The Canadians are leaving today. Loopy is going to the UofR to do some work on a scale that we have that isn’t working anymore. I did some work on the web site today. I removed the random banner from the top of the page because it was increasing load times a bit. Plus, most of the banners didn’t look so good on the page so I decided that it was better to go back to the old banner that matched better and loaded faster. This way your computer can cache the page and not have to reload that image a million times. I hope that this helps, I know the page takes a while for those of you on dial-up to load. In addition, new Ogg Vorbis version of most of the Evil Petting Zoo music has been added to the music download page so that you can check out EPZ in the best compressed format ever (be sure to go and download Zinf to listen to them on and then you can check out our SGL Radio station as well. SGL Radio has been down for the last three days because of the power outages. We had to shut down the computer that was serving it and after continued power problems, I decided to leave it off for a couple of days. We will be back up shortly, maybe even today, and the new link will be posted on here. I also did a lot of work removing the old navigation buttons from the left and replacing them with new CSS powered buttons (CSS is the Cascading Style Sheet that helps to define the way that a web page looks) that load tons faster and have that cool rollover effect. I think that everyone will really appreciate both the increased look of the site and the greatly increased load times. We now only have to load two button images instead of the sixteen that we had been loading before. And, I believe, the two that we have now are slightly smaller than any of the ones that we had before. It also cuts a huge chunk of excess code out of the header of the site that will affect every page as well. This new button strategy is a lot more manageable for me too and will make it so that I can change the look of the buttons and how many there are quickly and easily. Previously, doing this was quite a bit more of a nuisance. I have been teaching myself more CSS because it is a really useful technology for a lot of the things that I do. I think that it is a really good idea and am really glad that people are starting to switch to it. I have also been teaching myself XUL over the last few days and just got a book on it from Borders yesterday.
Everything before December 14 (and you all should have read that stuff because it was there forever) has been moved out to the archives. As you can see, it has been a really busy day here at SGL.
Today is mostly a relaxing day, the house is practically empty today after having been full all week. Only Bob, Min and I are home today. And most of the house telephones are still unplugged from the brown outs the last two days. Min is watching the movie “Pocketful of Miracles” while I am working on the site. There is still a ton of snow here and the trees are all hanging low still. The roads are clear, though, so travel is pretty easy. I am going to be happy if I just get to stay in all day and relax. I was originally going to go to Rochester with Loopy but the car is full and his suspension is bad and doesn’t need the extra weight on it.
Those of you watching the site carefully will also notice that Dec. 14 – Dec. 19 have gotten filled in. So there is plenty to read in addition to today’s update. Sorry that it took so long. Holidays are rough. I am uploading early today so more information on today’s goings on will be on tomorrow’s update. Everyone is back to work tomorrow.