The Site

And a New Title

Daniel1 Comment

You might also notice that the title of the page is slightly different.

It’s been leading up to this for several years — On the previous version of the site, I upped the “Dan Premo” and made the “Historical Context” very small. Then I got the danpremo.com domain — and not historicalcontext.com. Why? Well, eight letters is easier than seventeen (or even fifteen). And maybe — maybe — there was a little narcicism involved.

Anyway, even back in college I thought about dropping the Historical Context moniker. What can I say? I’m moving away from it.

And a New Title

Tradition

Daniel

As is tradition, I will now complain about my new hosting provider. (I did it with Tripod and I did it with 1&1.)

Complaint #1. PowWeb features WordPress autoinstall. Great! Only thing is, it autoinstalls WP 1.2.2. The current version is 1.5. I ran the automated install, looked at it for five seconds, then deleted all the files (and all the tables).

Complaint #2. Apparently PowWeb allows me to upload only two files simultaneously via FTP. This shouldn’t be too much of an issue with day-to-day or even month-to-month site maintenance, but I uploaded WordPress three times in the last two days, and it’s a hassle. Additionally, some of the timed-out uploads didn’t resume, so I had to go through the entire WordPress folder structure and ensure all of the files were present and at the correct file size.

Tradition

The New Site

Daniel

I decided to bite the bullet and move the page over to WordPress. I haven’t developed my own theme yet, but I have put some time and thought into one.

Additionally, I changed my hosting provider. PowWeb has more of what I’m looking for for a little less money than 1&1. Due to the nature of the Internet, 1&1 still handles my domain, for six bucks a year. I haven’t yet figured out how to manage subdomains when I go through separate companies for domain and hosting.

The New Site

New Color Scheme

Daniel

I modified the color scheme a few days ago. You might not even notice. The top and left edges are darker. You can tell the difference (more or less) by checking out the old page.

I still have aspirations of extending the effect to all four edges of the screen … and keeping it there even when you scroll down. The only site I really see doing anything technologically along the lines of what I want is Bungie.net. At least I’m happy knowing that the whole thing renders correctly in Firefox and it validates.

So besides the dubious layout wishes … maybe next I’ll create a database system for the posts … something generated on the fly … I’d like that.

New Color Scheme

Validation

Daniel

The front page will now validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict. Eat that, Lewis. Insert better-late-than-never “your site is down” joke here.

You’ll find two entries below that I wrote a couple weeks ago but never got around to uploading.

Based on the appearance of this site on flat-panel monitors and the fact that I have started to use a 1280×1024 screen resolution, I will be making some cosmetic changes to the site soon. Look out for that.

Validation

Site Stuff

Daniel

If you’re viewing this site with Firefox, it should now display correctly. Well, there might be issues at 1280×1024. But don’t tell anybody.

I finally got this page to validate. Right now it validates under HTML 4.01 and CSS. I don’t know whether it’s worth my time to see if it would validate as anything different or perhaps “better.”

Here’s something that caught me by surprise: When I finally declared a doctype, it kept breaking the site, both in Firefox and IE. It appears that when either browser encounters an explicit doctype declaration, it holds the CSS to strict standards. Who knew? So I fixed all the CSS, and when I put the doctype declaration back in, everything worked. And my validation worked. So I’m in business. Scroll all the way down to see my validation buttons.

I got my Halo 2 Stats page to validate first, because there’s a lot less code there.

Site Stuff

ASP

Daniel

This page is ASP.

Eventually I’m going to switch the whole site over to ASP. I’m kind of pissed, actually. The big thing — the only thing — that has always bothered me about 1&1 is the fact that Server Side Includes (SSI) don’t work. Well, turns out ASP has an analogous method. WTF!

The night I downloaded everything from Tripod and uploaded it to my 1&1 servers, I called 1&1 tech support because my SSIs weren’t working. The person I talked to told me that SSIs weren’t included in my package. So I consolidated all pages … it hurt. Fortunately, when I pasted the code together, I left the includes in and copy-pasted them so I could see exactly what got Frankensteined.

The whole reason I’ve been looking at ASP so closely (besides the fact that I purchased the Microsoft Server plan through 1&1) is because I have my Halo 2 stats, which come from an RSS feed provided by Bungie, and I wanted to take control of how they are displayed. So I’ve been reading ASP web sites like it’s my job.

At least something good came of it.

ASP

Multiple Topics

Daniel

So I just looked at some real old Historical Context entries that are sitting at the really old site. I can’t get over how … good … they are. They’re short and there are multiple entries per day. I talk about drinking coffee, waking up early, and studying for exams.

Nowadays my entries seem more like articles. Well, they are more like articles. I plan them at least a few minutes in advance, sometimes a few days in advance. They’re longer. They’re … less personal? Is that possible?

The Olympics are on. I’d say the best web site to read about the Olympics is NBC’s page. It’s so strange … the Internet allows us to take in information as it occurs; Yet I personally avoid pages like ESPN.com and CNN.com because I don’t want to read the results of Olympic events before I see them on TV. During the next Olympics or even the 2012 games, Americans may be allowed to view on-demand clips of event finals before they are shown on NBC. But when you’re at work, you might not want to spend two hours or even five minutes streaming that race to your computer.

This really brings up several interesting conflagrations: Sports as both news and entertainment, and the damned frustration that no matter where on earth the Olympics are held, the time of day is inconvenient for somebody.

First, sports. When it’s news, we want to find out about it immediately. Whether it’s a political election or a major event in a war or the latest on a hurricane, we don’t want to wait to see it on TV; we want the results right now, even if it means that we have to read them.

On the other hand, when it’s entertainment, we want to see it with our own eyes. If your friend tells you how The Village ends, you’ll poke their eyes out. You’ll record tonight’s episode of 24, but again, you don’t want to know the surprise ending in advance. The same applies to books, whatever.

And then you’ve got sports, which are mostly entertainment, but are covered more or less as news. Some people will record their alma mater’s bowl game and refuse to read or hear anything about it until they sit down and watch the tape themselves. But then some people will get on the Internet and watch the box score numbers update live. Here there is a distinction based on the importance of that day’s match. But I think a lot ties into personal preference. Personally, I would rather watch a gamecast of the numbers of the Yankees in the playoffs than record the game and watch it later.

The importance of the event relates directly to the Olympics. Also, the Olympics serve as the ultimate example of why you might want to watch an event later than read about it live. If it’s a baseball game, you might miss the broadcast of the game that is played while you’re at work, but hey — you can catch a game this weekend or next weekend or even Wednesday night. You might not see another World Series game until next year. Or another bowl game. And the Olympics … you won’t see them for another four years.

So Olympics seem to be more like entertainment than other sports, but in a kind of backwards way. Just like you wouldn’t want to read ahead of time that Rachel and Ross got back together, you might not want to read ahead that Paul Hamm won the individual all-around gymnastics gold medal. One is weekly fiction, the other is quadrennial nonfiction. Well, sports, anyway.

Oh … was I going to say something about how someone, somewhere is screwed because the Olympics are held just far enough away from their timezone? I don’t think any additional commentary is needed on that one.

Multiple Topics