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                     JOURNAL FOR MONDAY 15TH APRIL, 2019
______________________________________________________________________________

SUBJECT: I’ve either updated the site for the better, or trashed it all
   DATE: Mon 15 Apr 16:17:18 BST 2019

Finally, I bit the bullet and the new site revamp is live! This has required
me to rebuild all of the HTML from the plain text files. Hopefully, if I’ve
done everything right, you shouldn’t notice a lot of changes. If I’ve done it
wrong — well, you won’t be seeing much of anything :(

I’ve been putting a lot of effort into rewriting my static site generator,
probably too much — but I really needed a break from everything and something
different to work on :(

Most of the changes made are small improvements that I hope everyone will end
up benefiting from.

For me, personally, the biggest change — and one I’ve wanted for the longest
time — is the automatic bidirectional linking of footnote references and
footnotes. The current footnote or reference is also highlighted slightly
differently as well. This has required me to go through the entire site and
fix many, many incorrect uses of footnotes and references. There were some
references without a corresponding footnote and vice versa, and misnumbered
references and footnotes. I was actually surprised at how many mistakes I had
made[1]. Another surprise was how often I had to use the alternative ⟦n⟧
syntax to mark up footnote references instead of using the normal [n] form.

When displaying overly long URLs, they are now automatically truncated to fit
the width of the site. You can always see the full URL by hovering over the
link. An example of an overly long link would be the one below to an adorable
little case from ModMyPi[2] that I use for my Raspberry Pi Zero W:


  ModMyPi Pi Zero Case - Frost £4.99
  https://www.modmypi.com/raspberry-pi/cases-183/raspberry-pi-zero--zero-w-cases-1123/plastic-cases-1145/modmypi-pi-zero-case-clear


When printing, the long URLs are displayed in full and wrap. Speaking of
printing, there is now a basic print stylesheet so that printing of any pages
should produce better results.

I’ve also gone through the site and fixed a number of formatting issues, such
as overly long lines and paragraphs that were throwing off the alignment of
text on the page.

All pages on the site that don’t go directly back to the main index (home
page) now have an additional link on the left, at the top and bottom of the
page, to go to the main index. All index pages not going directly back to the
main index also have an additional first link to the main index.

All of the links on this site have been checked. Where possible links have
been updated to use HTTPS, dead links have been updated or removed.

Everything has been tested on Windows[3] using the latest versions of Internet
Explorer, Edge, Edge Dev (the one based on Google Chrome), Google Chrome and
Firefox. The site has also been tested in Google Chrome on Linux, Android and
ChromeOS on a Chromebook. Finally it’s been tested in Lynx[4] on Linux.

If all this pans out and works correctly I’ll be happy to go back to coding on
WolfMUD at last :)

--
Diddymus

  [1] With the new generator a lot of these mistakes should be detected when
      generating the HTML pages from the plain text.

  [2] I have no affiliation with ModMyPi, I just like this case :P

  [3] Gasp! Diddymus using Windows!? Yes, okay, testing websites and WolfMUD
      is the only thing my Windows 10 virtual machine is used for.

  [4] One unfortunate issue I have noticed, the footnote references clash
      quite badly with Lynx’s link numbering mode :( I’m not sure what I can
      do about that apart from changing the format of references. One possible
      solution would be to use letters instead of numbers, as in [a] [b].


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