sbranyan.com blog

The blog will use this skin for a while. It’s not too bad and it’s a whole lot easier to updgrade. I am making an attempt to catch up on the Bible Brief notes this spring. Bible class has yet to start in the book of Numbers. We’ve “lost our lease” so I’m working on finding a new place to meet.

© 2010, Scott Branyan

Finally finished redesign of the default WordPress headers and incorporated my webpage masthead designs on both sites. Hopefully, this will eliminate possible confusion over the different nature of the two blogs.

© 2008, Scott Branyan

Well, I’ve accomplished a lot since just before Thanksgiving and into the first few days of the new year. I’ve redesigned and integrated more fully my two websites. Two new blogs have been added with RSS and great search features. Also added is a newsletter list for each website. It’s taken a lot of work and pushed this aging boomer to learn new things. I hope you like and find the additions useful.

Time to move on into the New Year and shift the focus to adding content which is forthcoming.

Thanks for following along and lending any thoughts on the way.

© 2008, Scott Branyan

I made mention in the last post of a couple of tutorials I have been going through. One I stumbled upon in Barnes and Nobles shortly after I started using Dreamweaver. It is Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP, by David Powers. This is a great tutorial and is user friendly and complete. It introduces Dreamweaver’s CSS, PHP, Spry (Adobe’s version of Ajax) and MySQL features for building dynamic websites.

The Ajax, PHP, and MySQL instruction is adequate to bring you up to speed on these tools. The CSS part of the tutorial, however, is more how to use Dreamweaver in using and maintaining style sheets in the software. Powers recommended, and I purchased and read, Beginning CSS Web Development: From Novice to Professional, by Simon Collison. Collison’s book is a fine intro to CSS styling.

When I started playing with webpages in 1994-95 on Compuserve, there were not a lot of WYSIWYG web editors. Many folks just used Notepad. There were not a lot of formatting choices. Folks ingeniously found the tables element worked pretty well for formatting in HTML. But it was web design by the seat of your pants. I suspect WYSIWYG editors came about to test one’s use of tables in formatting to see if it worked. Java script menus came along later. Ah, the cool Java Script that people could, knowingly or otherwise, turn off. As www.w3.org has successfully established itself as the web clearing house for standards, it is clear most people see the need for an organized, standardized approach which keeps styling and formatting separate from content.

Well, I am happy to say, having gone through these manuals, I am forever weaned off of using tables to layout webpages. Tables worked for layout, but I never was convinced they were the best way to format. It seemed like overkill, and you had to use a lot of tags and math to move your rows and columns left or right, up or down. That is still the problem with computers and CSS styling—it takes too much math and understanding absolute versus relative positioning to layout a page that a little magic marker and a photo copy machine would produce nicely in the not so distant past.

In some ways, I think databases have taken over and are being overused in webpage design, much the way tables were. Take for example the tables in the recent Bible Brief posts. I constructed them using, of all things, a database plugin for WordPress since there is now no way to conveniently use the table element natively in the WordPress editor. The editor chokes on HTML tables and spits them out. But, at least for the present, the use of databases does make a handy way of searching for and creating dynamic content.

We are still on the fore edge of web design and use. It will be interesting to see how things continue to merge together in the future. The key concept now seems to be databases, and the key word is “searchable.”

© 2007, Scott Branyan

First Blog Post (Tuesday before Thanksgiving 2007) – A day in early November held a great fall afternoon with abundant sunshine, warm temperatures and blue skies. The fellas fishing with me were both engaged in concentrated effort to catch trout on a fly. 

I had been expecting to hear geese overhead pushing ahead of the next cold front, which was expected to arrive in a couple of days. I heard nothing. When I looked up, it was a flock of pelicans I saw silently riding the updrafts in circular fashion while drifting more or less in a southerly direction. “See the pelicans?” I asked. “Pelicans?” was the surprised reply. “We often see a few flocks in November,” I said.

Migration is part of outdoor living in the fall. As we enter late fall and winter, it is also a part of my online existence. This fall sbranyan.com and flyflinger.com will be migrating to a new hosting company. The move is necessary in order to introduce some feature upgrades to my websites. I’m leaving behind my Windows based host and returning to a Unix one (how things change every few years) so I can implement some PHP and MySQL database features.

Migration of sbranyan.com to its new server is already complete, and the addition of this blog is one of the results. This blog will be a catch-all for sbranyan.com, although it may become my primary Bible teaching blog for classes after the first of the year–I am still redesigning the overall structural relationship to all my webpages. Look for changes. 

The RSS feed for this blog should be working properly, so you can stay on top of anything new. You can find the RSS link at the bottom of this page and add this blog to your reader. As always, I am interested in comments and suggestions.

Where will fall migration take you?

© 2007, Scott Branyan