has been hacked, I can defend my published blogs from spurious updates and any effort to subvert my pages in some way. I've been down this road before and it will be easier this time.

First, I will set up my screen-capture utility and walk through shutting down directory access to the FTP account I provide for Blogger's exclusive use. I could lock down that account with the check of a single box, but I want to allow Blogger access to the Muddleware Laboratory for trouble-shooting and demonstration to the Blogger folk, if they happen to ask for details and confirmation.
Then I will update the default pages on the three other blogs to carry announcements of the lock-down and pointing out that any commenting will fail.
Then I will set up a "restore point" for refreshing Muddleware Laboratory any time I manage to corrupt it in my efforts to analyze the problem.

Pondering:
It's time for me to figure out my classwork for the second week of Information Security Engineering, and working it in with having my son Doug visiting too, along with the Sunday national holiday here. I will do the lockdown at once, and the rest will come later.
Listening to:
Marlon Brando. Clip from On the Waterfront, "I coulda been a contender; I coulda been somebody." All Things Considered, NRP News, retrospective on Marlon Brando who died yesterday at the age of 80. It followed on to a perspective suggesting that Marlon Brando pissed away a historical talent as one of the greatest players ever. I wept. Thanks Marlon, for all that you did provide.

[dh:2004-07-02-22:41Z FTP Corruption Investigation Starts]

It seems that Blogger is capable of sending corrupt FTP posts to my host sites where I keep my blogs posted. This happened early the morning of July 2 on Clueless. I have some notes about the recovery effort to restore the pages to last-good postings (which I did have in a backup of the site image) and post a warning. There are now new things to deal with, including seeing how reproducible the situation is, or whether it appears to have healed. I won't post this draft here in the Muddleware Lab until I am ready to do a recovery, if needed.

I have some ideas I am working on with regard to warning people and also having the posts be put up manually until I am sure what is happening. I don't know what to do about the syndication feed, since that was creamed also and manually updating the feed requires me to learn more things about Atom than I know now. What I learned from a simple inspection is that the content is not in the feed, it is referenced from the feed, and the reference is to a blogger site that apparently delivers whatever my aggregator digests and turns into HTML-formatted notes (dangerous, those, because I can't preview a web link before using it).

1. So, first, I want to have a place where I document the problem that it is outside of the blogs and it can be referenced from the top banner of manually-restored default pages.

2. I need to announced the suspension of my other blogs in the same way that was done for clueless. For here on Muddleware, I need to announce that there is construction and blasting and that the site is unreliable while I try things. That basically means that I have a clean version for roll-back every time I need it, so that restoring the site is done quickly.

3. I need to mention in all of my warnings that the Atom feed is also damaged during these events. I hate to see what syndicators do with this binary junk when they are looking for something close to well-formed XML.

4. I would like a way to make a manual feed update that has content to supply announcing the difficulty. It looks like it may have to pull something off of my site, and I don't know what that would be like yet.

Listening to:
Heart Rate Radio. MSN Radio Plus. While working out on the rowing machine.
Yoga, Yoga, Yoga. MSN Radio Plus. While cooling down and making the first draft of this note.

Linking the Atom Feed

2004-06-26T14:44:00.000-07:00

The page template has been updated to provide links to the Atom feed. This posting is simply to confirm that.

- y.o.s, Spanner Wingnut

Playing the Name Game

2004-06-18T17:44:00.000-07:00

Playing the Name Game

Those who may have stumbled across this blog in the hours since its inauguration will notice that the Title and Description of the blog have changed already.

That is certainly consistent with what you should expect from this place.

Many a Slip Twixt Cup and Lip. Of course there is no syndication feed button on the post pages yet, so that is something to be dealt with right away. Meanwhile, the really weird bots will have scraped it off the page by means Prof. v.Clueless may be tempted to look into, so let's say no more about that.

The other thing I need to record is that, on my Blogger Dashboard, it says this blog has no posts. Funny, it's right there. Been there for 18 hours or so. The tricky part is imagining how that could even not work. That is not the kind of experience I intend to promote, and it is a problem not-of-my-creation that I feel no obligation to fix.

You will notice that, for now, titles of postings appear multiple times. Once as the title of the posting and more times as a heading incorporated in the body of the posting itself. For example, there are, at the moment, three identical titles on this blog post. This is an incoherence case, and il Professor will definitely want to dig into that.

Uh, you were talking about the naming of this place? I suppose there could be some exotic question for a future geek-trivia East-West superbowl about the original name for this blog. Shh. Here's the secret.

The original title was Spanner Wingnut's [Incredible [Secret]] Web Cellar. The Incredible was meant as homage to Don Tarbell (and his Incredible Secret Money Machine). The Cellar was for Steve Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar. "Secret" never made it and "Incredible" disappeared between the initial site setup and customization of the setup information before the first post. And "Web Cellar" was too much of a stretch and I felt awkward with it, but I tried it out anyhow. "Muddleware" entered my thoughts in another context. I have already used it (as middle muddle), and I intend to expand on that. The resonance with the bumblingness of this particular blog adventure was irresistable.

For now, the name 's a keeper. -- orcmid

Inauguration

2004-06-17T21:45:00.000-07:00

Inauguration

Web Cellar. Dear Mum & Da,

This is my first creation of a blog post from the laboratory here with Professor Clueless. I am not sure what he wants me to do. I am to make this web log that looks like the one he has. Then I have to do 'speriments on this one, to see what he likes and wants done for his own log.

I don't know why he is so fussy.

The train carriages were very crowded and I could not sleep on the way to my new position here. I shared the sandwiches with others in my compartment. I already miss mum's cookin.

Your luvvin son, Spanner