Systems

This post ends the time that this blog was being created for a systems class I was taking. I originally planned to discuss RFID technology and its implications for the library world. I was also going to talk about some benefits and problems of digitization projects in archives, museums, and special collections. As you may have noticed I never discussed either of these. I got side tracked by the technology side of blogger. I ran into 'little' problems that I thought I could fix quickly and spent more time than expected on it. Before this project if you asked me to make some changes to some XML I would have said I couldn't do it but now I realize it is much closer to HTML than I thought so I can do an okay job with certain changes.
This whole things has shown me that no matter how lofty your goals are you need to take care of the technology side of your problem but it has also shown me that you should not get distracted by the tech side to the point that you don't reach your goal. I tend to get distracted by technology so I need to remember that it is being used for a specific purpose and to ensure that the goal is being reached.

Finally

Through a lot of playing around with the template code and everything I've done to the blog I finally got Mozilla to show everything right...I'm not exactly sure how I did it but I did.

Netscape works with my blog

I just installed the Netscape browser and checked my blog and it works fine on it. So that leave Mozilla Firefox as the only browser that's giving me problems. I can't figure out why it is not working. It isn't even like it is a code problem. The jpg and bmp don't show up at all and I can't figure out why.

This stuff is crazy!

Google search

I just added a Google search to my sidebar. I followed the directions on askdavetaylor.com except that I replaced "sitesearch value" to tomastirade.blogspot.com but after testing that it didn't work so i changed it to blogspot.com and it now works to search all blogs on Blogger.

It's sort of fixed.

I had an XML object in the side bar that displayed the map from http://www.die.net/earth/ but it seems that it caused a major break down of Mozilla. It seems it is what caused Mozilla to do what happened in my previous post. Once I removed it Mozilla shows the blog properly again except that it doesn't display any pictures I have on it correctly. Time to see if I can figure out what's causing that.

I just broke Mozilla

I decided I was going adjust the template I was using to make it a little wider. I found that the space it allowed me was far too small to use graphics within.
To adjust the template I needed to delve into it's code. The code is XML which is similar to HTML but enough different to cause me problems. I had learned HTML code from scratch back in 1995 but things have changed a lot since then. It took me a while to figure out how to adjust the width correctly. Once I did that I found out that the parchment background did not cover the new expanded width so I needed to set the parchment background to repeat so it would cover the space. Once I did all this I was feeling very proud of myself...that is until I opened Mozilla Firefox. It now looks like this on Mozilla.