It’s downtime! I just finished a major run, updating almost every book in my current oeuvre, as well as several online courses. That means I need to catch-up on some lingering items, one of which is to refresh and update the Wambooli website.
I would prefer my downtime happen in the summer. That’s when the weather is amiable toward my working outside. I did get some projects completed, such as new planting beds, a path in the backyard, and a few others. Remaining are items I wanted to complete, but will have to wait for next year when it warms up again.
The Wambooli website started out in 1997 as a simple support page for my book Dan Gookin’s Web Wambooli. I hand-coded it in HTML. I used a basic HTML editor — nothing more than a text editor like Notepad but with HTML tag shortcut buttons. Eventually I migrated to Adobe’s GoLive, and that version of Wambooli was clunky as ever. Then Dreamweaver came out, and I use it still today as my web page editor tool.
Since that time, HTML has changed as has the philosophy of presenting web pages. A while back, I updated the site to remove some of the deprecated HTML tags. (During this current round of updates, I was surprised at the number of tags I forgot!) I also tried to corral the website design into something consistent, which was also the motivation for the current update. Consistency is good!
The key factor in this update is to remove my old method for page formatting and replace it with the currently accepted method.
Since the early days, I’ve used tables to format the web pages. The HTML table tags are pretty basic and they allow for consistent and easy page formatting. The HTML gods, however, would prefer that you use style sheets to format the page. So my effort for these pages few weeks has been to transform the table-layouts into CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) layouts. It’s been a frustrating task, but worthy as a learning experience.
Page by page, I worked through the entire site. I removed some ancient material, most of it legacy from about 12 years ago. Some support pages for older books were pulled out. I do that a lot as technology races forward and, honestly, a book I wrote 3 years ago isn’t really relevant today — especially a book on a mobile device that’s no longer available.
Some items I’ve yet to get around to. The Wambooli online dictionary is going to take some work to update because it’s pretty complex. And I’d like to fix the Porchcam page, but the new Porchcam hasn’t arrived. That’s a story for another blog post.
My hope is that you won’t recognize any of the changes. And I don’t assume that you visit every day so that you’re that familiar with the site to notice anything different. But I do! And that’s why, every so often during downtime, I take another stab at updating the site.
