Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Updating The ScopeRoller Website

Updating The ScopeRoller Website

I decided to take a break from waiting for HP to figure out what they want me to do for the next few weeks, and update the ScopeRoller website. In particular, the "Casters" page was huge--about 211K long, plus gobs of pictures, so it took a long time to download, especially for those with dialup connections. Partly this was because the original page only had caster sets for three different mounts--now I support dozens of mounts. And it just grew.

Also, I didn't use stylesheets for the ScopeRoller website when I first put it together--and this really is the proper way to build a website now. You get consistent formatting this way, very much like using the styles in Microsoft Word, rather than applying individual formatting to every paragraph. I also had gobs of individual formatting commands left over from whatever HTML authoring program that I originally used to make the ScopeRoller website. Using stylesheets not only makes it prettier, and easier to change--but I believe that it reduces the number of bytes that have to be downloaded. This has the potential to speed up loading of pages (dependent on the number of files that get loaded indirectly through the include virtual commands).

Anyway, I am uploading the files right now. I may still make a few more tweaks, because the directory at the top is ugly, but it all looks a lot better, and loads much faster than it did before.

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