Isle of Man Kayaking - Making it fit.

It's been quiet on this blog recently. Everything is kind of in limbo. All my spare time is take up with developing the new web site. I don't know about other people but it takes me so long. I've only just finished designing the template. That's the static element of each page into which the content is pasted. When you see it you'll think it doesn't look that much different from the old one! I'd agree, but it does use space much more efficiently - visitors to web sites hate to scroll! Spinning that little mouse wheel can be exhausting you know. Anyway, writing the code doesn't take that long but as it usually takes me about 10 different designs before I like the results, and so its taken a week or so.
Now follows the laborious task of copying and pasting the old content into the new site. It's not that simple as the layouts have changed and so the "style sheets" have to be adjusted to make the content fill a new space with different dimensions. This will take another week or so. Once that's done I can look at putting in some new content. New content really takes time and is the reason it will be several more months before it sees the general WWW. Finally, there's the process of trying to make it look right. I could just put all the old header photos up, but what would be the point of that? I'm still waiting for some inspiration in this area.
In fact the new site, or at least some of it, is up on the web. I tend to test my sites in hidden subfolders on my server. Alternatively, I could post the site on a server set up in my own computer. The reason I don't is that I like to test the new pages on as many browsers and screen resolutions as possible. You'd be amazed how if you are not careful, your beautiful site can completely fall to pieces on someone else's screen. For example, the Isle of Man Government still uses the now decrepit and prehistoric Internet Explorer 6, which is a web designers nightmare.
Speaking of decrepit and prehistoric, I was looking through my old photographs and found the picture of the car above. This was the hire car we rented last Summer in Lofoten in Norway. It seemed a bit prone to punctures, as we suffered two. When I came to apply the spare wheel there was a slight size difference as you can see! It still fitted however, although it rendered the car a bit lob sided. This, added to the smoke which poured out from the engine compartment, made this rental a very different driving experience. Thank you Hertz.
www.KAYAK.im

Isle of Man Kayaking - Cluttered!

My mind is as cluttered as my garage at the moment. The car was long ago expelled outside to make way for my 5 kayaks and multiple sets of gear. It's been a combination of work issues and web development that's responsible for my mental turmoil. The former is always negative but the latter offers "green shoots" of hope. You may have noticed the "login" which has appeared on KAYAK. Behind this are a series of forms feeding, working and extracting from a couple of databases. And it all seems to be working now. The last few days were spent sorting out the security. I really don't want to get my site hacked, or to be inundated by offers of instant, fabulous wealth if I would only send my credit card details to Nigeria! The former issue has been partly solved by separating the servers. If when the data input forms go live I do acquire a nasty little virus most of the site will remain immune, as the two servers are now 5000 miles apart.
So what's all this in aid of. Well, KAYAK will change a bit soon. There's a new design on the way which is a progression of the current design, but which utilizes precious web real estate more efficiently. The site will maintain and in fact increase it's Manx content, but in addition there will be more general kayaking pages. I hope to make it a source of more general kayaking and equipment knowledge. Of course the latter takes time and there will be some opportunity for readers to add comments or reviews, hence the databases. There will also be up to date kayaking news with live feeds to the home page. This will take time however, and in the meantime the current site will have to do.
www.KAYAK.im

Kayaking Isle of Man - Border Dispute!

A non-kayaking post - apologies!
If you are reading this blog at KAYAK you will be able to see through it to a large background version of the picture above. By the way that's Peel Breakwater, Isle of Man, on a very stormy day. I'm telling you this because I've been trying to achieve this transparent web effect for almost a year now. Previously, all but the blog was transparent at KAYAK, and it niggled at me. You could be excused for thinking therefor that I've solved the problem, but you'd be wrong. What you are looking at is a bit of cheating! To a professional web designer (which I am not) this would be unsatisfactory.
So what's the problem? Well the blog is located on Google's servers and is incorporated into my locally hosted web site in an "iframe". I cannot find a way of overriding the CSS (styling) in the original blog to make it transparent on KAYAK. Non of the javascript fixes I've found work. Well, you are thinking, why not alter the code at the Google end? Yep, that works but then if you access the blog directly, rather than through www.KAYAK.im, as the blog is now transparent, it becomes a white out. As the text is white you can no longer read it. If I darken the text at Google then you can no longer read it at KAYAK and so on.
Another solution would be to access the Atom or RSS feed and post it into a div tag rather than an iframe, and then write the style sheets to alter the layout as I want it. That solution works well until it comes to putting an essential white border on the photos. Even using a third party feed modifier like "feedburner" I can't quite get the photo borders right. Eventually I think I will solve this with a bit of Javascript, but so far the "perfect solution" has evaded me. In the meantime the "two blogs" solution will have to hold the fort.
Sorry if I've bored to death any kayakers who may have read this.
www.KAYAK.im