Another point in my plan bites the dust

Yes, I know the above title doesn't fit very well into the classic Queen song.  I tend to be an absurd humourist at times.  

I can say without a hint of uncertainty that the title is true.  One point was successfully implemented in what is now an 8 point plan.  

Can you guess what it is, yet?  (Rolf Harris Accent, of course)

I have now made Father's message easily updateable by any human being.  Not only that, I have worked out how the database preserves punctuation like new paragraphs, so the text isn't printed on the screen like one, big, ugly blob.  A bit like that thing in the film. From the 80s.  That killed a lot of people.  What was it called again...?

There's something poetic about PHP and MySQL.  You invoke things from a database using the SQL language and store the items into variables that can be called onto the screen using PHP, giving you complete control over how you manipulate the content stored in the database.  For a geek like me, it's a beautiful thing.  

8 to go in THE PLAN and the only way for you to track how things are going is to keep coming back here and to the parish website.  We have not yet reached the technological capability whereby we will be able to surf the net with our minds, so I'm afraid you will have to use the now prehistoric means of Personal Computer. Give it a few years, I'm sure it will happen one day.  

  

Back On The Wagon

After finally conquering the redesign and displaying its defeated head on a stick at Times Square (it finally did my bidding), I had a few days break to catch up on my sleep and relax.

It didn't take too long for me to get back into the web frame of mind.  I always thought there was something of the Spiderman about me.  I took some pics of the Pastoral Area Youth Mass on Sunday, which was a very enjoyable service.  I wouldn't have made it to that Mass if it wasn't for my beautiful Girlfriend, Sophie,  who drove me to Everton's last game of the season at Goodison and then picked me up and drove me to Mass.  If I had gone in my own car I would have been stuck in aeons of traffic trying to get out of Walton.  Sophie met me in Tuebrook, where the traffic dissipates and I ran like a maniac in the stormy rain to the car.  The combination of Everton winning and doing something for God spurred me on.  It was rather serendipitous that I dried in time for Mass on the journey there.      

At the eleventh hour, I was commissioned with the responsibility of coming up with bidding prayers again, which I composed on my iPhone in the car on the way to Mass.  I wouldn't recommend it, although I had been thinking about them all weekend and what they should be devoted to (I was told I may be needed), so it wasn't a complete rush job.  

Last night, I fine-tuned a couple more pages to compensate for the new design.  I need to do something with the pastoral area section.  It does the job but it is a bit of a boring list.  Watch this space on that one.  

David Moyes has come up with another 4-year plan for the future development of EFC.  Similarly, I have devised an 11-point plan to get the website in optimum shape.  I shan't divulge this yet.  However, I have completed 2 of them tonight.  One was to upload the new pictures of the Pastoral Area Youth Mass and Holy Communion 2008 and the other was to amend the Gallery section appropriately to fit more galleries in the events section.  As you can see it is mission accomplished.  

9 more points and I will be much happier with this site when they are done.  I shall elaborate more on what they are when I am making progress with them.  I like to keep you all on tenterhooks.  

Redesigning the redesign

It's not as drastic as it sounds.  Now I can tell you about my two-pronged attack...  Well... What are you waiting for???? Move your eyes to the next paragraph and assimilate the following tidbits of information!!!!

My first point of attack was to deal with the dropdown menu issue.  On lower resolutions (even 1024x768) the dropdown menu ended up being broken down into two rows, making all the pages on the site substantially bigger and rather unsightly.  I used one of my original attempts and shrunk it so it would fit properly.  Not only does it fit properly now on 1024x768 (the most common screen size in use and the size that most commercial website base their designs upon) but it looks even sexier (as much as a dropdown menu can) on my higher resolution monitor.  

The second problem that my stratagem would have to rectify to bring about a resounding victory was the scrollbars in the News, Archive, View Prayers, Links, Mass Times and individual Saints sections.  I didn't stand on ceremony and got rid of all the scrollbars on these pages.  To prevent the pages from being as long as the Great Wall of China, I have added some code that divides the content into separate pages to make it more digestible.  I was thinking of doing the same for the Mass Times but decided against it.  I thought as opposed to clicking from one part of the mass times to the next, it would be better to use the scrollbar that God (i.e. insert your browser here) gave you to look at the other days of the week.  The better the resolution you have, the more you will see on the one page.  

The tackling of both these issues should prevent any further viewing problems.  Therefore, if I ever do another website presentation in front of the Parish Council I won't have anywhere near as much egg on my face.  Hazaa!!!

And so ends another intriguing episode of Webmaster's Blog.  Goodnite! 

Pics Galore

Decided I needed a break from any design problems for the evening and indulged in more simple pleasures of uploading new pictures onto the site.  It didn't take too long at all to get the picture from my camera to my Mac, resize them to a less hefty size and then upload them to Picasa using the special Mac client.  All I then needed to do was cut and paste code from Picasa onto the Gallery Events page file to bring up links on the website for the individual galleries. 

I was going to have a News in Pictures section with pictures and captions portraying recent news, but after a think about it, the Event gallery will serve that purpose.  One thing I will have to work on in the future is to create more pages for this section so we can have unlimited number of events in the section without putting it all on one page, like it is at the moment.  But that is for another day.  

Got a nice little surprise once downloading the pictures from my camera to my Mac.  There are a couple of hilarious videos on there from Friday's Australia night that I will be able to put on the Youtube Parish Channel.  And thus, the Video section of the St John Vianney Website will be born very soon methinks. 

Tomorrow I will be having a really big crack at fixing the redesign.  I will elaborate tomorrow evening on my plan once it has been successful.  I will tease you by saying that it will be a two-pronged attack to assassinate the bugs.  No doubt another late night ensues but I will having a decent night's kip tonight so no worries.    

Long time, no shee

After putting in the small hours to get the redesign online last Monday/Tuesday Morning,  I presented it to the Parish Council on Tuesday.  Unfortunately, the site did not display correctly on the projector and it threw me a bit.  Not the best presentation I have ever done.  See more about that problem later.  

I was engaged with familial obligations for the rest of the week.  It was my cousin's wedding and we had family get-togethers book-ending the occasion.  Not much time for either webdev or blogging all weekend.  

However,  I did make some time to attend all 5 masses within our parish to speak about the website.  Father Vin asked me to do this seeing as it was Communications Sunday that weekend.  I felt a bit awkward at first as there was already someone doing a talk about missionaries instead of the usual sermon and didn't want to deflect attention away from that message or overload the congregation with information.  I kept it short but sweet as requested and added a further dimension to the talk by bringing my set of bongos that my Uncle bought me one Christmas and performing a little song to promote the website.  I got some great feedback off parishioners and would like to thank all who attended those 5 masses for putting up with me.  That goes for Father Owen Grant as well who spoke about the Mill Hill Missionaries and must have thought I was stalking him.  

It will be interesting to see if the talks had any effect on the web stats.

At Sunday 11am mass I took more pictures of the lovely Mary Nichols who was 100 on Friday.  I also managed to get a few shots of the Pro-Life sale that was taking place after that Mass, which was well attended.  I will be uploading these pictures and others this week, further beefing up the gallery section.    

Today (Bank Holiday Monday), I set some time aside to work on the aforementioned problem with the redesign which means there are big white spaces on certain pages.  It is a combination of a problem with the dropdown menu and the different sizes of everyone's PC monitors.  It can and will be remedied.  Today was one of those experimental days that will help me decide the best course of action to take on this.