Microsoft has a reason to be jittery

AS I POINTED in my 100th post in the other blog, I have been a Windows user since computing hooked me as a college student and a greenhorn government worker.

But last Saturday, I finally got to handle a PC running on KDE, a UNIX/Linux variant, in the internet cafe of my niece in Pili. At first I was disoriented with the logic of the whole setup--the way I was disoriented with the 'new' Filipino that Irvin blogs about courageously, I think. But in the end, I managed to complete the task I set out to do, which involved

1. Locating the flash drive which the PC recognized seamlessly;
2. Finding and opening the text and image files associated with that post; and
3. Uploading them into Blogger Beta using the really intuitive and intelligent Mozilla Firefox.

I haven't even touched Ubuntu, to which Chin Wong, Master Jessie and Dune Padre swears by; but to which Joel, my niece's hubby, will definitely not agree.

But it was a vastly different Linux I saw and ran for a brief moment last Saturday, lightyears ahead of its incarnation in early 2000 that was no longer text-based (as in MS-DOS), but certainly not very user-friendly. Its graphical user interface (GUI) is almost Apple-like but has a distinctive feel and look that Microsoft users cannot sneeze at. And as Joel said, not prone to viruses, worms, malwares and other security hazards that have become synonymous with Windows.

And most important of all, open-source and BSA-immune: the bottomline for the individual computing enthusiast who does not have the financial muscle that corporates have.

Now I really believe Microsoft has a reason to be truly jittery.

This is going to take a lot of time

VALIDATION, I mean.

The other day, I asked Master Jessie, EDP's resident webmaster who runs a very restrained blog that forms part of the Planet Naga aggregation as to why validation is necessary.

He said a validated site means it conforms to programming standards. It is also most probably the reason why my other blog--and by extension this one--does not render well in Internet Explorer, which I complained about in a previous post.

Which means this test blog will be here for a longer haul, owing to a raison d'etre whose breadth and depth has just grown many times over.

The reason behind validation

BY THE WAY, here is the reason advanced by the W3 Consortium on why validation is necessary:

One of the important maxims of computer programming is: Be conservative in what you produce; be liberal in what you accept.

Browsers follow the second half of this maxim by accepting Web pages and trying to display them even if they're not legal HTML. Usually this means that the browser will try to make educated guesses about what you probably meant. The problem is that different browsers (or even different versions of the same browser) will make different guesses about the same illegal construct; worse, if your HTML is really pathological, the browser could get hopelessly confused and produce a mangled mess, or even crash.

That's why you want to follow the first half of the maxim by making sure your pages are legal HTML. The best way to do that is by running your documents through one or more HTML validators.

A lengthier explanation is available here.

Now, is it worth all the pain and the effort? You tell me.

First stab at HTML validation

ONE OF the final suggestions of the CSS resources I consulted in coming up with this 3-column layout concerns the need to validate one's HTML pages.

So, I checked the W3 Consortium and led me to this free validator service.

Unfortunately, when I plugged the URL of my other blog, here is the result I got:

Result: Failed validation, 857 errors

The error items actually totaled 1,023 so I surmised there were duplications along the way. Which only goes to show this journey will take more twists and turns.

Two new enhancements

SINCE yesterday up to this morning, I managed to implement two new enhancements to this and the other blog.

1. Tipped off by this post from Blogger Buzz, I restored the Google AdSense element. But this time, I placed it at the bottom of my right sidebar, under the subheading "Sponsors," instead of the top of my posts. That Blogger Buzz article is quite straightforward, using a new page element labeled "AdSense"; the only tweak I made concerned the "Sponsors" subhead, which is actually a separate "Text" page element.

Changing the subhead to "Sponsors" alone will not do the trick; Blogger Beta will reject it. One must therefore put in at least one character and color it white for that element to be accepted. I opted for a period (.).

2. The second is the Firefox promotional button, which can be accessed here. But I did not like the default buttons available from the page, so I saved it to my desktop, tinkered with the text using Microsoft Paint, resized it using Microsoft Office Picture Manager, and uploaded it to my Geocities account. Then, I made the necessary changes in the accompanying script, i.e. changing the image file location to the Geocities page where it was uploaded, and the subhead ("Optimized for").

Two observations: (1) My blogs are not rendered well in Internet Explorer, prompting me to place the Firefox buttom at the top of my left sidebar. (2) I had a hard time looking for the Firefox promotion button site using Google; but when I used Yahoo! Search it was right there on top of the list.

Is Yahoo beating Google in the search game?

Happy monthly anniversary(?!?)

THE PREVIOUS post made me remember so I opened the "Posting" tab and confirmed that 25 posts later, this test blog has turned one month old! How's that for an HTML tyro like me?

By the way, a "monthly anniversary" is actually a misnomer, as correctly pointed out by Zero Now here. But what the heck! It's the nearest thing there is to this milestone.:)

And try googling "monthly anniversary" and you'll see that I'm not the only one, hahaha!

Some people read this (mis)adventure after all

I THOUGHT no one would bother but a month after starting this test blog, three already bravely came forward and joined the fun.:)

First is chymera (from Guimaras?), who pointed me to a weblog of his own. Another is SyLuscious, who's asking me for to help solve a blockquote-related problem. Then there's 郁沉, a 23-year old blogger from China, who volunteered a solution to my previously unmoving Labels widget.

My posts are coming in fewer and farther in between, mainly because of the other blog, but it's been an enjoyable one-month ride.