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                    JOURNAL FOR TUESDAY 27TH OCTOBER, 2015
______________________________________________________________________________

SUBJECT: Website changes
   DATE: Tue 27 Oct 23:46:46 GMT 2015

Last week I spent some time sorting out my website publishing tool. I also
spent time making a few changes to the site.

The first change was suggested by Josh:

  The only thing I'd consider changing would be adding a duplicate of the 'up
  a level' near the top of the sub pages. It's not terribly noticeable that
  it's not there on a first pass of proper reading, but going back through for
  quick reference, particularly on longer pages, I noticed I was doing quite a
  bit of scrolling to hit the bottom of the page (despite 'back' being a more
  sensible approach).

I have obliged and added said links.

It would seem that users have been brain washed into not using the back button
in their web browser because 'It breaks things'[1][2]. Even though I'm sure I
made a point of telling users to freely wield the back button on this site :)

The second "suggestion" was from Michal:

  I wanted to ask if the WolfMUD project is still alive because the last
  update on the wolfmud.org website about the program itself has been made in
  year 2014.

He is quite correct the project does look dead if you just look at the dates
on the download page :(

I have now added the date of the last update to the development (dev) branch
to the downloads page for easy reference :) I hope that once the re-re-write
has caught up with the functionality of Prototype 3 it won't be necessary, but
I'll still leave it there just in case.

Then I wanted to make some of my own changes:


  - I wanted to use Roboto Mono as the font so I had a know set of glyphs.
  - I wanted to centre the text on the page.
  - I wanted to make the page more mobile friendly.


I do this stuff all the time so no problems eh? Yeah, right...

Firefox, Safari on iPhone4 and some versions of IE will not render the mono
font with all characters the same width. IE has some serious issues with ch
CSS units. Safari 7 has issues with vh and vw CSS units. IE has serious issues
with the CSS calc() function.

What really was depressing was everything looked beautiful in Chrome on my
Linux desktop, Android smartphone and Android tablet :(

It is damn near impossible[3] to take a fixed width font and render a text
block that is always 80 characters wide and centred on the screen using basic
HTML and CSS that will work on everything. I am not going to use JavaScript,
JQuery and plugins just to layout basic text.[4]

So after fighting with these changes for a number of evenings I just ditched
all my changes :(

--
Diddymus

  [1] Like shopping sites, banking sites, payment gateways, sites with
      mountains of JavaScript and ajax...

  [2] Ever lost all of your information in a form you were filling in?
      Shopping cart mysteriously emptied itself? Checkout blow up due to
      payment gateway acting weird and you went back a page to try again?

  [3] I did find a solution that was 99% working but ditched it due to too
      many of the other issues.

  [4] See also: ../../../about-site.html


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