Thanks to a good friend the development/cleaning up/hacking of my site has been put on hold while I determine how to proceed. About a year or so ago during my first attempt at a web site he convinced me to use html tables to format my site and css just for minor formatting such as text and the like. He then took me to amazon.com to prove his point, by showing me how browsers that were css enabled and not both loaded the page the same. He has since taken that back stating he still used tables for formatting but this on effects about 10% of the browsers out there, and after messing around with css foormatting he prefers the way it looks. So now I have to decide to continue down the path I have started or to scrap everything and start over. Thanx a lot man.
Oh and by the way I really dig the bookmarklets that Basil/Tim came up with. I do have a request on that line, can you make one that I can enter a name and have it search the oca website for that saint?
6 comments
Chris, check out http://www.worldtimzone.com/bookmarklets/
The saint name thingy you wanted is already there.
Oh yeah, and about the tables versus CSS thing. That was 1) a year ago, and 2) a commerce site like I expected cnaughton.com to be. Like I said, I’m using tables to build a framework, but CSS for the formatting and styles. But then up until recently I was using Netscape 4 exclusively at home. I’ve since upgraded to Mozilla 1.1. I still want to support Netscape 4, but at this point I’m more comfortable with degraded support.
Tim, he means a saint’s name bookmarklet for the OCA site. Chris, checking into it.
OK. Geek out for a sec.
What the bookmarklets do, if you haven’t noticed, is produce a well-formed URL for retrieving information from the site itself. If the site is not set up well, then you’re probably out of luck. In this case, you are out of luck.
First, there is no good way to get a saint by name. The only thing that comes close is the search function, which is quite broken, when used from the front page. Although the URL created by their search function can be hacked to get results — which is what we need anyway — there is no efficient way to pare the keywords down to get a good result set.
The search “”Feasts and Saints” AND basil AND great AND saint AND january” (note that I had to know the date already) still yields 43 results, many of them not even saints pages.
It sucks, but it’s the fault of the OCA webmaster, unfortunately.
OK. I take that back. On further reflection, ISTM that this is, in fact, what you want, and the results aren’t as tainted as I earlier thought. So, check this out! 😀
Whoops, sorry for the confusion. I only had a search for the Greek Orthodox site. There’s now one that searches the OCA site. It uses the URL set up for searching the saints names only. Go to my bookmarklets page mentioned first in the comments.