Site and tecnical info

You are looking at www.stuartb.net, the home page of me, Stuart Benjamin. But I'm betting you knew that already. :-) The point of this page is just to provide technical details about the site, as much for my own reference as anything else.

This is version 4 of stuartb.net:

	Version 1: March   2001 - December 2001.
	Version 2: January 2002 - December 2002.
	Version 3: January 2003 - May      2003.
	Version 4: June    2003 -      

Mozilla Screenshots:
Version 1
Version 2
Version 4

Major changes from Version 3:

New 'blue/yellow' theme, with new graphics.
The site is now organized into four sections, each with a dedicated directory.
There is no longer a 'live' update page.
Perl .cgi scripts have been revised and/or tidied-up.
Menu sub-items appear in respective sections.
A new, non-standard index page.

In addition, travel update pages archived from 2002-03 retain their V3 format, and the travel update page from 2001 has been modified to resemble its original V1 format

Browser Issues

I have found no problems with standards-compliant Gecko-based browsers. Mozilla, Netscape6/7 and Galeon should be fine.

MS Internet Explorer: This browser, popular as it is, falls short of full compliance (with CSS2) and has a number of annoying rendering issues that had to be worked around.
IE does not support padding or border properties for a (link) tags. It also does not seem to render the small-caps value of the text-transform property. It shows full-caps instead, althought this might be a font-specific problem.

Old info...

Changes from Version 2 to Version 3:

V3 looks very much like V2, but is changed sufficiently under-the-bonnet that it is a major revision. The primary difference is that the site no longer uses frames. There is also more use of Perl Server-Side Includes to insert content, a (possibly) clearer layout, more use of CSS, and a font-family declaration to use mainly sans-serif fonts.

The removal of frames improves the site, as the pages are now directly addressable (if you had ever tried to bookmark, say, the update page, it wouldn't have worked before, because whatever page you looked at, the address shown in the browser was just http://www.stuartb.net/). Other issues with using frames are here.

As this revision was implemented with limited resources (I was travelling, and using only work and cafe internet facilities) it is far from perfect:

The perl cgi scripts are messy, uncommented, and need rewriting; The SSI statements are also messy, as is the html in general; The site is far from compliant with any strict version of html.

The site has not been tested with many browsers. If you come accross any browser-specific issues, please let me know!

Galeon / X (Gnome) / Linux
Should now display all page elements correctly. The previous problem was with the site, not the browser (sorry for suggesting otherwise!).
-- I found Galeon being used on "PIE" internet booths in Australia. It's Gecko-based and is "fully standards-compliant."

Netscape 7 / Windows 2000
Now displays all page elements correctly. ...But not for the same reasons that Internet Explorer does! The 'static' page names in the top right hand corner are placed by a style sheet for Netscape, and by Javascript for IE. Small problem with Netscape: When the page is scrolled, traces of the undelining are left behind on the page.