kexsof site blog

20050626 - completed cross-reference of acronyms. Corrected syntax of most site pages and all style sheets. Made other minor changes for simplicity and uniformity.
20051014 - Moved site to www.kexsof.com
20051226 - Modified deprecated kx site pages to pause before redirecting.
20051227 - Corrected a slew of spelling mistakes.
20070210 - After a year of small corrections and additions to the acronyms not to mention the addition of drop down menus, upgraded to more easily maintained php language. Planned for the future: a MySQL database for the acronyms and another upgrade, this time to AJAX, but the pages will be served through php.
20070214 - OK, I looked at which web pages are being perused. Time for a roadmap. No signs (dates) on this roadmap - only a to-do list. I need (soon) to put .html redirects to all the new .php files so users don't think we've gone away. Then there's people who actually use the framed acronym page with the alphabetical index, so I'm planning a floating index next to the acronym table. Should be easy enough. Also, embedded data collectors on each page which store the usual data so I can distinguish "real" users from the bots when judging page popularity. Along with this, a couple of pages usual to large sites: terms of use and privacy policy. There's already a list of disclaimers on the acronyms page; perhaps a more generalized set for all the pages - hmmm. Is there some of this in the "about" pages . . . perhaps all I need to do is a little rewording . . . and then there's the boatload of old obsolete source code. I'll be busy forever.
20070502 - Haven't reported on the events until now: as you can see, the floating index to the acronyms table is done. Also, the database to store the acronyms is finished and is in use. Evidence of this is the fact that the acronyms are now in the correct collating order and the tab rows reflect the individual starting character: previously all the numbers were lumped under "0-9" and there was no tab for "-" (dash) at the beginning. Now you can see that there are headers for 0, 1, 2 and 3. However, 4-9 are missing because I haven't included any such acronyms (and I'm not aware of any right now.). Next to do is several private pages that I can use to easily update and repair the list. After that I will add more acronyms.
20070701 - Finally got some time to work on the site. Copied the acronym database to the server and added a web page to dynamically fetch individual acronyms. It's not in the menus yet. It's at kexsof.com/acrym.php. It uses AJAX technologies. Javascript is required.
20070707 - Cleaned up the javascript some. Put search page in the menus under acronyms. Also prepared the way for some changes to the database. Search page works nicely in FireFox.
20070710 - AWK! Discovered that Internet Explorer has its own version of javascript and has it's own version of the DOM. I had to make some changes but it still does not yet work in IE.
20070717 - Rewrote some of the acronym search javascript and got it working OK in IE as well as FireFox. Cleaned up and integrated the style sheets into one file for all. Fixed the random fonts in IE. Looking much better.
20070721 - A slight detour has occurred. I discovered that Stu Nicholls at cssplay.co.uk has added validated drop-down menus to his css only menus. [If you like that stuff, check out his site. Probably not a better css site on the internet.] So now I have decided that it's more important to get the drop-down menus working in IE than it is to facilitate adding and editing the acronyms. Hopefully the menus won't take too long.
MORE IMPORTANTLY, I have discovered how to get rid of the annoying garbage characters on my web pages. Recently I discovered that they are byte-order codes that tell some applications what the character encoding is, e.g. ASCII, ISO, UTF, 8-bit, 16-bit, etc. Today I discovered that they are called a "BOM" or Byte Order Mark. [See the discussion at http://us2.php.net/session_start. It's about PHP's session_start.] Anyway, all I need to do to get rid of them is to change the encoding type in BBEDIT to "Unicode* UTF-8, no BOM" and the problem goes away. Whatever you are doing, make sure all your files have the same encoding, especially for web pages. If a web page loads source from more than one file, all the files should have the same encoding. If you choose ASCII, apparently no BOM is used implicitly.
20070724 - OK, the new menus are in place and the inconsistent fonts are fixed in IE. The drop-down menus now work in IE as well as FireFox. I'm not testing opera right now because opera complains about something I use frequently but which validates.
20070730 - Had to rewrite some code to handle the embedded anchor tags from the database. These showed up quite readily in some of the expansions. This work may enable building the (all) acronyms page from the database. Also changed the sort on the search page to be case-insensitive.
20080103 - Well, it took a while, but I now have the ability to quickly edit the acronym database. Since the acronyms page is generated by me, it will probably always be at least one or two entries behind. The dynamic list, however will be more up-to-date. A button allows dynamically loading the entire database from the "Search List" page, but this currently takes some time to generate depending on your computer capability. Also, I edit the database offline so the database itself may not quite be current until I can manage a nightly update script. Much of the new is invisible, although you may notice some corrections. Since I can make these easily now, please email me any errata. I'm also thinking of changing the contexts to tags as used by del.icio.us. In the Search List page, clicking on a link will no longer load a duplicate but will take you to the already loaded acronym. Of course, as before, if the acronym is not loaded when you click the link, it will be loaded - provided that it is in the database. Whew. Now I can concentrate on adding new acronyms. That list keeps growing and I'm way behind.
20090820 - Decided that maintaining the acronym list - at least adding new items - is futile. The list of new ones I am encountering is increasing at a rate faster than I can add them. Nevermind that MySQL stopped working after an OS update and I had to fix that. Then subversion stopped working. Then I got clever and trashed my password application and lost a bunch of passwords I had just added. I had to change over to a new password manager because of the bug in the old one. Well, enough of that. It's another year now.
My focus is changing. I'm adding some poems and photo backgrounds, among other things. Things will be sporadic because we are redecorating the house and adding a little more storage room by opening up unused space. Stay tuned. I'm on facebook (my soap-box) and linkedin, but I'm not on twitter. And I'm still posting here occasionally. Very occasionally.
By the way, I don't get any money from Stu Nicholls for promoting his work but then I use his free software so I hope we're even.


			Site History Always Under Construction