GNCC Web site notes

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This new incarnation (new as of Dec, 2003) of the GNCC web site uses some of the more modern web "technologies", such as CSS2 (Cascading Style Sheets, version 2) and PHP (PHP Hypertext Preprocessor) to, hopefully, make the site easier to maintain and give it a dynamic, fresh look.

Some discussion of the new elements:

• The Bulletin Board on the Home Page. This is all custom PHP code which I wrote to read a specially formatted text file. Events are displayed only when their event date has not been passed, and when a start date is specified, only after that date. HTML tags can be put in the text file to be applied, e.g. to emphasize text. (New, March 04->) The text now is displayed in simulations of "sticky notes". This is a demontstration of what Cascading Style Sheets can do, and uses CSS to good effect, I think.
• The drop-down menus, using a method gleaned from an A List Apart article. Note that the technique used includes a fix for Microsoft Internet Explorer. For some reason, that company keeps on insisting that it should set the standards, not follow them!
• The image at the right-hand side of the home page is taken randomly from a set which can be as large as server space allows. The PHP code to do this was borrowed from "HIVEWARE IMAGE ROTATOR Version 2.1 Copyright (c) 2002-2003 Dan P. Benjamin, Hiveware Corp.", but heavily modified for our purposes.
• The width of the pages are coded as a PHP variable: any changes can be made by just changing that one variable.
• I had some fun with Paint Shop Pro's Animation Shop in creating the animated logo. I put the animated version just on the home page, though, using a static version on all the other pages. It is interesting to note how different browsers handle the image on re-load: Mozilla (Win) only runs the animation upon loading, and not on reloading. MSIE and Opera re-run it "at the drop of a hat".
• The idea for the weather network connection was found in Dave Cutts' son's web page. Dave is a member of the GNCC and is currently involved in trying to keep all those trees that we see on Mt Benson!
• The code for the calendar was borrowed from keithdevans.com, again modified for our purposes.
• New, April 2005: added a Gear Chart calculator.
• New, October 2005: the Contacts page has been re-written to NOT use "mailto:" references. This is so that those nasty robots can't find our email addresses to be sold to spammers. Most of us have gotten quite tired of those get rich quick and phaarmasootical (or however they misspell it) ads.
• New, October 2005: the Gear Chart calculator has been augmented so that it can "sketch" the chain path for any gear that is produced by the particular gear combination that the user is using. Some neat server-generated-on-the-fly graphics are behind this.

If anybody wants to submit Nanaimo cycling-related photos for the random rotation display on the home page, all we need is a brief description of the event/ride and a name to use as the credit. All images will be re-sized (down) to 250 pixels wide, so consider the resolution (i.e. by resizing them yourself and sending them already sized!). Also, if anybody wants to replace the "Logo" image it is 800 pixels (firm) wide and 250 pixels high (could be different).

If you find something that doesn't seem to work, email me via the contact page (select Webmaster).

Keith Brown, with thanks to Don Oliver and Bob Goerzen.

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Last updated: October 27, 2005.