Domainatating for Ten Years, Time for ZEN!

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Sharkey
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Domainatating for Ten Years, Time for ZEN!

Post by Sharkey »

<center>ZEN
...And the Art of Web Design</center>

This weekend marks the ten year anniversary of the mrsharkey.com domain name. It was December 12, 1998 that I registered the name, and Dec 14th when the first log entries of visits to the site began. Here's an overview of the background, and a preview of the start of the next ten or so...

<hr>

Way back when I composed my first web page, coding the entire thing by hand, I had no purpose other than to have a subject while teaching myself the basics of HTML. When I needed an image to practice inserting graphics, I had to teach myself to use a scanner, *then* figure out how to put it into the page. The first version would fit on a floppy disk, and was hosted in my front shirt pocket so that I could plug it into friend's computers to view it.

In late 1996, the SYSOP at the local community free network provided me with a dial-up account that included 2Mb of disk space. I put up the pages I had created and added a few. The graphics were small because I was using .gif files, which didn't have compression. That and the fact that the dial-up connection was slow and took forever to load images onto the 640x480 screen that was the default resolution for 14" monitors of the time. 2Mb didn't go all that far.

Shortly thereafter, I moved much of the site (this was all pre-mrsharkey.com domain) to a sub directory on a server hosted for my employer's radio station. Although disk space wasn't a major issue any longer, the dial-up connection when away from work was. While in my office I had what we considered to be ripping fast service, 56k Frame Relay.

Originally, my idea was to scan the entire book Rolling Homes in order to get images of house trucks and buses, and to present the book, which was long out of print. Copyright fears put this to an end, but my friend Greg saved the concept by offering to allow me to scan and post many of the photos from his albums of trucks and buses. Files were saved as .jpg's to save disk space and bandwidth (I couldn't go hog wild with the disk space, as I was kind of piggy-backing my site on the radio station's account. At some point the host's server would begin to strain and I might get booted off.)

Out of the blue, I began to get emails from people who had viewed the pages, some of them from New Zealand, where housetrucks are still a popular means of alternative housing. When I asked how they had found me, I was told that my pages had some up during a search for "housetrucks". Obviously, the busy little search robots had found and cataloged my pages, and they were now being spread over the planet.

Back then, searching for "housetruck" would yield about four pages on Alta Vista, one from NZ called "New Year's Day Buzzwords" (I just searched, it's not out there anymore), a couple of pages about house moving, and my page. Obviously, I had the corner on something unique.

Early 1998, I designed a web site for a local computer store. They weren't very impressed with it, and decided to keep doing their own web pages (which I thought were exceedingly awful, but that was their problem.) Trying to decide how to salvage the many hours that I had into the design and concept resulted in using the template for my site, completely redesigned to what you see today. The theme and menu interface was designed to resemble Windows NT4.0.

December 1998, I registered the mrsharkey.com domain, and secured domain hosting on a server that was now owned by the former SYSOP for the old free community network. Gone were disk quotas, and at the time, bandwidth on the server was nil, and so was the traffic on the new domain. I began to add pages, scanning yet more from Greg's albums, and putting together book reviews that I thought were relevant.

In September of 2004, I became fed up with sporadic failures associated with the existing server, and the lackadaisical attitude of it's SYSOP, and moved the entire domain over to yet a different server, paradoxically the same one that hosts the page of the radio station where it all began.

From there, the site traffic grew, more pages were added, and you see the result on the site. As it is now, the site comprises over 93Mb in file size and the database for the forum adds another 20Mb to the disk space total. Weekly bandwidth is about 2 gigabytes, serving 13,000+ pages of information.

Last winter, I ran the page code from the pages on this site though the markup validator at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The point of the exercise was to detect and correct syntax and grammar errors in the HTML code from which the pages of this site are composed.

Many of the pages here go back to my original design. The basic framework of the page design was composed in Netscape Navigator Composer. As new pages were added, I would open a page, edit its contents, and save it under a new file name. Errors in the code were carried forward in this manner, and editing the code introduced new errors. Netscape Composer was rather experimental, and the developers invented markup tags that were proprietary to Netscape browsers. This code remained in the pages long after Netscape ceased to be one of the leaders in browser software.

Once I got access to Microsoft Front Page (starting with FP 98, and working up through FP 2000 and then FP 2003), some, but not all of the Netscape errors got edited out of some of the pages, but not others. Fragments of orphan code floated around in the pages, sometimes ignored by browsers, sometimes not. Occasionally, the page code would produce such a whacked-out mess that I'd have to go in and hand edit raw code to get the look I wanted.

All of this resulted in a real "dog's breakfast" (to quote our Aussie friends) of page code.

