Prior to August 2006, I had a section called The Thoughts Of Chairman Mike, into which I put, on an irregular ad hoc basis, thoughts and ideas that occurred to me. In August 2006, I created my weblog and decided, then, to transfer the contents of the Thoughts section there, to have all my entries in one location. Four years on, however, I have had a change of mind and now think that I would prefer to have all my web presence in one location. Accordingly, I have set up a new Journal section, into which will go my blog entries. As there are, currently, 480 entries on there and as I haven't thought of a better way to do it than copy each one individually from Semagic, the transfer will have to be done over an extended period. At the moment, I heve no plans to close down my blog but, rather, to keep two copies going.
I decided to post a story I had written onto the site. The problem was that it was in the form of a Word 2007 document. So how do I get a Word document into an HTML page? I could have pasted it in as a link to a downloadable file but that really assumes that the reader will have Word which is, by no means, a valid assumption. So, after a little experimentation, I found that you can save a Word document as an HTML document. Word writes a whole range of extraneous data to both the HTML file and to an additional directory of files but in amongst the unintelligible noise is some simple and usable code. Word uses the styles in the document as the basis of the CSS styles it creates in the HTML version and, fortunately, I had written the document using Word styles to control the layout. It was, therefore, a relatively easy job to extract the story text itself (with its CSS markup) from the Word HTML document and paste it into an empty HTML document on my site. Then, I added a few very simple CSS styles to the site's existing style sheet to restore the document formatting and the job was done.
Now that I have a widescreen monitor, as, it seems, do most computer owners, the calendar views of my What's New section were looking a bit stretched out horizontally, to the point of looking a bit weird. The calendars were laid out as four rows of three months each so I decided to rearrange them into three rows of four months. A simple task, on the face of it, I thought. Not so. My first attempt had to be abandoned when it went hopelessly wrong. So I thought a bit more about a method for doing it more easily. The second attempt worked out well, with a few set-backs on the way but nothing irredeemable. As it took me a couple of hours, I decided that I would do one a day for six days. On the second day, I did two in just over an hour, leaving just three, which I polished off in about an hour on day three. The calendars look much better now, more natural. I guess the moral of the story is to think about what you're doing and devise a plan before jumping in and actually doing anything.
Well, it's a case of see my previous comment, pretty much. The one before that is still quite apposite too. Getting on for halfway through the year, I have added the What's New In 2010 page but that's not actual new information really. The truth is that I have not really done much to speak of with this site for getting on for three years. As I type this, I have a renewed enthusiasm for developing this site and I hope it lasts. I have plans to add new sections and to return my weblog to here so we'll just have to see if any of those plans come to fruition.
This site really has fallen into disuse. I didn't make a single change in 2008, which is pretty dismal. It has just taken me over an hour to delete the What's New In 2008 pages (because there was nothing new in 2008) and add the What's New In 2009 ones. I would express the hope that, in a year's time, I won't be doing something similar after another blank year but, technically, by virtue of this very entry, there has been some activity in 2009 and so that's already guaranteed to not happen.
I haven't made any changes to the site for nearly five months. I think I was getting really bored of just writing film reviews. As I mentioned in the entry I've Started So I Won't Finish below, I had not intended for this to become just a film review site but that's what it seems to have become so, once again, in a note to self stylee, I am now intending to implement some of the other features I've been planning.
It occurred to me that the film reviews I write could each be illustrated with a poster that was used to publicise the film. So I have captured many images from the IMDb which has many film posters (or links to other specialist film poster sites). Where I could not find a poster, I looked on Amazon and used the DVD or videotape cover. In the few cases that I still couldn't source an image for, which were all American made-for-television films, I created a graphic in CorelDraw (and converted to a gif in PhotoPaint) that was a composite of the American flag and a television, both of which items came included in the CorelDraw package. I sized all the graphics so that they are small (with the shorter side 100 pixels) and load quickly. On trying the graphics, I encountered a problem where the reviews were short and didn't reach the bottom of the picture. In that situation, the next review would start immediately so both it and its graphic would encroach upon the previous review's space. To get round that, I put each review and its image in a separate table cell, thereby keeping it spatially separated.
Since I started working regularly on this website again back in August, I have noticed myself slipping into a very bad habit. I have had some ideas for features that I can add to the site and have started work on them. For instance, the test version of the site has a partially written Music section and a Poetry section, neither of which is yet remotely ready for publication. The result is that this has become little more than a film review site which was not my intention at all. Now I have plans to add an illustrated mini-autobiography. This will become yet another started but as yet unfinished feature. Since the Music section is the first of the unfinished sections that I started, I shall endeavour to complete that first but I'm not at all sure I'll manage to stay focussed and disciplined enough.
