Ted's Blog

It's been kind of slow going but I do have 5 of 7 days set up now. The night before last I got two pages set up (after finally getting the film scanner cranking). Then last night I got the fifth page done by 8:00 but then spent the next 2 hours figuring out a navigation scheme. My idea was to use Thai numerals to represent Day 1, Day 2, etc. Thailand doesn't have anything to do with Baja but Arabic numbers seemed too left-brained. I thought about Braille or Chinese before settling on Thai. After searching for graphics of the numbers, I found out they are already contained in the Unicode fonts so I had to figure that all out. Then I had to mess around with styles so I could avoid having the numbers (which are links) underlined, though I wanted to keep them blue or purple. Once I get done I think I'll use a style sheet for the whole Baja site though I've always avoided them in the past.

You are doing a nice job with these articles. What software do you use to compose your pages? The Thai characters at the bottom are very curious. These look like text (vs images) yet I don't have that font, so how are you making it show (in this case on my iMac.)

Since you asked . . .

I'm using LView which is a simple graphics program for resizing and cropping. It does other basic stuff like changing contrast and brightness as well as editing .gif palettes and putting together .gif animations (I didn't use any of that on this site). I scanned the negatives from my underwater camera using my Nikon film scanner.

Then I use Allaire Homesite 4.0 to write the code by hand. I did some illegal stuff with FONT tags (it's not supposed to be applied to a whole page, but it renders okay) but I liked the look of SIZE=4 better than I liked anything I could specify using styles.

For the look of the pages I was going to try to use some of Movable Type's look which is so clean. I noticed that part of what is neat about it is they use gray text. So all I really used was the gray text. It made a real difference.

As for the Thai characters I was wondering if they would show up on a Mac since I wasn't able to test that. In an effort to address the thousands of international characters the main fonts now are Unicode meaning they include these thousands of characters. So if you have Arial, you have the Thai numbers and they are vector based and completely scalable. The font has Cyrillic (I guess), Japanese, Arabic, Thai, and so on. Maybe the only thing they probably don't have is Chinese since it isn't alphabet-based like the others though that might be there too. I didn't realize Thai was available until I started searching for number graphics and noticed that I was seeing Thai text, not just graphics on my screen and then figured out how they were doing it. The way it works is you use a META tag to specify a character set (each page of Unicode within a font has a different character set) and then type in the corresponding extended ASCII character that works for that page of the character set (the o with a pointy hat on corresponds to the Thai 4). Figuring that out plus figuring out how to use styles to specify a point size (I maxed out the FONT SIZE= attributes and the letters were still too small plus I didn't want underlines) is what took so long to add the Thai navigation characters.

Susan says she doesn't read my blog entries because they're boring. How could this be boring?

Perhaps if you mentioned Susan more in your blogs, she would read them. You could say things like, "I'll use a style sheet (Susan has a lot of style) for the whole Baja site..."

My Jeb-Log site is mostly a technical written mainly to my future, forgetful self. Stonegate is the place for stories about and for the family.

Ted, Visiting your pictures is like a trip through National Geographic magazine. They are really beautiful. Wish I had been there!
Love,
Mom

As a follow-up, I finally finished the web site. Today I added a map and some links to the American Cetacean Society for more information about some of the different whales we saw. Other than correcting typos as they are discovered I don't plan on adding anything else.

Yesterday I took Katie for her last vet visit for her knee. The doctor said she had recovered very well and was ready for full activity as long as it didn't bother her. Red Top Mountain here we come.

Anyway, as you will recall, this doctor had gone to the Galapagos around the same time I had, so I told him about the Baja trip. He had just gotten back from Hawaii but was thinking about doing Baja eventually. So I e-mailed him my website plus a link to my Galapagos trip. He wrote back saying it was a great site and that when he showed it to his daughter she said she remembered visiting my Galapagos site when she wrote a report on turtles. Small world.

Just for future reference, I found a better way to do the Thai numbers. Before I was using a META tag to use a certain subset of the unicode font instead of the default extended characters. In the source I would then type in the extended character like the o with a hat but it would show a Thai number on the web page. But then I found out that you can just specify the particular number of that character so I can type ampersand pound 3666 semicolon for Thai number 1 (it is the 3,666th character in the Unicode font). The downside is that doesn't work with Netscape 4.7. I thought that was a small price to pay. (If you want the characters to show up in a Word document you hold down ALT and type 3666, though on a laptop (without a number pad) it is better to type the 4-digit alphanumeric code (in this case OE53), highlight it, and press ALT+X).

Here's a very helpful page that dissects a lot of the layers of Unicode (though much of it doesn't work). Next time I might try Gurmukhi or Telugu numbers . . .

http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/