Minor Touch Ups

I've made some minor site wide touch ups. I've added a Lisp logo to all my pages. The logo was created by Conrad Barski, M.D. and generously donated to the public domain. The logo is on the right side bar of my pages, below the ads. It is also a link back to Conrad's Lisp logos page.

Another change I've made is to create a new <DIV> tag and CSS class to wrap my content. I haven't installed it everywhere. The purpose of the tag is to guarantee a minimum height for my content area so that my "Created With Emacs" and W3C icons will always be at the bottom of the page and use the full page width.

So far I've been maintaining my site in Emacs, editing the HTML directly. I haven't been using a staging site and I'm not using any kind of version control or content management system. This hasn't been a big deal so far. But as I add pages to my site it gets more painful to do site wide changes (other than minor CSS changes). Sooner or later, the pain of trying out a proper CMS system and adapting it to my needs is going to be outweighed by the pain of manually editing existing pages.

While I'm going on about cosmetics, I still have a minor issue with my CSS. It isn't all in the style sheet. I have some CSS interspersed throughout my HTML. For some things it isn't too bad. But the whole point of CSS is to seperate the structure of the documents (the HTML) from the presentation (the CSS). In principle, I should be able to affect site wide changes just by editing my style sheet. I can in fact do that, but the existence of CSS in my HTML prevents me from exercising the full potential of CSS.

It probably doesn't help matters that IE is still buggy with regards to CSS. IE is still the most popular browser, so I have to make some effort to make my site presentable in that browser. The thing is, I don't run Windows at all. I have to look at someone else's machine to see how IE is rendering my site. I use Safari primarily and also Firefox. My hope is that if those two browsers render my site OK, then other browsers will too. Even that is a tad problematic as Firefox seems to want to put a horizontal scroll bar on my site. Safari doesn't do that. I'm not sure what the issue is, but the validator service says my HTML satisfies XHTML 1.0 Strict and my CSS is OK. I guess I'll have to live with things as they are until the browsers are fixed. If people keep working around browser bugs, the browser bugs will never get fixed.