Notice: This site is still under construction. I'm learning XHTML, CSS and JavaScript as I go, so please be patient. Site is confirmed as working in: Internet Explorer 6+, Mozilla Firefox 1.5+, Opera 8.5+ and Netscape 8. If you're using something else, I'd like to know if it works correctly. It should resemble this sample and scale to fit your browser window.
July 22, 2008:
I've added a new gallery, called the "Gift Box" for lack of a better term. It houses gift art, commissions, contest entries and collaborations, and is currently my largest gallery (with a whopping total of seven images...). Go check it out! Also, I made some minor updates to About Me (because I'm now officially ancient).
July 3, 2008:
Yeah, about that free time and site updating business from the last entry... So not happening. I have a job now (say what?!). It's part-time, but I'm so tired/lazy on my days off that I don't feel up to doing much of anything except read, watch TV or otherwise veg. And I'm going to a convention at the end of September (in California, no less), and I'd like to add a costume or two, so that'll be eating up my 'free' time from now until then. But, I'm a full-fledged member of Koi now (my cosplay group) ^_^, which makes it even more important to me to cosplay with the group.
On actual site-related business, there are minor updates to the About Me page, and I've tested the site for compatibility with Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5. No problems, as expected. I also finally got around to validating the gallery pages, and fixed the stupid error I made on each one (leaving out the alt attribute, which is a no-no).
April 2, 2008:
Well, Sakura-Con is over now (sadness!), so I'll finally have some free time that won't be eaten up by sewing and assorted cosplay stuff. Ostensibly, that means the site will get updated. Right now, I'm collecting pictures from the con, many of which will eventually form a new gallery here. I also need to finish catching up on a week's worth of missed sleep, and find a job...
January 10, 2008:
I just haven't had the time or inclination to look into doing what I want for the galleries with JavaScript, so for now at least, I've broken down and decided to just do the darned individual pages. I really need to devote my brain cells to learning to sew and finishing my wig, not trying to learn JavaScript to do something that may not even be possible. Especially now that I've decided to cosplay Rangiku Matsumoto from Bleach at Sakura-con, in addition to Tsunade. And Melissa and I are working on a collaboration picture to enter in the Sakura-con 2009 mascot contest (deadline is February 28, 2008)...
Naturally, changing the way the galleries are handled meant a lot of extra work. I had to create a new function in my navigational JavaScript (ok, so I copy-pasted and modified an existing one, but still!), add a new div class to define gallery description text, reorganize the gallery folders (and change all the links therein as a result) and actually write picture comments. I think it's all right and working now, but I haven't actually validated the new pages yet. Eventually, I'll be adding more pictures, and even new galleries (particularly Gaia-related art, photos of my cats and cosplay goodness). But I'm too tired and sick of working on the site right now. It's 3 am, and I need to sleep so that I can sew some more "tomorrow".
Oh, and Melissa has a Mac G4 now (a hand-me-down from her dad), so I've tested the site and found it works in Safari. I'm just not sure which version of Safari it is, since there are two completely different numbers listed that seem to be the version, and I haven't done the research yet.
October 15, 2007:
Dang, I haven't done anything on here in almost a year!? What with my sister's wedding, basement apartment, and making a costume (my OC Kariana ^_^;) for Sakura-con '07 and getting all four of my wisdom teeth removed, I've been busy and absorbed with other things. Then I had some major computer malfunctions starting in May that ended up with me getting a new Intel Core2Duo computer in June. It's black, named Deathscythe (long live the GW fandom!) and I built it myself! I also fixed up Mom's computer using my surviving parts, a new motherboard and her old hard drive. She had an ancient, used Dell 450 MHz Pentium III. Now she has a 2.8Ghz P4. My old 19 inch CRT monitor took a dive in July, so now I have a 22 inch wide screen LCD. Then, in August I helped my sister get packed to move to Idaho so John can finish college. And now I'm putting together a Tsunade cosplay for Sakura-con '08. I'm slowly learning about sewing, pattern alterations, wig making and beading. I want to make it all myself (except for the shoes, of course). Maybe when the costume is more together, I'll get interested in working on my galleries again…
On a sadder note, our dear sweet 19 year old cat Pancake died last Tuesday. We miss her terribly, but she had a long, happy life, very healthy up to the last few months, and she was well loved. I'm glad she's not in pain any more, and if there is a ‘better place,’ I know that she's there now with her brother Spot.
November 24, 2006:
Okay, I broke down and changed the gallery images that were too big for 800x600. But the Journal is still 700 pixels wide, and I doubt I'll be changing it. The default width of that LiveJournal style is 600 pixels wide, and I had to change it because that's just too small at my resolution (1280x1024). So :Þ! I also changed the placeholder image on the gallery pages to little splash/header things. I'm not sure how much I like what I've got, but I do want something there, mostly so I can put a border on it (and therefore on the displayed gallery images).
