The Oo Kingdom: Early Versions

The first appearance of The Oo Kingdom at www.ookingdom.com was the Beta version which ran from October 7 to November 5, 2001. The Home page was designed to look much like a Web portal; it featured a wide, skinny banner at the top and a lot of fine print. It was closed, then reopened 11 days later, looking more friendly and much different.

Version 1 — November 16, 2001

Version 1.1 — April 1, 2002

Version 2 — April 22, 2002

Version 2.5 — May 8, 2002

Version 3 — May 12, 2002

Version 4 — May 23, 2002

Version 5 — June 12, 2002

Reconstruction was completed on July 14. The motive behind the upgrade was to remove all presentational markup from the pages so that Internet devices with limited parsing capability, will be able to find our content more easily. They will also load and display more quickly on conventional browsers. This is the biggest change since the Oo Kingdom first appeared online.

Some satellite sites also received an upgrade to XHTML 1.1. These include The House of Oo (now called Oo’s Writings, Petitt’s Creations, Joe’s Portal, One More Thing… and The Legend of Blue Eyes White Dragon. The latter has the distinction of being the first site to be launched in the new markup. The Ummamum’s Picture Place home page and all 2002 picture sections were upgraded also.

Old picture sections (2001) were not upgraded, and neither were Celebii’s Pokémon Universe, Magnadramon’s Planet or Princess Zelda’s Home.

Version 6 (Beta) — August 19, 2002

Only the root directory and Web Design were released at this time. We used a “style switcher” form to provide a variety of page designs. This meant linking to 11 separate style sheets, which dramatically slowed down the page load. We also conducted a survey to see which page designs and fonts our visitors preferred. No one responded! Probably a sign of the times: privacy concerns are big these days, and—hey—I don’t like filling out online forms either. Needless to say, this version was short-lived.

Version 7 — August 25–31, 2002

Most of the changes (which began with the ill-fated Version 6) are detailed below; accessibility features are detailed at Our Site is User-Friendly (this page was removed from the site with Version 17).

Links and Navigation

  1. Doctype (on the main site) was changed from XHTML 1.1 to XHTML 1.0 Strict to allow the use of the name attribute in link targets. This way, visitors with Netscape 4 could use our links that go to specified points on the pages.
  2. Navigation was restructured as follows:
    1. Navigation bars in the main directory (such as on this page) include the Home page, Site Map, pages in the main directory (now called Odds and Ends) and sections. A few pages also include the satellite sites on the menu.
    2. Navigation bars on section cover pages (such as Web Design) include the Home page, Site Map and sections; a list of pages in that section appears in the body of the page.
    3. Navigation bars on sub-pages (such as God Made This Day Beautiful) include the Home page, Site Map, section cover page and other pages in that section.
    4. Navigation bars in Ummamum’s World also include the Ummamum’s Surprise page, which is in the main directory (called Odds and Ends).
    5. Sub-sectional navigation in Fun With Food (now called Ummy’s Nummies) and Just for Laughs was improved.
  3. A “Skip navigation” link, invisible on newer visual browsers, allows users of older visual browsers and text-only browsers to bypass the menu if desired.
  4. Link titles on the Home page have been shortened, and some link titles now appear on other menus. Most visual browsers will display a tooltip when the mouse is hovered over one of these.
  5. Access keys are now defined for frequently visited pages and form controls.

Changes to Specific Pages and Sections

  1. The alphabetical listing on the Site Map was dropped, and the listing by location was expanded to include details of some pages.
  2. About This Site was broken into four pages; all content was updated.
  3. Ummamum’s Surprise now plays the sound clips automatically on Internet Explorer or Opera. A link to the sound clip is provided for everyone else.
  4. The Backwards Compatibility page in the Web Design section was rewritten, and another page, Building an Accessible Website, was added. Other pages in that section were also updated. (These pages, now old and outdated, were dropped in 2022.)
  5. The blockquote element is now used for long Biblical quotations in Our Faith and Seasons & Holidays.
  6. Each animated GIF on the Ummamum Media Files page now bears a description (via the title attribute) that will yield a tooltip in most browsers when the mouse is hovered over it.

All satellite sites received similar upgrades. Reconstruction was completed on October 1, 2002.

Version 7.01 — October 5, 2002

Numerous changes in the few days following the completion of Version 7 prompted me to designate this as Version 7.01. Several of these are highlighted below:

  1. On Ummamum Media Files, transcripts of all sound clips now appear on the page.
  2. <NOSCRIPT> tags are now used, or have been enhanced, on the Home page, the Ummamum’s World cover page, and the Cool Games page in Celebii’s Pokémon Universe.
  3. <H1> tags are now used for all title logos, including on the home pages of all sites in the Oo Kingdom.
  4. The News Archive section (created September 14) got a new title logo.
  5. Metadata was added to the News Archive and each section of Ummamum’s Picture Place, to identify the previous, next and cover pages for each page within each section.
  6. Three new pages were added to the Oo Kingdom:
  7. Finally, the Home page logo was updated to include the following line of text: Digital Home of Charlie Petitt & Family. This changes the whole appearance of our Home page. A few other pages received minor updates as well.

