Selection: Tech - Web Development

Apparently Microsoft only sees the light if you are running the Windows operating system. Silverlight, their way to deliver feature-rich web content, will at first glance only run on a "Silverlight-compatible" Windows operating system and browser. After doing some digging (and non-working links), I could find that Mac OS 10 is supported for Firefox and Safari, and Linux users are referred to Novell for Firefox support.

I was looking into "Expression Web" that a friend is using, and as I found www.microsoft.com/expression I was told to install the latest version of Silverlight. Otherwise I could not view all the features on that page.

I am disappointed but not really surprised that Microsoft locks people out of their web content due to their web design. I have similar concerns when web designers choose to use Flash menus and leave no alternatives to navigate the site.

If as a web developer you truly want as many people visiting the site, then don't make your visitors jump hoops. Many people will just click away and not come back.

The blog is now on the new server. Slowly I am moving all sub domains over. Currently uploading photo.danen.org which has a huge number of photos. Will have to do some housekeeping once all the moves are done.

I signed up for an identical hosting account for our company intranet. Already experiencing some startup issues, but that's only temporary.  

Grrr... Drupal seems to be a b!tch to move. One move went fine but LDIS gives me a headache. I can log in, but Drupal does not remember that.

Well on to the others first... LDIS and the Lily Register will have to be last. 

A few more domains have moved over, including Parkland Perennials, a commercial site.

NALS 2007 and Suriname People have moved also. I hope to get the majority done this weekend, now that I get a better handle on what's required.

I am excited that I have received approval at work to move our intranet to a similar hosted service.

I have made a deal with my son to move my websites to a hosted service. One site, LAMP Development, is already on the new server. I hope to have all sites moved before the end of the month.

If you find you cannot reach a site, please be patient.

When all is done, overall access to the sites should be faster. 

Last night I downloaded "Lightroom" 30-day trial version. So today I am playing with it. Some observations:

1. I like how it handles. Rather intuitive, I have not yet needed the help file or the manual.
2. Created a web gallery and slide show of my Fairmont photos. It took about 45 minutes to create 4 sizes of 178 photos (thumbnail, small, medium, large). That's over 700 transformations of good quality, about 15 per minute, or about 4 seconds per image. Not bad if you consider the input images are in Nikon raw (.NEF) format and filters are applied with changes.
3. Either the flash or the JavaScript is doing something strange in Firefox. All other apps are fine, but FF does not refresh all parts of the screen. Could be a FF issue as I've seen that with some PDF documents also.
4. Lightroom does not recognize any Capture NX or Capture Editor modifications so you can't use both. It will interface with CS3 though, and the 2 programs know about each other's changes.
5. Flash seems more suited to smaller galleries. If you want a larger web gallery, I'd choose an html version.

Adobe sent an email with tutorials so I'll look at them next. If more comments are warranted, I will post more.

I have tuned up the comment display so the original post shows. A bit more meaningful, I think.

Let me know what you think. 

Updated the crappy look of the help section. Now to fix the bulleted lists (see January 12th post, for example).

Made the main panel a bit paler blue. Yesterday's version had a bit of a pinkish tint to it. Check out the slick Sliding Color Picker. A very cool tool.

Finished the styling of the blog site (I think). If you find any pages with an inconsistent style, please send me a message (under the OTHER menu section).

I had a comment that the green I had up this past week was too sombre. I agree, so here is a brighter look.

The site has not been tested under IE 6 or lower and I am given to understand that the menu looks spaced out. It is supposed to look like this screenshot...

Not really Rest & Relaxation, but everything seems to work now. Had a bit of a problem with the sliding menu earlier, but it seems to be fixed now.

Phil, notice the "geek" category. Stop reading...

Display resolution has come up. Seems like anything less than 1024x768 is ancient history. See browser statistics for more info.

Also, some people are seeing the dark green as black. Likely due to brightness and/or contrast settings on their monitor, but I would like feedback.

We have a new menu for the blog site. Click on categories or archives to see the menu slider in action.

Now I need to clean up the display of the blog entries.

I like to do some more overall cleaning up. Will see if I have some time. 

jQuery is a JavaScript library that has great potential to make websites more attractive. If you want to see some funky stuff, check these demos.

I'm thinking of using a "collapsible menu" for the next overhaul of the blog. See dev.danen.org for an example. The benefits are that a page does not have to be reloaded when you open or close a section. Should speed things up when lines are busy. Community Chaplaincy also has a nice example of displaying selected sections of content.

If you are a web developer, you need to check this out!

I'm starting a new category for Web Development. I have recently started working with JavaScript for work, so I am doing a lot of research.

I find that the more I look, the more I realize I have to learn. All this new "stuff" is on the one hand daunting, yet on the other hand very exciting. At age 57, this old dog can surely learn a few new tricks.