i win?

[fox]

Teaching myself CSS = not so hard, really.

Big overhaul of the website under way.  At the moment, only my index page (not the whole site's, I mean, and not any of the other areas') and "Best Man" are linked to the new style sheets; the rest is the old blue-on-blue stuff.  The index page is -- we're going to call it "in progress", okay.  But do we like the new look for the story page?  Someone want to pop over there and tell me how it looks?  Readability okay?  I feel like the font might be a little small, but on the other hand it might be my screen resolution.

Comments

[thalia]

Two ideas:

I use Arachnophilia as my HTML editor, which can do a global change in all open documents--like every single page on the site. It's a godsend sometimes.

And if your server supports server-side includes (SSI), you can use an include statement to pull in the same info on every page. You'd still have to update everything once, but after that you'd only have to change one file.

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

[perk] Tell me more about this SSI thing. (I don't use an editor, is the thing, I just code by hand. Which, yes, is why I'm loving the CSS. [g])

[thalia]

You really might like Arachnophilia, then--it's not wysiwyg, but it has macros and uses color-coding to make hand-coding HTML way easier.

SSI: You have to check with your host if they support it and how it works. Sometimes you have to use .shtml instead of .html. Sometimes you have to put something in a .htaccess file. For Minx's site, I have these two lines in .htaccess:
AddType text/html .shtml .html .htm
AddHandler server-parsed .shtml .html .htm
... and that tells the server to look for SSI in any type of file.

The SSI itself is very straightforward. All the files on Minx's site include the line
<!--#include file="sidemenu.html" -->

There's a file called sidemenu.html that includes the html for the side menu (duh!). When a page is loaded, the server sees the include line and replaces it with the contents of sidemenu.html. So if you're looking at a page on her site and look at the source, you'd see the actual html, not the include statement.

Does that help? Let me know if you have more questions--I find SSI way more manageable than trying to use php or perl or whatever. SSI can do other things, too, like automatically display the current date, but I've never bothered with that.