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>

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

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

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.

Anyway the books are

• Emperor: The Gates of Rome
• Emperor: The Death of Kings
• Emperor: The Field of Swords
• Emperor: The Gods of War

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.

All too easy to just use one web tool to post to facebook/twitter/blog these days.

Anyway, been a busy weekend of things – Lost was excellent last night. Just as well we watched the catchup because I totally forgotten about the nuclear bomb! Not sure where it is going at the moment since we seem to have a bit of parallel existance going on.

Heroes to catch up with next.

It was quarter to six when I last looked at the alarm clock before drifting off to sleep. Getting to old for this malarky.

Great night was had by all, good to see the usual gang and visitor from far flung places.

Managed to stay in my bed until 11ish before I had to get up – feeling very sober, if a bit tired, this morning and creeping about to avoid waking Lorraine and our house guests.

So hope everyone has a great 2010 – and that it brings much excitement and joy to all.

Bruise