blmweb

Not on his own this time, Mark Beaumont is heading out by boat along with a team of fellow explorers to row to the North Pole.

You shouldn’t notice any difference, but blmweb blog has moved to a different setup on the same server. Just to make things easier for me to maintain/backup…

blm

Been experimenting with a plugin for wordpress that shows a much more cut down version of my blog on mobile phones.

So if you want to use it then point your browser at mobile.blmweb.com for the mobile version (no really???) or blog.blmweb.com (or blmweb.com or www.blmweb.com) for the non-mobile version.

blm

Grrrrr, why do things have to be so tricky. It’s used by more than 60% of web users so we all have to make sure websites work in it not matter how much of pain the @rse…

Anyway – enough moaning.

Working on www.markbeaumontonline.com and adding Mark’s twitter feed to the frontpage seemed to work fine in Firefox/Chrome etc, but was behaving oddly in IE8 (and other flavours)

The twitter embedded stuff was causing an error as follows

HTML Parsing Error: Unable to modify the parent container element before the child element is closed (KB927917)

Caused by the javascript for the twitter call altering the content of the div it resided in. The solution suggested by Microsoft worked and here it is!

<div id=”twitter_defer”>

<!– some other stuff in here –>

<!– this is where it used to just say the following –><!– <script type=”text/javascript” src= ‘http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/cyclingamericas.json?callback=twitterCallback2&amp;count=10′>–>
</div>

<script type=”text/javascript”>

var script= document.createElement(‘script’);

script.type= ‘text/javascript’;

script.src= ‘http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/cyclingamericas.json?callback=twitterCallback2&amp;count=10′;

document.getElementById(‘twitter_defer’).appendChild(script);
</script>

Following on from my post about updating Lorraine’s website I thought I would post a few things about the changes here.

Firstly, thanks to Maddie for the cool design, finally got us away from the monolithic menu structure of old!

So the new site has a main menu across the top for the main areas of the site, with a further menu down the left column that changes depending on what area you are in. You can see where you are at all times because the main area and page from the left menu will remain highlighted as long as you are on that page. These menus also stay static on the page, only the content of the central area of the page changes and scrolls within a fixed width.

These menus are php driven, dependant on what page you are on, so no need for lots of static pages needing changed all the time!

The pages themselves are organised a lot more hierarchically (is that really a word) than before – no crazy long blahblah.shtml page to link to. Means the underlying structure is a lot easier to maintain.

Images also got moved into their own folders and sub-folders rather than sharing the same directory as all the .shtml files.

The front end to the booking system got cleaned up a lot, as did the back end as there was a lot of repitition in there – much better organised now. Poor Lorraine still has a really bland bunch of pages to edit the data on, compared to the front end

All the forms got fancied up with some JQuery niceness to make them more interactive and useful. The forms also result in a nice faded in results page rather than flicking over to a generic thankyou page.

htaccess drives a few 301 permanent redirects from the old pages to new to make sure any existing links out there still hold valid. Lorraine has fought hard for her google ranking and doesn’t want to lose it.

Still a few minor tweaks here and there but the site is 100% html valid and would be 100%css valid if it wasn’t for the nice rounded borders on some of the site elements.

Possibly todos,

• Provide an alternate style sheet in different colors for those that prefer high contrast.
• make everything php rather than the mix of php/perl at the moment… maybe…
• think about alternate language stuff?
• CSS3

Woohoo – finished at last. Thanks to lots of effort from Lorraine on fitting the old content into the all new layout we have a brand new all singing all dancing Feel Good Therapies.

Still a few things to tidy up, meta tags for each page, search page output and some other stuff behind the scenes.

Lorraine will be sending out a competition for those on her mailing list so we’ll see how folks like the new site.

Bruce

In case you haven’t been following Mark’s BBC site and the one I developed for him there is some news regarding when he is next on the TV

The BBC One documentaries of this expedition are due to be shown at 10.35pm on Monday the 15^th, 22^nd and 29^th March, which I will confirm closer to the time. The feedback from my production team has been excellent and everyone involved is looking forwards to a great series.

Massive update of Lorraine’s main website underway. Here’s a quick snapshot

It gives us a great chance to clean up a lot of the detritus that has gathered over the years.

Will post once it goes live.

Wow – amazing guitar playing as featured on Rude Tube

My techie step-bro-in-law (James) has a job for New Scientist and has produced a video about some cool tech that creates an entire 3d cityscape from photos on flickr. You can watch the vid and listen to James’ voice over at the link below.

Entire cities recreated from Flickr photos – video 42059434001 – tech – 29 September 2009 – New Scientist.