Version 7.02 — November 16, 2002

  1. A minor problem was corrected on several of our pages. Italicized links required that the <em> tags (for emphasis) be placed outside of the link tags, in order for the Mozilla browser to display our red active link color.
  2. A smaller menu font was chosen, and the menu links are now underlined on hover.
  3. Link colors on Ummamum’s Picture Place were made the same as those on the main site.
  4. Active link colors were added to all other satellite sites.

Version 7.03 — January 1, 2003

  1. A Heavenly Ummamum was moved from webpages.charter.net to ookingdom.com and was integrated into the rest of the site.
  2. Title logo and greeting on the Home page are now centered, and the background is a different color from the rest of the page.
  3. Menus are now uniform in Odds and Ends and Ummamum’s World. A new “Version 7.03” logo replaces the normal Home page link, on the Home page itself.
  4. Menus on cover pages of all sections and satellite sites, now include links to each other.

Version 7.1 — January 19, 2003

  1. Ummamum’s Almanac was renamed Oo’s Almanac. It now resides on the Home page. It has since been removed entirely.
  2. Text was added to the Ummamum Guy on Ummamum’s Surprise and the Ummamum’s World cover page, to indicate that he sleeps from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. each day. This isn’t there any more either; the dynamically generated images have been replaced by static image files, so he never sleeps.
  3. More metadata was added to all pages. This will provide an extra toolbar with links for Opera 7 users; hopefully other browsers to come will also support this feature.
  4. Several browser bugs have been corrected, and many pages have been updated.

Version 8 — February 17, 2003

The groundwork for this version was laid in the various Version 7’s, so the conversion was done in a day.

  1. The navigation bar was moved to the bottom of the page source, and the style sheets were modified so that the navigation bar would still appear at the right, as before, although it is a bit narrower now. This was done to ensure faster loading of content; it will also look nicer on text-only browsers and older visual browsers such as Netscape 4.
  2. The main column used to be the full width of the page; now it’s narrower, making it easier to read. Printouts will be unaffected by the change.
  3. Text inside of tables was made a bit smaller to fit the new format.
  4. Markup was refined on certain pages.

Version 9 — July 3, 2003

Renovation began on June 18.

New Additions
  1. Customize This Site (no longer available) — worked on all browsers that support style sheets.
  2. New Bravenet Guestbook on the Home page.
  3. Shorts 2003
  4. Never Underestimate a Woman
  5. That’s All, Folks! (this page disappeared with Version 10)
Name Changes
  1. Changed name of main section from Odds and Ends to Close to Home.
  2. Changed name of “Contributed Humor” in Just For Laughs, to “Email Humor”.
Design Changes
  1. Redesigned menus using heading and list markup; changed styling also, making them easier to read.
  2. Made other cosmetic changes via the style sheets.
  3. Changed menu background color on A Heavenly Ummamum from lavender to maroon.
Other Changes
  1. Greatly improved the Color Picker page in Web Design.
  2. Patriotic logo and link will now appear the Tuesday before Memorial Day instead of June 6 as before.
  3. “Dates in Our History” was removed from Oo’s Almanac on the Home page (too much personal information).
  4. Outdated information on several pages was revised.

Version 9.01 — July 5, 2003

A minor revision that took only a few hours.

  1. Fixed a print bug in Internet Explorer 6: floating elements (mainly images at the side of the page, that the text would wrap around) weren’t floating on the printouts! This happened because the text was justified; that is, it would stretch across the page so that both the left and right margins were even. I removed this from the styling and all was well.
  2. Windows XP gives an off-blue default color to the legend element in forms, so I specified either a black or white text color for those as well as for table captions, which normally always appear black.
  3. Gave the table captions italicized text.
  4. Corrected inconsistencies in the various style sheets.

Version 9.1 — July 7, 2003

This one involved editing every page again, some pages more than once.

  1. Added two more layout options and refined Customize page, script and style sheets.
  2. Opened new Transformers site (this was part of Joe’s site that is no longer online).
  3. Moved Access Keys information from the bottom of the page content to the bottom of the menu.

Version 9.2 — July 10, 2003

There were a number of “bugs” in the previous version.

  1. Added many new customizing options.
  2. Debugged and refined all scripts and style sheets for the custom settings.
  3. Changed second paragraph of What is the Oo Kingdom? The new portion reads thus: “We also hope to set a good example for other webmasters through meticulous adherence to established standards of Web design.” (Page was replaced by About the Oo Kingdom in Version 17, and at that time the added statement was removed.)

Version 9.3 — July 20, 2003

A few pages appeared in Spanish July 16–18; they were removed in favor of some translation links, but those were removed on July 19. Several translation services are available online.

July 13
Added three new layout options; refined custom settings page and script.
July 18–20
Fixed minor bugs on five pages. Revised User-Friendly page.
July 20
Moved default styling to the main style sheet so everyone gets normal styling, even if scripts fail. Revised script so that no custom style sheets are loaded unless custom settings are chosen.

Added Panic Button to Customize page; revised some wording on the page. Added style sheet for older browsers. Edited and refined all style sheets.