Under the heading of things I wished I had done from the start, I have just added the What's New section. It's available either as year-by-year lists or in calendar views. By far the most tedious part was in populating the pages with the contents of the site, what was new, if you like. It does introduce a bit of an overhead when adding new entries from here on but I think it's worthwhile.
When I display the main page in my browser, both the picture and the text fit into the screen. However, I have realised that most people use a screen resolution smaller than 1600x1200 and that with such resolutions, the text under the picture is pushed off the bottom of the screen. Accordingly, I have made a minor change to the <img> tag to include height="40%" so that the picture will resize to the screen resolution.
An index to all my film reviews has been added to the film reviews page. On the page for each individual letter, I have added a small panel down the left hand side which contains links to all the reviews on that page. This was achieved by making each set of reviews a 1 row by 2 columns table.
I have introduced a CSS style sheet into the formatting. At the moment it only sets the font for the <h1>, <h2> and <p> tags but now the sheet is in place it will be relatively easy to add further formatting. I have copied my review of Film 4's 50 Films You Must See Before You Die from my weblog to here because this is a more appropriate location. However, this meant introducing a further level to the Film page so that the directory structure continues to match the site's structure.
As it is my intention to eventually change all the formatting on this site to CSS, I thought I would amend all the headings and sub-headings to use the built in <h1> and <h2> tags so that their default rendering can be easily be overridden by a style sheet. I have also added an email link and a message about Copyright to the front page. I'd forgotten that my host had changed their email server so it took a while to update Outlook with the new settings.
I wanted to add the site version number and copyright details to the bottom of every page. I didn't want to use Dreamweaver's template facility because that would have meant uploading every single page every time. So it seemed that the easiest way to do it was to use a Server-Side Include to insert the relevant information from an easily updated file. I tried it but couldn't get it to work until I read the suggestion to change all the file extensions from .htm to .shtml. In addition, I added a Date Page Updated line to the bottom of every page.
Following prompting from someone that it was still there, I finally got round to deleting Milly's stuff from the site. Furthermore, since I have copied everything that was in the Thoughts Of Chairman Mike section to my weblog, that section is now redundant so I have removed that too.
Today I inaugurated the Miscellaneous Thoughts page. Having recently discovered the Belle De Jour and Mil Millington sites which are so full of intelligent articulate wit, the contrast with my own efforts on this site was all too apparent. Both the miscellaneous thoughts recorded thus far are very serious ones. Perhaps in my other pages there is some humour, perhaps in a drier style than either of those two sites but I can't help feeling that I would like to be more entertaining and less thought-provoking.
And over two years later, here we are again. This is also my first change using Dreamweaver MX 2004. I went to the pictures today and saw a Spanish film called Mar Adentro (The Sea Inside) about a tetraplegic man fighting for the right to die. So I thought I'd add a review to the Film Reviews page. Yes, I know this necessitates adding another letter to the page but I'm sure I'll cope. Oh yes, I'm now changing the copyright legend on each page to just me. See you in 2007.
Today I wrote my first film review, of Halloween, and added the alphabet links to the main Film Reviews page, inviting the visitor to pick a letter. However, since there's only one review at this point, only one of the letters is an actual bona fide link. I feel like Henry Ford. You can have any letter so long as it's H.
In my film course today they showed Halloween which was so dull that I began to think about the Film Reviews section. I created the basic page and then attempted to draw some star ratings graphics. I managed the stars in CorelDraw but had trouble converting them to gifs of the right size. So I called in Milly who managed the whole job in ten minutes flat with Jasc Animation Shop. How irritating a smartarse is. Actually I'm dead proud of her really.
Awake in the middle of the night and having got an idiot's guide tutorial from Milly, I published what I'd done so far only to find the return to mikejmay.com links on the start pages didn't work. After a lot of double-checking, it turned out that the link was to index.htm but the file is Index.htm. It's bloody case sensitive. I hate computers.
The Thoughts Of Chairman Mike, Diary Of a Website Developer and Links pages were created. Almost immediately I realised the Thoughts page would have to be split into categories to avoid being a huge amorphous mess.
I have started version three of the website. Version 1 was created by my wife Milly, who did a fantastic job. Version 2 was an amended version which included a business section and the MikeVille start page. This version omits the business section because we're not doing that any more.
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