what's under the hood

My pages are driven by a mixture of Javascript, PHP, CSS, and mySQL.

The Javascript is in charge of doing the menu mouseover/mouseout tricks: highlighting each item on the menus as you roll your mouse over them and also changing the text displayed in the "blurb" boxes on the various pages.

The PHP helps me do... well, a lot of stuff. Such as:

• Effectively manage what I display on pages depending on which server you're looking at: my primary site at annathepiper.org, or my backup site at drizzle.com;
• Driving the form I've set up for contacting me;
• Being the primary means by which I determine what browser's being used to visit me (see the Credits page for details on where I got the browser sniffer);
• Showing the "last modified" dates on various pages;
• Doing a lot of handy under-the-hood including file snippets over into larger files, and even more importantly letting me maintain page templates into which I can plug actual content, separating code from content and therefore making this site a lot easier to maintain; and,
• Providing the front end for searching my roleplay logs.

Cool, huh?

CSS is my stylesheet language of choice at the moment and is in charge of "making it pretty". Previous versions of my web page have been fairly heavily graphics-intensive; this time around, I'm feeling minimalist, and am trying to see how much I can accomplish just by using extensive CSS and relying upon color, layout, and font to make a nice presentation, rather than having to make people download a lot of graphics.

(That said, I'm not bailing on the graphics entirely. I do have a historical penchant for leaves to maintain, after all.)

MySQL is the database language of choice I use to help me manage my huge archive of roleplay logs.

browsers tested, browsers not

These are the browsers on which I have tested my web page:

• IE 6
• Lynx 2.84
• Mozilla 1.4b
• Netscape 4.8
• Netscape 7.02
• Opera 7.11

I have tested against these versions of these browsers because those are the versions I have. I know there are a lot more browsers out there--older versions of these browsers I've listed here as well as different browsers entirely. But I've already got five browsers running on my personal computer, and that's quite enough, thanks. ;)

If you're running a browser not on this list and you'd like to give me some feedback, please feel free to drop me a line. Tell me what browser you're running, if it's an older version of one of my testing browsers or something else, and let me know whether my page looks good on your browser or whether you see something that's specifically broken. I'm particularly interested in testing feedback from users of Konqueror or Amaya.

nifty discoveries

Browsers are getting better these days about being more consistent in their support of HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc., but even now there are still little glitches you'll want to watch out for--as I have discovered again this time around, setting up this version of my site. For example, I can tell you now that doing the borders on the header and footer of my main index taught me that Netscape 7.02 did not stretch out a border completely across the top of a table cell spanning two columns. On IE 6, Mozilla, and Opera this worked fine, but to make it work on Netscape 7.02, I had to slap a border on the <tfoot> tag in my stylesheet.

The trick I'm using to change the blurb text on IE, i.e., just altering the "innerHTML" of the blurb box via Javascript, didn't used to work on Opera. It works on Opera now. This made my life significantly easier by reducing the amount of code I had to chug through, and letting me get rid of a lot of unnecessary <div> sections in my HTML.

I also discovered that while Netscape 4.8 tries to support doing tricks with your background tiling via the "background-repeat" and "background-position" properties, it caused some annoying issues with screen refreshing when I tried to put other windows in front of the browser window. This is why on that browser, my page comes up with a standard tiled pattern for that leaf design on the main page rather than the single leaf pile you see on other browsers.

And, I discovered that you can in fact sneak PHP into a Javascript function, if you're including that Javascript function into an overall web page which is getting parsed for PHP. I am officially amused. This wouldn't work though if I were invoking the routine externally, though.

what the heck was I thinking?

Some of you might say to me, "Gosh, Anna, you've gone to a lot of trouble to test your web page on various browsers when it's just your personal site! Why did you do all of this work?"

Two reasons:

1. It keeps me in practice being aware of the various issues that come up when you need to support multiple browsers on a web platform. And if I go to this trouble on my personal site, I can be better aware of such things in a professional setting as well: whether that be doing web work for hire, or testing web-based applications.
2. Many of my friends, like me, are computer geeks. And we use a wide variety of browsers between us, so I'd like my friends to be able to see something pretty when they come and look at my web page.

Let me know if you think it works.