The World Wide Web Consortium validator service examines code and returns error messages, advising what parts of the pages are broken. As I ran pages though it the results were anywhere from 2 to 150 errors per page. I then hand-edited the pages, testing the validation along the way, until the validator reported that there were no problems with the code on the page. I then saved the file and ran it through a browser to see if the layout has been affected, and perhaps edited the code further and re-validate if necessary. That process resulted in most of the pages on the site being HTML 4.01 Transitional compliant, with key pages, (Home page, Site Map, Busbarn) being edited to a higher standard of XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

Even while I was validating all the pages on the site, I was sensing that the look and feel of the site was dated, looking a lot like Windows 95 in an era of Vista. Little, if any new content has been added to the site, partly because Housetrucks is a rather static subject for the most part, but also because composing, editing and uploading web pages isn't all that much fun. Nearly all of the new content goes into the forum, where I can type in the info, click "submit", and get on with something else.

About five weeks ago, I did some research on CMS (Content Management Systems), and after consulting a couple of online reviews, picked one to try out in a specially-created directory on the server. After playing around with it for a week or so, I saw immense possibilities for migrating the entire mrsharkey.com domain over to the new database-driven system. All of the page titles and site directory structure could be preserved, and I was able to find a bare-bones theme that I could customize to resemble the existing site’s color scheme and presentation, so that the change wouldn’t be too much of a shock to the viewers. That theme is named ZEN. I’ve typed that name into so many file names while composing, uploading and adjusting that I’ve decided to name this THE ZEN PROJECT!

So far, I’ve only managed to port over about 10% of this site’s pages to the new CMS. Each page has to be opened, its formatting code stripped away, then the content is pasted into a form on the ZEN site. Most pages then have to have their structure adjusted in a significant manner to display properly. Page titles, menu headings, filename aliases, shortcut icons, robots tags, and meta tag information have to be entered on each page.

When that’s done, the page gets run though the W3C validator and the code adjusted to the very stringent XHTML 1.0 Strict standard. Once it passes validation, I move on to the next page.

I’ve had to learn a lot about Cascading Style Sheets, and the latest techniques of formatting page layout in order to properly validate the pages. It’s no longer acceptable to use old-school tags such as font, center and align=â€
Last edited by Sharkey on Mon Feb 23, 2009 8:02 am, edited 1 time in total.
Griff
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Post by Griff »

Hi Sharkey!

Nice job on the new site, very readable! 8)

Didn't have time to peruse all of it, but will get there later this weekend to see it all again in it's newly formatted splendor. :lol:

Thanks for all the time and effort you've put into providing us with this delightful resource! :)

Griff

p.s. Will chum the waters again after the (cash-draining :P) holidays. . .
~(G)Q Arduously Avoiding Assimilation
Sharkey
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Post by Sharkey »

Since there has not been a flood of complaints, I'm going to assume that the new site is working well enough that it can be viewed, and that the layout and changes aren't too awful. I did talk with a couple of people by phone who said it seemed to be OK with them

Haven't been doing much else other than plugging in content (pages) on the new site and working on background stuff. The project the last couple of days was to update the CMS software and bump the forum to the next highest version. I see that phpBB2 will no longer be supported after the first of the year, so I want to get up to the most current version before it becomes orphanware.

[edit] More useless info: [/edit]


...Which is the reason for this post. I'd like to ask that some of you use the forum at the new site for a few days to see if it updated correctly. I tried all the regular things, posting as a Guest, registering as a new user, searching for things, etc, but before I upgrade again, I need to make sure that nothing is broken.

So - how about using this link to view and post for a couple of days:

new.mrsharkey.com/forum

Try some stuff, view your profile, add some smilies, quote some text and LMK if anything is cockeyed before I apply the next version update. I have three more versions to go and I don't want to find out at v. 2.0.23 that I goofed up back in 2.0.20. Backing up in versions to find and correct errors is even more difficult than going forward.
Last edited by Sharkey on Mon Feb 23, 2009 8:05 am, edited 1 time in total.
Tim Clevenger
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So far so good

Post by Tim Clevenger »

Looks good so far. I didn't have the double-login issue, and if you're seeing this, I was able to post through the new forums.
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Post by Griff »

Hey Sharkey!

Like Tim, I had no double-login issues either, my pass was accepted at the turnstyle the every time I came through.

I've been playing around on the new playground, and all the swings, teeter-totters and maypoles I played on appear to be safe, and soundly constructed!

I'm posting this "graffiti" to see if it sticks to the wall. (Don't worry, I used chalk, not paint, so it'll wash off easy, heh, heh!)

Thanks again for all you've done and all you're doing for us! 8)
~(G)Q Arduously Avoiding Assimilation
Sharkey
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Post by Sharkey »

Thanks for acting as "spotters", it helps to have a few more pairs of eyes to watch for problems.

Tim, I included your name as a user at the new site because I figured that you probably check in somewhat frequently, same with Truckingturtle, who I talked with in the phone last week.

