Re "The Big Meow" domain host move: thanks to all who contributed!

[dianeduane]

Thanks to everybody who hit the little ChipIn button to help change hosting for The-Big-Meow.com. The necessary funds were raised pronto: we're now sorting things out with the new hosting provider.

The move should happen later in the week. In the meantime, my apologies for the site still looking messed up.  Something I did broke the CSS (site formatting language, for you non-techies) in a way I've had no luck fixing, and at this point it seems to make more sense just to wait until the domain's moved to its new home and then do a clean install of Drupal 5.0, pulling the necessary files and settings in one at a time to make sure the CSS behaves itself this time. (sigh)

Meanwhile, chapter 7 of The Big Meow is in process, and should be posted around the end of the week. Chapter 6 will go public at the same time (the database will be sending out a notification to the "general information" list when it does).

Thanks again, all!

Comments

[pendlemac.livejournal.com]

Thanks to everybody who hit the little ChipIn button to help change hosting for The-Big-Meow.com. The necessary funds were raised pronto: we're now sorting things out with the new hosting provider.

Would that be why I couldn't see the 'ChipIn' button when I went to contribute?

Maybe next time I'll be a bit quicker on the uptake. :-)

[dduane.livejournal.com]

(grin) You can always use the button here (http://www.the-big-meow.com/ChallengeGrants.php) if you still feel so inclined. We had some unexpected web-based expenses last week, and I'm not sure I'd start shrieking in indignation if a little extra cash appeared. (eyeroll)

But, yeah, the CSS is still very broken -- all the buttons have vanished in the general messing-up of text formatting. I'm toying with punching the "panic button" and resetting everything to the factory defaults to see if it helps. (sigh)

[pendlemac.livejournal.com]

Ooo! A shiny clicky thing. Wonder what it does? :-))

Hope my little bit helps. I'm sure I still owe something to you and Peter for being such good sports during the panel game ambush at DWCon '06.

[occams_pyramid]

The validator refuses to even look at the CSS as the XML isn't valid:
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?profile=css2&warning=2&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fthe-big-meow.com%2F

You have it defined as XHTML 1.0 Strict which means it has to be correctly formatted with no errors, but the validator for that gives errors:
http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fthe-big-meow.com%2F
Though most of them are just having the 'A' and '/A' of the anchors in upper case - the doctype you are using requires that all tags are lower case.

Various others. For instance you've used target="_blank". You can't have targets with that doctype - I don't know why, and it seems a bit silly, especially as that's one of the main reasons a lot of sites use a less strict doctype.

To get it to work you need to either clean up all the errors and then look at the CSS validator to see what's wrong, or change the doctype to something more forgiving.

[dduane.livejournal.com]

First of all, thanks for taking the time to look at it -- I much appreciate it.

I think I may just have fixed it: try refreshing the main page and see what happens. (You might have to clear your cache.)

I solved this by looking at one of my other Drupal installations which *was* working and correcting the naughty one's settings back to match the working one's settings, one by one. Turns out I had an internal setting set up wrong for how Drupal allows users with differing "permission" levels to post content (filtered HTML, full HTML, or PHP). I corrected that setting back and immediately the image display returned and formatting worked correctly.

I have to kick the tires a little more and see what happens. Feel free to do the same. :)

[occams_pyramid]

That does work better, but long term it's only going to be reliable if it passes validation, so it's worth having a look at that in your Copious Free Time :-)

Is it Drupal that sets that doctype for the page? Very few sites or web developers that I know of use that strict setting, partly because it's unforgiving. If you use it then you must have completely valid markup or you cannot guarantee results. If you can't keep it valid it would be better to use something much more forgiving.

Err, it occurs to me that you might not know which bit I'm talking about? It's the very first line when you look at the source, which says:
DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"

[dduane.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know the line you mean. Yes, Drupal does appear to set it, in this version anyway (4.7.4). They may have changed that for 5: once I've got everything migrated over, I'll have a look around their support forums and see if there are any alternate options.

Anyway, thanks again!