HTML5 – Update

Not a major upgrade but I have tidied up the code and made the site HTML5 compatible. I am not sure if this adds anything or has any advantage but it keeps my coding brain working! A few CSS terms have become obsolete but nothing major the most difficult bit was getting the site map table to validate at W3S.

I have also altered the menus slightly so that they work better on Android tablets, iPads and probably phones. They now stay open if you tap them, the items are perhaps a bit close for large fingers but the extra space at the top prevents most of the auto triggering.

W3C Validation

New Look – New Name

I decided that it was time for a change… The old CIGN Workshop site has been around since 2007 with only a few minor updates. This time I decided that a complete new look was in order and set to making all the necessary changes to the site. The main change is re-writing the CSS stylesheets, there are two of these, one for the main site and one for the WordPress pages. I also decided to change the name to something slightly more meaningful.

Welcome to the Journeyman’s Workshop, if you have visited before nothing has been deleted, in fact it’s all still in the same place. The main changes are bigger pages and different colours (or colors if you are into CSS or American). The menu is also bigger so that I can add some more pages without falling off the bottom of the screen. At the moment the Models tab is rather sparsley populated, alright it’s only got one item but more will follow. I am off to the workshop now to make some!

A journeyman is a term not used much these days but used to refer to a craftsman who had completed his apprenticeship and was then free to move around improving his skills in different workshops in his quest to become a master craftsman. Well I did an apprenticeship a loooong time ago. I have a lot of travelling yet to do to achieve a reasonable standard. A master craftsmen?… ah well!

CSS Menus

It was pointed out to me that some people are still using Internet Explorer 6 as a browser and that the menus on the website do not work. I must admit that I had deliberately ignored older browsers whilst writing the site but just in case I have added some additional navigation that doesn’t rely on CSS to work. Why IE6 is still in use remains a mystery, it is after all over 10 years old and never was standard compliant. Even Microsoft are trying desperately to persuade users to upgrade. I have been using Firefox for ages but when writing the site tried it in several other browsers. It all seemed to work OK which begs the question what else could you use for menus other than CSS. OK, you could use Javascript but that can be switched off in the browser but come to that so can styling be switched off. Short of doing everything in PHP there seems to be no surefire way of doing things. All that said I think I will just stick to the CSS and rely on the hope that most users don’t turn styling off and don’t turn Javascript off either. Hopefully the extra navigation will solve any problems for those tied to ancient technology.

Here At Last

Grumpy Old ManWell the CIGN Workshop blog is up and running. It’s only taken me 3 years to get here! My excuse is that I had to find out how to integrate WordPress into the rest of the website and at my age things get forgotten quicker than they get learnt. Now of course the problem is to find engineering type things to blog about. I may of course just have the occasional grumpy old man moment. Please feel free to join in, no no not just the grumpy bit, all comments and ideas are welcome. Any general comments about the site, model engineering or anything else for that matter can be added to this post. If you would like to post something a little longer, contact me either here or there is an e-mail link off the home page menu. Cheers John