Fun with CSS

I got interested in CSS and HTML via working with Flex this past week – Flex uses style sheets and formatting tags (XML I think), and while I was spending hours tinkering with the Flex formatting for our demo to the board today, I learned a lot about structure and how to code stuff in style sheets.

So, naturally, the next time I had a free moment, I took a look at my website.  With considerable effort, I managed to get my Web page templates cleaned up, and (after backing up the site) went ahead and updated the affected pages.  Then I started looking at the individual pages, and oy vey! what a mess.  Everything was formatted individually, (mostly) overriding the template and existing stylesheet, simple as it was.  Embedded stylesheets.  Icky stuff.  What you get when you use a WYSIWYG editor to the exclusion of good design.

(Well, at the time I had no aspirations to be a good Web designer.  I built half my site while in a series of small huts in Third World countries….web design hell, I was grateful just to have electricity and a battered little laptop to design it on!)
It now looks like I have a choice between leaving everything as it is (cruddy bits and all) or going through and hand-coding all the pages on my website to clean them up.  I haven’t counted yet, but I know that’s going to be quite a few pages….50+ is my guess.  I’m not sure whether I feel like putting in the hours it would take to clean them all up – that’s valuable time I could be spending doing other, more interesting stuff.  On the other hand, I’ve also put two or three hours into doing just the stuff I’ve managed, so…I dunno.

I’ve also discovered that my site, minus my blogs (which are in a separate directory) and the stuff I’ve backed up onto my Web server, has about 3,000 files.  That’s about right for the size of the critter, which is 150MB with the average photo being 100-150K.  Every photo has a thumbnail, so at a guess I’ve got 1000-1200 photos on my website.  Quite a bit to clean up.  (I had no idea it was that large!)

I have now finished winding the warp for my weaving exercises and have also started making another set of dye samples, this time with Cibacron F (fiber-reactive) dyes.  I got lucky in my set of color choices and already have some very lovely browns that I can use to dye the linen for the placemat project, once I get there.