README.site

This is just some site programming notes... The simple idea was to take the current site, and convert it to :-
a. have a left side navigaion menu,
b. to use CSS positioning, in pace of tables, and
c. use DOCTYPE XHTML 1.0
d. pass W3C validation

Although I have used MS FrontPage for YEARS to do my own site, I had only experimented a few minor times with MS Visual Web Developer 2008 Express (free) Edition (MSVWD), and saw this as an opportunity to give it a good 'check out' ;=))

Since I have this powerful (free) web tool, I did all this in WIN32 (Vista), so take care of the line endings in files ;=(). And as well as using the built in very powerful MSVWD debugger, which runs IE under a debug mode, and allows you to, for example, trace through javascript, I also installed MS Internet Information Services (IIS7) for Windows, and pointed it to the developing site, so I could do immediate checking using IE, and other browsers, on 'localhost'...

See below 'Things To Be Done' for known cavetes ;=))

The first effort was to build two CSS based templates -
1. blank3.html - This is a 3 column format
    Left - Naviagtion menu
    Content - The information
    Right - Snippets
2. blank2.html - This is similar to the above, but without the right side info snippets

To keep the HTML script looking 'neat' I used Tidy (http://sourceforge.net/projects/tidy/), well actually my own slightly modified version of Tidy ;=)) Since the maintainers of Tidy have close ties to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), this ensures, about 99.9% of the time, that the page will pass their 'validators', so I have not 'checked' every page yet, using it...

In the main I have MAINTAINED all Google advertising, usually in 3 places
1. Top hozontal sort of 'Google' ad bar
2. Right column, when present, as a vertical bar, and
3. Near the bottom, although in some cases this is at the top.

Concerning urchinTracker(), I initially got some errors from this javascript, so left it out for the present, but it could easily be put back at the bottom of each html file ;=()

I had NOT enabled the 'shtml' extension in my IIS7, so a small number of files were changed from 'shtml' to 'html', since as far as I cold see no 'server' prcessing was required in any of these files.

Navigation Menu

This had to handle pages in subdirectories, and hightlight the current page, so this led to a NEW service in js/template2.js called MainMenu2, with two parameters - 1 - the parent directory, and 2 - the module number per the javascript array.

Then I set about 'converting' all the current pages to this new format, mostly keeping exactly the same content, and google advertisments, although some 'moves' were done.

Page by Page

  1. Home - index.html - This is the main page, took some things from Pete's site, and added slide show - done
  2. Introduction - introduction.html - done
  3. Features - features.html - done
  4. Gallery v2.0 - Gallery-v2.0/index.html - first in a sub-directory. Developed getFooter($pardir) to deal with image locations - done
  5. Announcements - announce.html - done
  6. Calendar - calendar.html - used 2 column, since it was difficult to constrain the Google calendar to the center - done
  7. Events - events.html - done
  8. Get FlightGear - 8

  9. Download Central - Downloads/index.html - done
  10. Binary Programs - Downloads/binary.html - done
  11. More Aircraft - Downloads/aircraft-2.0.0/index.html - changed from shtml to html. A BIG conversion ;=)) And also had to give a name attribute of 'ac_' in 11 cases - ["ac_14bis" "ac_21" "ac_707" "ac_727-230" "ac_737-100" "ac_737-300" "ac_747-200" "ac_747" "ac_747-400" "ac_767-300" "ac_777-200" "ac_787"] so the 'name' attribute could be copied to the 'id=' attribute by Tidy.  - done
  12. World Scenery - Downloads/scenery.html - done
  13. Source Code - Downloads/source.shtml - changed to html - done
  14. DVD set - dvd/index.html  - Mostly done - but still some outstanding issues *TBD*
  15. Version Log - version.html  done
  16. Hardware Req. - hardwarereq.html done
  17. Support - 17

  18. Manual (html) - Docs/getstart/getstart.html *TBD* many pages!!! *
  19. Wiki - link to Main_Page of Wiki - link only
  20. FAQ - Docs/FAQ.html - changed to 'html' in place of 'shtml' - not fully checked - done
  21. Links to Docs - docs.html - basic page done, but LOTS of 'links' to others not done - *TBD*
  22. Lists, Forums, IRC - mail.html, but many LINKS to check
  23. Links - 23

  24. Websites - links.html - done, but many LINKS to check
  25. PProjects - Projects/index.html - done - and 'some' sub parts done, but more to do... *TBD* - have done one Projects/SynthVision/Links/las-vegas-airpsace.html just to try at this depth '../../../', nad found no problems.
  26. Users - 26

  27. Multiplayer - link to http://mpmap02.flightgear.org - link only
  28. Places to Fly - places.html - done
  29. Developers - 29

  30. CVS Resource - cvs.html - done - but this led to 4? other files below
  31. Source Code - Downloads/source.html - is a repeat of 13 above - need to choose to higlight this or the above in the menu - presently coded to 13 - done
  32. Goals/Wish list - goals.html - 3 column, easy, quicky - done
  33. Contributors - thanks.html - from 'shtm' to 'html'. Wow, lots of conversion of '<' and '>' to &lt; & &gt; entities. Thankful for good replace functions in editors also one & change to &amp; - Also points out the need for an inpage 'top' link when at the bottom. It also pointed out a 'bug' in my Tidy. It removes blank lines in <pre> </pre> blocks - a no no ;=)) Used blank2.html since <pre> has an unconstrained, non-wrapped, unpredictable width! - done
  34. Design Proposals - design.html - combine the linked document into the page -  done

Files NOT directly from MENU

Downloads/scenery-1.0.1.html - the graphical interface - done
mirrors.html - list of mirrors - done
Just some test pages - testpage.htm - testpage2.htm - testpage3.htm - done

cvs.html leads to some other files

Things To Be Done

And probably many more items that I have not yet thought of, or found ;=))

Further Enhancements

Just some thoughts...

And probably a zillion other things... enahancement can be a NEVER ending project...

Things to Avoid

This is just my 'personal' preferences...

Download

To make it 'easy' for anyone to try my current pages, locally, on on another site, I have zipped the entire things into a single zip

Date Link Size MD5
2010-03-21 fgfs-05.zip 19,333,193 7bb29ca2862248a781e4a163f4672b61

 

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