Updated September 15, 2002
Sometimes, when I speak of “The Duh Factor”, I’m referring to my own careless actions. As the webmaster of the Oo Kingdom (which includes this site), I am always very careful when making changes to Web pages or redesigning them. But due to the complexity of websites in general, sometimes I overlook something that, when left unchanged, looks very stupid. And sometimes I don’t catch it right away! The flip side of this is: usually our visitors don’t catch it either. So I’ll expose some of my own “stupidity” here:
On May 9, 2002, as I was putting the finishing touches on Version 2.5 of The Oo Kingdom, I changed the way I did the main menu on all of the pages. Before, a box with a border was made by the page code, and a script brought in the menu links. Now I changed it so that the bordered box was drawn by the script. But I failed to remove the boxes from the page codes, so this odd looking, double bordered menu was the result.
By the way, I did another stupid thing when I made this part of
the page: on the first attempt, I accidentally left out a single
< symbol, and the following line of raw code
appeared on this page instead of the image:
img class="fl" src="double_border_menu.gif"
alt="Menu box, 5/9/02" width="170" height="203">
Luckily, I caught this prior to publication!
I found the following paragraph at ookingdom.com/design/general (that page is now gone), on June 5, 2002:
Perhaps you don’t want a long, obscure URL (Web address) such as http://members.aol.com/profiles/ummamum/yadayada. Top level domain names (like www.ookingdom.com, which we had for a while) can be registered for $9-$35 per year, depending on what registrar you go through. In order to use a domain, however, you need to purchase your own web hosting; such hosting may cost anywhere from $5 to $80 or more per month ($5 per month only if you pay by the year). Many web hosts also offer domain registration.
Wait a minute! What is this, “which we had for a while”? Remember, I found this at ookingdom.com.
The Oo Kingdom—and its predecessor, Ummamum’s Kingdom—have a history of unsmooth moves. One of them was our migration from charter.net to ookingdom.com—then back to charter.net—and finally back to ookingdom.com, all in a month’s time during the fall of 2001 (see our special report in The House of Oo on that one). The piece quoted above was written during the process of those moves and was never changed until the following June—which means that we looked stupid online for nearly eight months!
Fast forward eight days to June 13, 2002. I’m still waist
deep in the muck of website conversion—but this time it’s
Version 5. I’ve just rewritten the script that puts the main
menu on all of the pages—but somehow I forgot to change the
script tag on the Home page. As a result, the Home page logo
is not displayed, but the menu box appears instead!
Duh—there’s already a complete menu at the left.
View a screenshot of our botched
Version 5 Home page
I found this on the Adoption page of Celebii’s Pokémon Universe on September 14, 2002, during the recent upgrade (NOTE, November 9, 2007: that site, which belonged to our son Joe, is no longer online):
You can choose from Lugia, Mew, Celebii, all the new Pokémon, Ash, Giovanni, the Crystal Onix, Marill, Sabrina, Murkrow, an armored Mewtwo, Officer Jenny, Nurse Joy, Togepi, Misty, the new badges and gym leaders, Pikachu, Ho-oh, Bulbasaur, and more. If I find more Pokémon pictures people say I can use, I will put up more. To get a Pokémon link to my main page, Joe's Pages with the adopted Pokémon, but to get one you must e-mail me first, and ask. In the e-mail you must give me your e-mail address, your site's URL (If you have one) and your name. If you want to submit another Pokémon for me to put up for adoption, you can e-mail me. Have fun with your new Pokémon!!!!! I will also credit you for submitting a Pokémon!
Excuse me, but Joe’s Pages was redesigned and renamed Celebii’s Pokémon Universe on April 21, 2001. Just another example of how you can look stupid, if you don’t read your own Web pages from time to time!