Updating the forum software would be a lot easier if I hadn't customized the forums by adding code to the files. Normally, you just replace all the files in the system with the updated files. I have to edit in changes line by line, sometimes having to comb though ~thousands~ of lines of code in multiple files to get the update properly installed and in some cases, writing in custom code to integrate the update around one of my modified scripts.

Uhg, three more versions to go. The change from .19 to .20 was huge. The change from .20 to .21 seems to have been much simpler.

Don't know if anyone has noticed, but the new site's menu structure is allowing me to bring more pages that used to be buried in sub menus to the forefront.

I've also just made some changes to the .css style sheets that will allow me to plug content in with much less modification, so the Bus Barn pages of individual vehicles should start rolling in at a better rate. Previously, I had to remove all the layout tables and use <div> tags to frame the text and images. <div> tags are a PITA to work with and I have been dreading laying out all those pages using them. Now I should be able to migrate the pages into the new system without removing the tables, which should speed the process. Tables are still considered a poor way to format layout, but for now, I can live with the results as long as the pages come out looking like they are supposed to.

More to come...
HOGCAT
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Post by HOGCAT »

Howdy Sharkey. How about me getting in??? I tried, but no luck
Sharkey
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Post by Sharkey »

OK Gary, your user account at the new site is up and running.
Jones'n4chrome
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Post by Jones'n4chrome »

Hey Sharkey,
I was able to log on, no problems. The new site look's good. I will look around some more when I get time.
Thanks for the upgrade.
Sharkey
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Post by Sharkey »

Glad to see you made it in, I was concerned because the CMS system declared the ' in Jones'n to be an illegal character when creating the registration. I had to create the account without the apostrophe and then edit the database to include it. I was a bit worried that the login module would choke on it, but I guess the check-and-safeguard against using such characters in a user name only applies when filling out the form to register.

Some of the rules that they build into these systems a silly...
Sharkey
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Post by Sharkey »

Been spending quite a lot of time over the last week plugging in content on the site. The "Trucks" and "Buses" sections of the Bus Barn are pretty much complete, and I'll start on Book Reviews tonight.

There is now some new content to view. Thanks to Roger (Truckingturtle), I have added a feature page profiling Sam and Pat's 1951 White bus, using Roger's photos. You can view it only at the new site:

http://www.mrsharkey.com/busbarn/sam/sam.htm

This will not be the last new bus to hit the Barn, I have photos in the que waiting to make their appearance.

I've been using the new site as my portal to the forum and to the webcams that I veiw frequently. I'm really pleased that I can be working on adding pages and and administering the site and still keeping an eye on the forum via the "Recent Forum Posts" block under the navigation menu. The Site search is proving to be very useful as well.

I've been investigating module additions to the CMS that would allow me to put the cute little truck and bus icons on the navigation menu, but I've been holding off on that project until I get more content put up.

Can't wait until I can put the new site into production.
Last edited by Sharkey on Mon Feb 23, 2009 8:06 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Dennis The Bus Dweller
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Post by Dennis The Bus Dweller »

Sam's bus/home is one of my favorite "Old school" rig's. There are some great pics of the roof raising in Rogers book. I wonder if it's still up and running.
Peace along the way
Dennis the bus dweller N.Y.
Mark R. Obtinario
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Post by Mark R. Obtinario »

Perhaps I am doing something wrong but I am able to log on to the new site but all I get is the index. I am not able to access any of the pictures or whatever.
Sharkey
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Post by Sharkey »

Hi Mark. Are you saying that after logging in, you can't use the menu to the left to navigate to the various pages of the site? Hope your browser isn't breaking bacause of the new code.

After you log in, are you able to enter page addresses without the menu? For instance, the Busbarn should be available at: http://www.mrsharkey.com/busbarn/busbarn.htm .

Speaking of which, I have been looking into adding icons to the menu items on the new site. I've had some code around, and decided last night to try it, expecting that it would not work, and I could go back to plugging in content. Turns out it did work well enough that I stayed up until 12:30 AM tweaking it to get what I wanted.

This morning, I did a Photoshop session to copy images out of the old menus and create icons for the new menus. The results were ~exactly~ what I wanted:

Image

Lots more images to process, but the script and CSS files were doing a great job.

Then I decided I should see what Micro$oft Internet Exploiter was doing to the page menus:

Image

Just TOTALLY RUINING them!! !$*@&!!!!! ARRRGHHH!!! What a Piece Of $hit MSIE is!!!! Nothing I have tried will make the menus appear as they do in Opera, so I guess I'll just revert back to the old code and forget menu icons for now. :x :x :x :x :x :x
Last edited by Sharkey on Mon Feb 23, 2009 8:07 am, edited 1 time in total.
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stuartcnz
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Post by stuartcnz »

Sharkey wrote:I have tried will make the menus appear as they do in Opera, so I guess I'll just revert back to the old code and forget menu icons for now. :x :x :x :x :x :x
Well there's your problem. Using about the only browser which is fully web compliant and expecting other browsers to accept it.javascript:emoticon(':lol:')
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