Not so flashy

Last weekend I spent time frantically coding away, and am pleased to say I have something that looks curiously like a functioning website. I’m as surprised as anyone really. Here’s a screen shot of the front page. I’d give you the link, but I think it’s all going to be mucked about with over the next few days so best not.

Celebration Rites home page - the latest incarnation

Now for the troubleshooting, and if anyone can help me I’d be most grateful. I’ve got everything working so far except for the Longtail Flash Player, so I might have to make do with the YouTube embed that I worked out earlier in the semester.

The most frustrating thing to deal with over the weekend was, without doubt, the php. I got a form from this site, then pulled it onto a page, uploaded to the server and it worked! Hooray! Then, much later when I pulled the site together, thinking I’d used the same workflow and changed nothing about the site, it didn’t work. Much hair pulling and gnashing of teeth followed. Double checking of workflow and files. Nothing. More gnashing. Moving on to including the date stamp on the site was even more frustrating. I’ll save my second go at both for later in the week.

Some great tips from our IT/coms/campaigns/web master at work who gave me some tips that might also be useful for people to keep in mind.

“Couple of little things… the default home page, often dependant on the server, should be index.php or index.html or index.htm. If you put in the domain without it, you’ll get a directory listing and make your site easy to hack.”

Thanks Pete! He also gave me a quick lesson in paths last week and got me reading through the php.info file documentation. I have a feeling that is the key problem with the php not working. Hmmmmm. More on this later.

Late in the weekend I moved on to validation issues: Good news – the html is valid on most pages. But of course there are some serious validation problems, and they are mainly with the extras on the site I wanted to include. You guessed it, Flash appears to be a BIG problem.

I was really keen to incorporate Issuu into my site, on the resources page. It looks good, and works, but it’s not working in IE and it won’t validate. I’ve taken a look at the W3 working group guru’s blog post on a work around but I have to admit it’s not making a lot of sense to me at the moment.

Does anyone have a more comprehensible way of working around the problem of <embed> not validating? I’ve got the problem now with Issuu but I can see it’s going to be the same again for the YouTube or Longtail embedding.

The CSS is valid as well, except for some code I gleaned from the CSS Cookbook, which shifts the reader to CSS3, for which standards are still in development (for the most part). It’s the nice little bits of code that make the curvy corners on my menu.

My curvy menu

I’d already tested it in IE and was prepared to live with it no looking so nice there (bit of progressive enhancement), but it appears that I won’t be able to progress that far for this assignment.