The Hobby Webmaster Blog

As I was going through the blogs last evening, having found why my background image was not displaying in my footers, I had one site that stubbornly refused to co-operate. The footer image did show up as expected but I was also adding a white background behind some text in the body below the footer. I had written the rule for the background to be just wide enough to contain the text, but it was stretching across the page. I checked and rechecked the punctuation and syntax and it all seemed right. I had finally left it to proceed with the other blogs.

Today I revisited the site. I finally located the problem. I had added a rule long ago when I was having a problem with this and had forgotten what I had done. I finally opened my include file and found that I had something there that was causing a conflict. (Checking here I found the same code in the include file, but I had never added the css code, so there was no conflict here.) I removed the offending code and deleted the spare rule from the css and the problem went away. Now everything is beautiful, mostly.

On to the plus. I have just added a blog, Live Sound Mixing Tips, to the Mixing Live Sound site. I made a second post in the blog today. The post was long enough and seems to me to be useful information, so I just finished submitting a slightly adapted version to EZine Articles. It will take a few days for the article to be accepted as EZine does manually check all submissions. Two editors look over each article, checking for different things. Article approval has been quite fast but they have warned that approval time may increase. They have added a number of editors as the article volume has increased to try to keep the approval times reasonable. I have a number of other articles that I need to submit in support of some of my other sites.

I have had reasonable response (click through to the site) to a couple of articles and no response to the other two. One of the articles that has not produced clicks directly was picked up for reprint on another site. I have not been able to track any response to it with my analytics though. Maybe people on that site are checking the article but not clicking on the links in the resource box.

The resource box seems to be the key to these things. The word ‘free’ in the resource box will improve the click through rate. I keep forgetting this when I put together a resource box. I did have it in one box and that box has brought the most click throughs. The other key to getting people to visit the site is to offer some quality information. That is the case with the other article that has brought visitors and with the latest article, I think. I do need to remember about the word ‘free’ though.

Css code is very picky. Leave out a curly bracket and the browser will not read the rest of the code. Place a colon where a semi-colon should go and things get crazy.

I have had some display issues with the footer in my blogs. I had built a skin.css file and added it to the folder. I got the file path right and the skin was working except for the footer. I never could figure out why it didn’t work, but it was only the footer image that I could not get to display, so I passed it off as unimportant. I just shrugged as thought that was the way it was going to work. There are several levels of folders to a WordPress blog. I thought maybe it was something in one of the other folders that was causing the problem.

I just set up the new Live Sound Mixing Tips blog. While setting it up I was making some tweaks and adjustments. I was looking in my skin.css file that I had copied to the folder and noticed that there was a closing curly brace missing on my nav rule. I put in the missing brace and updated the file. When I checked the site I had my footer background image as I had often wished.

Somewhere along the line (a few times, I am sure) I typed a colon where the code calls for a semi-colon. That does not work, I promise.

I have been going through my other blogs making the correction and a few other tweaks this evening. I am beginning to be quite comfortable with the untheme theme. I will copy the fresh css files to my blog master copy, the one that I copy to a new location when I set up a new blog. That will save a lot of time the next time that I set up a blog.

I went a little further than I have with my other blogs on the Mixing Tips blog. Check it out and tell me what you think.

I located some information about multiple onLoad events for javascripts with a web search. The music player that I have used on several sites came set up with an onClick event to start the player. The comment system uses an onLoad event in the body tag to initialize the comment script.

When I set up the AudioArt MusicPlayer site I had wanted the music player to start through a link but had to have a second play button on the landing page from the link that still had to be clicked. I became aware of the possibility of using the onLoad event in the place of the onClick event to start the player. I adapted the code and tried it out, and it worked. I also wanted the comment system on this landing page to take specific comments on the music.

I did the web search and found the information about the formatting for multiple onLoad events, so I tried that out. It does work. The player loads and begins to play when the page is opened. The comment system will accept input and function properly as well. The only problem with the solution is that the page reloads if there is a comment posted and that restarts the player. I will just add a note that explains the situation. There may be a better solution but this is workable. Only a small percentage of people will leave a comment anyway, so it should not be too much of a problem.

I do need to make a few more pages for this site and I have a bit of other housekeeping to take care of with this update. The major technical hurdle is behind me, so the rest of the update is downhill. The new features are now active so you can check them out at The AudioArt MusicPlayer Site.

