Warning: Moderately technical post about coding webpages.
One thing about relocating my website — it forced me to actually look at it all. (There was some code I had to change on Every. Single. Page, because SFF Net and my new host handle certain things differently, and I had a little ad for SFF Net at the foot of almost every page.)
There are 446 HTML pages on watt-evans.com; I didn’t get a count for ethshar.com or misenchantedpress.com, but there are lots there, too. (Don’t bother trying to find and read all 446; some are just redirects from URLs I don’t use anymore.)
I had been through all of it a couple of years ago, updating everything, filling in placeholders, and making sure it was all mobile-friendly, but a lot of that was pretty rushed, just making sure everything worked and all the text was there. I was nominally using HTML 5.0 and CSS 3.0, hand-coding everything (except blogs, guestbook, etc.).
Well, this time through I noticed that it wasn’t actually all HTML 5/CSS 3 compliant. I hadn’t bothered to learn all the differences between HTML 4.1 and HTML 5.0, and I never really learned CSS properly in the first place, just sort of picked it up as I went along. (When I started The Misenchanted Page I think the standard was HTML 1.1, and CSS hadn’t been invented yet.) A couple of people pointed out glitches and infelicities to me when the relocated stuff all went live (my thanks to them!), and when I fixed those I read up on the new standards.
They’re different. A lot of my favorite old tricks don’t work right under them. I’m still using tags that either aren’t allowed under HTML 5, or don’t work the same as they used to.
So I need to go through everything again and fix it, though it’s all minor stuff, nothing urgent, and most browsers will handle the old stuff just fine.
So far I’ve fixed a couple of pages — and I think they look better with the corrected code. Here’s an example. And the new standards provide greater control (which was sort of the point).
So now I can distract myself from actually writing stuff even more, by tinkering with webpages all over again!
If you don’t have a favorite text editor, or have considered switching, I highly recommend either Ultra Edit or UE Studio. I used Ultra Edit for years to edit everything from raw text files to Perl scripts to HTML and PHP. The latest version of UE Studio will even let you connect to your site remotely, via FTP, and make edits live. It’s pretty awesome.
As a side note, I do NOT work for IDM or UltraEdit. I’m just a dedicated fan.
You can check out the features here:
http://www.ultraedit.com/products/uestudio.html
I’m not familiar with that one; I’ve been using an obsolete editor called AceHTML, which I like, but it’s not supported anymore so it’s getting more and more behind the times.
I’d been looking at maybe upgrading, but hadn’t heard of Ultra Edit. I’ll check it out.