Except for this paragraph and updating links, this page was left intact during the Version 21 upgrade on January 11, 2022. In Version 17, pages had a yellow textured background, and text was in Palatino or Book Antiqua font. Main heading was in Segoe UI or another sans-serif font. The navigation, in the upper left corner of the page, was simple: an image link to the Home page, a breadcrumb trail, and links to previous and next pages. That was it. (Originally the pages had a green textured background.)
This page—as is this version—is a work in progress. You will notice while browsing this site that many pages remain in Version 16, with the old styling: wide sunset logo at the top with a lot of orange, maroon and moccasin colors, and text in small Verdana font. Version 17 pages will be styled like this one.
In short, the site desperately needed a makeover. The Web is changing rapidly, and not only was the styling outdated, but so was much of the content. Below I am recording the daily, blow-by-blow progress as I rebuild the site; once the conversion is finished, the contents of this page will likely be trimmed and refined somewhat in order to make it more informative and meaningful. Detailed reasons will be given for some of the changes. But for now… here it is:
Version 17 debuts late evening of the 8th with only the Home page and all main cover pages (News Archive; Our Faith; A Heavenly Ummamum; Web Design; Metric Conversions, Etc.; Ummy’s Nummies; Seasons & Holidays; Just for Laughs; Ummamum’s World; Oo’s Writings; Picture Gallery). A new page was introduced for Little Mmm Guy Web Works, replacing the old page. A single style sheet (allstyles.css) controlled everything except the Little Mmm Guy page, which has its own style sheet.
Until now, the normal pages were centered, with a brief navigation div at the top of the page. Today I made a fixed-position navigation bar at the left of the page and ran the content to the right of it. I made a smaller image link (sunset134x50.gif) to use for this new setup. The next few days were spent (off-and-on) trying to get styling for home/cover pages, as well as normal pages, to work properly on all browsers, especially IE6.
In a late night session, I managed to divide allstyles.css into four separate style sheets—common.css, covers.css, normals.css and pix.css—so the various page styles would no longer interfere with each other. This fixed the problems I was having, and now everything works properly in all browsers including IE6.
Added The Night the Bears Took Over to new picture section. Renamed from Picture Gallery to Ummamum’s Picture Place and finally to Oo’s Picture Place.
After researching accesskeys, I learned that most of them interfere somewhere, on some platform, with built-in keyboard shortcuts. Also, they are activated differently on every browser and every operating system, and they are subject to arbitrary change without notice to users. I removed them all from the site; few, if any, people appear to be using them, and the markup is a lot cleaner without them.
Finished pages in root directory (about, links; family and cats were previously done) and added new Site Information section, which so far includes logos, greeting, glossary, early (early history) and v01 (early Oo Kingdom versions) plus a cover page.
Also eliminated all <head> and <body>
tags, which are optional in HTML; this cleans up the page sources a bit. I kept
the <html> tags because the language is defined here using
lang="en-us".
Added this v17 page to Site Information, about 1 a.m.
Added paragraph markup and styling to the stationary navigation bar on normal pages. Everything looks identical on graphical browsers that support CSS, but text-only browsers such as Lynx will provide an extra line break to separate the two paragraphs.
Converted all pages in Our Faith to Version 17.
Converted all pages in A Heavenly Ummamum to Version 17.
Converted all pages in Ummy’s Nummies to Version 17.
Alternate recipe added to Easy Barbecue Sauce (a big hit at tonight’s dinner).
After leaving the site alone for over two months, I didn’t understand much of what I had done, so I had to re-acquaint myself with the markup and styling. I made only a few minor styling tweaks and eliminated a few unnecessary “Skip to main content” links on cover pages; otherwise the new version stands as before.