November 22, 2006:
I revamped the buttons a little. They have a new font called "LaurenScript", and they're now 82x30 pixels, instead of 90x33. I also made the navigation div slightly narrower, so that it and the content div now have matching padding (10 pixels on the top and bottom, 12 on the left and right) on the non-IE 6 version. This means the Links page should now fit at 800x600 (no more horizontal scrollbar on that page). I'll check up on making that correction for the IE 6 version as well. The other pages that were previously affected by double scrollbars at 800x600 still are, and I have no intention of making them fit at the moment. I like their content at their current sizes (especially the Journal).
November 20, 2006:
Font sizes are back to pixel values. I like them better this way, because I can easily get the effect I want. Firefox can still scale them up with the "increase font size" commands, but IE is stuck with unchangeable sizes (unless you tell it to ignore page-defined font sizes). Pixel is a "relative length unit," so it should be mostly okay. I switched some heading-like things to use standard HTML heading formats (with CSS customization, of course), such as the text on the right-hand side of the banner on each page. Following that, I tweaked the IE 6 stylesheet a little more. It's now much better at 800x600 (you can actually see all the important stuff!), with the sacrifice of having a bit too much extra space at high resolutions, but I figure most IE users who prefer higher resolutions will upgrade to IE 7 soon, if they haven't already. Some pages with wide image content still have horizontal scrollbars at 800x600 (on both stylesheets -_-; I like big images, okay?!). This affects the Links page, the Journal, and a few gallery images.
November 19, 2006:
The World Wide Web Consortium released some new validation icons in a nice muted blue color scheme. Since these fit so much better with my site design, I grabbed them and shrunk them to 75% of their original size (just like I did with the others). It seemed silly to have them as separate files, so I merged them into my first-ever image map. ^_^ Then I had to change the positioning in the navigation div, which led to experimenting a bit more with my IE 6 stylesheet. I discovered that IE 6 is still loading both stylesheets, but the IE 6-friendly one overrides the structural definitions of the regular stylesheet. So it doesn't really matter that both are being loaded. Probably. Anyway, I made the banner and navigation divs a little bigger on the IE 6 version to reduce clipping, and fixed the banner-border issue. The site still doesn't look very good at 800x600 in IE 6, but it's functional. That'll have to be good enough.
I also discovered that the inconsistency I was experiencing with the positioning of the navigational bits in IE 7 vs. Opera and Firefox was due to some unnecessary paragraph tags. Apparently, Firefox and Opera both add some additional padding for those and IE 7 doesn't, thus the same top position value in the CSS looked different in IE 7. So I removed the tags and conditional comments, then adjusted the stylesheet accordingly. The <noscript> unordered list version of the navigation links was still being stupid, though, so I added an IE 7 conditional comment with an empty list item for extra "padding."
November 14, 2006:
Haven't worked on the site much the last few days. I've been helping my sister get her wedding invitations ready. I've also done a little reading in my JavaScript book, but not nearly enough. Anyway. I broke Kae's links to me by renaming all my pages from .htm to .html, because I felt like it. Then she had me update the links on her page. I set them to link to my root directory, instead of any particular page title, so that doesn't matter anymore. The Find and Replace - "find in: entire current local site" option in Dreamweaver is a wonderful thing! Also, I've pretty much given up on ever having the IE 6 stylesheet act like I want it to. I might occasionally mess with it a little more to see if I can fix it, but it really isn't important.
November 10, 2006:
I consolidated the galleries a bit, by pulling the embedded JavaScript gallery function out of the individual pages, and doing it as an external file instead. Because it's silly and pointless to have each page define the same exact function when you can just link to one external file. I think I tried it this way before, and it didn't work. I must have made some stupid typo or syntactical error. I added a few more IE 7 conditional comments, because IE 7 wasn't vertically positioning the "meat" in the navigation div the same way as Opera and Firefox. I didn't want to make the spaces larger on Opera and Firefox, so instead I set up some special conditional comment divs with additional padding. For some reason, adding a padding of 1px to the top and bottom makes a little more difference then I want it to, but without it the Home and CSS buttons are pressed right up against the edge borders. The new conditional comments added about 268 bytes to each page. Also, I moved the About Me page up to my root directory. It doesn't need its own folder, since there isn't and won't ever be anything else to go in that folder.
I'm attempting to alter the IE 6 CSS to use wildcards for the main, content and navigation heights, so that hopefully the page will maintain fluid sizing with an exact value (58 pixels) for the banner height. Because it's really bothering me that the banner div gets all screwy looking with percentage height. It gets clipped at lower resolutions, and is way too big at my resolution. Grr. This really shouldn't bother me, since I don't use IE 6 anymore, but I'm just anal like that. ^_^;
November 7, 2006:
More clean-up. I cleared out some old calls and declarations that weren't doing anything (structural work for old test-builds of the site, from before I figured out how to use position: absolute). Some of the other code needed to be reorganized a bit, too. I changed the way I define justification for the update logs. For some reason, I was using a per-paragraph CSS call to align the text, and it didn't occur to me until today that it would be so much easier and cleaner to assign a style="text-align:justify" parameter to the content div for this page and the update archive. *Smacks forehead* I can't believe I didn't think of that before! I also tweaked the positioning of the sidebar <noscript> navigation links, because they were too far over to the right (and thus obscured by the content div at lower resolutions).