The clean-up from the hacker break-in to my hosting site is complete. The blogs at The MotorCycle Rally site and the Number One Pictures site were a bit messed up from my first repair attempts. I had uploaded more than I needed to and so my later mods were not in place.

While I was there I tweaked the designs a bit and even found out something new, so I need to make some changes to some of the other blogs as well. I had placed an include in a less than optimum spot and I had forgotten how I did some other things. I chose a blog that was not disrupted and used it for a pattern.

Things are now back to normal, and that is a relief.

I found the main page problem that was causing IE-6 to have a headache. I had set a width and IE could not make it all add up. I have another site using the same format that worked in IE so I checked how I had gotten it to work there and found the problem. Now on to the support pages for the site. They also use the same format as the support pages on the other site and those pages work so I will look there for a hint. Maybe we can get by without some stronger pain reliever for IE.

I have embarked on a journey. The trip is to rebuild my business website, AudioArt Sound. It is too soon to check the progress at this point, but I will post an announcement when the journey ends. Right now the new pages only reside on my computer, but you can look at the AudioArt Blog to see the new site design.

This was one of my original sites. At first it resided on my free ISP web space. I was not very knowledgeable when I first built the site and did most things wrong. I gained some knowledge and rebuilt the site one time and moved it to the paid hosting space. I have progressed some in my capabilities, and so I will soon unveil AudioArt Sound 3.0.

In many ways it is more work to rebuild/upgrade one of the old sites than it is to slam up a new site. With a new site I make the pages to my current standards and skill level. When I redo one of the old sites I have all the old mistakes to correct and I must maintain the linking framework through the transition. With a new site there is a straight forward process. I do this and then I do that, and soon the site is live. With a rebuild I have to think of how I can make things better. This site and the personal website, Wink Longnecker.com, are the only two sites that do not use my basic wire-frame layout. This  makes this rebuild even more interesting. I will also want to improve some functions as I make these changes.  All of this takes a bit of head scratching. I will get the task finished at some point, but it will have to be a spare time project, so it may take a while.

I have begun an update of The Closet Online. I will be adding some catalog pages. Then I will be trying to direct some traffic there. The catalog that I am putting up now is a custom jeweler. I am thinking of putting up a Squidoo lens to direct some traffic there, and maybe a hub page as well. I may also try a few articles.

I have a lot of studying to do, and a lot of work. I need to start generating some income from the sites. This becomes a job if one is to derive the benefit. I will drop some links here when I go live with the update. Subscribe to the RSS feed so that you can keep informed.

I have initiated a new blog in conjunction with the Mixer in a Box site. The blog details the gigs that I do with the Software Audio Console. I have one more show to log to bring the blog up to date. Adding the blog creates an RSS feed in conjunction with the site, and blog posts are indexed by the search engines. I just added the nav links to the Mixer in a Box site today. I also worked on the blog page to give it the Mixer in a Box family look. I have a bit more to do to complete that project as I am using a white background for the title section of the header block that I have not yet incorporated into the design. Working with the blog template is not as straight forward as working with a straight page.

I have begun an update to the AudioArt sound site. I had put up a blog over the winter and used a different design for the blog. I thought that it looked good, so I have begun updating the old site to match the blog. I did not use my standard parts in the original design, so the update is not just a matter of changing the css file. It will be a bit of work this time, but then if I choose to change a skin it will only be a matter of updating a couple of files. I am doing some redesign as well as the cosmetic changes. This should make site navigation a bit easier. Overall I think that this will be a step in the right direction. If you want a preview just go to AudioArt Sound.

I was adding some pages to the new site today. It is best practice to use an unordered list for menu items. I had done that for vertical menus but not for horizontal menus. I thought that since I was making some changes that I should learn how this was done. I have not used unordered lists much, but I had a good idea of what needed to be done. I changed the list display to inline and sure enough, the menu displayed almost right. The only problem was that the unordered list introduces an indent, and this was causing the centered display to be not quite centered. I did a web search and found a solution without any problem.

The same solution will help with the display of my vertical menus. I had tried a negative margin to correct for the indent. This worked fine in FireFox, but I forgot to check it in Internet Explorer. Someone pointed out to me that the menu was cut off in IE. I have not tried the fix yet, but I think that it will take care of my display problem with my vertical nav sections, too.