As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m currently working on a new look for the site. This entire week I was constantly changing the design. Realizing that I may be causing some inconvenience to my readers, I decided to go “old school” and set up a local LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl or PHP) server that ran Wordpress.
I just happened to have an old Dell Dimension L400c laying around so I went ahead and did a FC6 (Fedora Core 6) LAMP install as covered at howtoforge.com. The install was pretty straight forward and I ended up skipping steps 8 (Chrooted DNS Server) and 10 (Postfixas) as I felt I had no need for those options as the machine is just for testing purposes.
The WordPress Install was even simpler taking only about four commands and the modification of only one file. More information can be found at linuxjournal.com and wordpress.org. Now I have a reliable system to test the design of my page without wasting too much bandwidth. Sorry if I caused an inconvenience to anyone. If you have questions about the install feel free to contact me.
biowhat.com is officially validated!
This all started with me trying fix my sidebar for IE browsers <= 6.0. For some reason the sidebar drops to the bottom of the page after all the content. While searching for a solution, I ran into a site that inspects the code of your site to ensure that it meets the standards as published by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). After a troubleshooting about 260 errors biowhat.com was finally validated. The largest issue I ran into was for the flash plug-in I used in one of my previous posts.
Using a plug-in from slide.com I was presenting a slideshow from my “scalping” experience. The problem was, it was using an <embed> tag that was not part of XHTML specifications. After some help from alistapart.com and wimpyplayer.com I was able to fix the problem. I had to get rid of the <embed> tag and use the XHTML compliant <object> and <param> tags instead. For more information follow the previously mentioned links
Non compliant XHTML code:
<div style="visibility:visible;">
<embed src=”http://widget-0d.slide.com/widgets/slideticker.swf”
type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” quality=”high” scale=”noscale”
salign=”l” wmode=”transparent”
flashvars=”cy=ms&il=1&channel=288230376157364493&site=
widget-0d.slide.com” width=”426″ height=”320″ name=”flashticker”
align=”middle”/>
<div style=”width:426px;text-align:left;”>
<a href=”http://www.slide.com/pivot?ad=0&tt=17&sk=0&cy=
ms&th=0&id=288230376157364493&map=1″ target=”_blank”>
<img src=”http://widget-0d.slide.com/p1/288230376157364493/
ms_t017_v000_a000_f00/images/xslide1.gif” border=”0″
ismap=”ismap” /></a>
<a href=”http://www.slide.com/pivot?ad=0&tt=17&sk=0&cy=
ms&th=0&id=288230376157364493&map=2″ target=”_blank”>
<img src=”http://widget-0d.slide.com/p2/288230376157364493/
ms_t017_v000_a000_f00/images/xslide2.gif” border=”0″
ismap=”ismap” /></a>
</div>
</div>
Compliant XHTML code without the slide image links included at the bottom of the flash player:
<div style="visibility:visible;">
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://widget-0d.slide.com/widgets/slideticker.swf" width="426" height="320" align="middle">
<param name="flashticker" value="http://widget-0d.slide.com/widgets/slideticker.swf"/>
<param name="quality" value="high" />
<param name="scale" value="noscale" />
<param name="salign" value="l" />
<param name="wmode" value="transparent" />
<param name="flashvars" value="cy=ms&il=1&channel=
288230376157364493&site=widget-0d.slide.com” />
</object>
</div>
While the validation process has ensured that my content will work consistently among the major browsers, my sidebar issue is still not fixed. I will be troubleshooting this issue over the next couple of days and further customizing the look of the site. Feel free to drop any suggestions or praises of the changes in my comments section. Constructive criticism is always welcome.
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