Changed the main (non-nav) link colors so that they stand out better against the text body, and users will be able to see where they've been. I'm using blue and purple like the generic standard, but in my own hue choices, because the standards are too garish.
November 6, 2006:
*Maniacal laugh* I got the darn Journal working! Apparently, all IE 7 needed in order to understand percentage height for the <iframe> was a position: absolute CSS declaration. So I moved the size definitions to my stylesheets and got rid of that weird conditional comment, so the Journal page clears validation now. Of course, that only applies to the part hosted here. The source of the frame, being LiveJournal output, is beyond my ability to clean up. But it still works, even if it is imperfect 4.01 Transitional. So :Þ! I had to adjust the sizes somewhat, and they're not absolutely perfect (especially the IE 6 version), but they weren't perfect before all this, either, and I like them better now, because the scrollbar lands in the same place as on my other pages - the rightmost edge of the content div ^_^.
I also did a bit of site-wide resizing for the IE 6 stylesheet. It still doesn't degrade perfectly to lower resolutions (or obscenely large font sizes, but pretty much every web page looks bad at enormous font sizes). 1024x768 works, but isn't as pretty as I'd like. 800x600 is still functional, but there's a lot of overlap that really shouldn't be happening, which means scrollbars where I don't want them. If only position: absolute was correctly implemented in IE 6. Then I wouldn't have to mess with multiple stylesheets at all, and it would work the way I want it to, even in IE 6.
Later: I did a bit of redundancy clean-up. It was pointless to have <center> tags in multiple places in divs where all the content needed to be centered. So I removed them, and used the align="center" property on the relevant divs. That's a cleaner (and not deprecated) way of doing it ^_^. You know, squeeze out a little more efficiency and well-formedness. Also, I moved more old updates to the archive, since no one but me is likely to read them, and I really don't need a large backlog of old, irrelevant and/or inaccurate information clogging up the front page. Now, only updates from the last month are on the index.
November 5, 2006:
My pages all validate again, and I wanted to show that off on each page. So I created a new div style and added W3C validation icons to the bottom of the navigation area on each page. I shrunk them to 75% of their original size, partially because they don't really need to be that big, but mostly so they won't break the layout of the navigation section at very low resolutions (i.e., 800x600). Of course, the semi-conditional comment (no dashes) on the Journal page prevents it from validating. Grr. So the Journal page only has the Valid CSS image on it for now.
November 2, 2006:
I borrowed my sister's computer for a while, and checked up on IE 6, Firefox 1.5.0.1 and Opera 8.54. They're all playing nicely with the new detection. Hooray for IE not trying to load both stylesheets at once like 6 did the first time I tried to use conditional comments this way (I must have done something wrong the first time around). And hooray for interoperability and backwards-compatibility! In other news, I found out that due to server migration, my .htaccess file was no longer doing its job, so I went on a little web scavenger hunt and found a tutorial that helped me put together a new one for Apache 1.3.33 servers (which is what PowWeb is using now). Also, I moved updates older than six months to a new Update Archive page. Because I'm sick of the clutter. When (if) I actually get the site ready to officially open, I'll probably put more old updates in there. I changed the IE 7 proportions of the Journal inline frame to a fixed height (460em) scaled for 1024x768. Finally, I switched the font sizes to scalable values, instead of static ones. I'm not sure how important that is, or if I even like it this way (though I decided the values in such a way as to keep them all looking the same for me ^_^).
November 1, 2006:
It's been a while since I last worked on this thing... I've mostly been playing the Sims 2. I'm so happy I have Pets! But I still need to wait for a few crucial hack and tool updates before I can go back to (my) normal play and really work on my custom neighborhood.
Anyway since Internet Explorer 7 got added to the "critical update" list at Windows Update, I went ahead and installed it. And, happily, IE 7 actually plays nice with my "good" CSS file. But that means now I have to try to find some way to make the JavaScript detect that, because IE 6 really doesn't work well with the regular stylesheet, and IE 7 can't use the IE 6 stylesheet. That means more work for me. Poo.
Later: I seem to have found a way to fix my detection issue, by going back to conditional comments. The good side of it is that now I can remove the JavaScript detection and <noscript></noscript> tags, so I can nuke the extra stylesheet, and my pages will validate again. The not-so-good side is that I'm not sure if the conditional comments work in older versions, so until I can do some more testing (probably on my sister's computer), I can't vouch for the site working correctly in Firefox 1.5 or Opera 8.5 through 9.01.
Current detection method looks like this (I put it in the <head> section, right under the normal link rel):
<!--[if lt IE 7]>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/kariana1_ie6.css" type="text/css" />
<![endif]-->
I'm still having one little problem (that I've noticed so far, at least ^_^), with my use of an inline frame to embed my LiveJournal. I can't see why or how they managed to break it, but the simple, single method that was working in IE 6, Firefox and Opera gives no height and width definitions in IE 7. So, I had to cobble together another conditional comment for that, and the IE 7 height still won't work as a percentage, so I'm using a fixed height (714em) scaled to my screen res of 1280x1024 (for now).