TheWebPixie Diaries

 February 7, 2002
Thursday
What a chilly, foggy morning! It almost seems like winter.

The toughest thing about learning CSS, especially on your own, is that when you return to work on page you were practicing on earlier you find that you've learned so much since the last time you worked on it, that you need to re-do the whole page!

Lately I have been focusing mostly on controlling color in CSS studies. It's probably time to start on the next CSS code that I might to expect to use a lot.

 February 6, 2002
Wednesday
The January "spring" finally left and we got a bit of ice to try to drive in. North of here, around the town of Moberly, it was much worse. Power was out for days and there was lots of damage to trees and utility wires. There isn't any kind of weather that lasts very long in this part of the country though. Today it was sunny most of the day with some scattered drizzle/flurries now and then.

The websites where I've been practicing the new web-weaving techniques are beginning to take some sort of shape. They've multiplied too, as I'm sure they will continue to do. Right now these "practice" sites are at:

I didn't realize there were so many in the works! That may not be an exhaustive list of the sites I've been practicing with, but it's a fairly representative sample of the different techniques that I'm currently learning. Putting them here looks like an easy way to help me keep track of them! I suppose I will be spending more time here in the future.

 January 28, 2002
Monday
And the warm, sunny weather continues for yet another day! It surely can't last, and it's not supposed to. There have been warnings in the forecast for ice and snow west of here for days. Nothing has materialized yet, but the anticipated date of the oncoming storm keeps getting closer.

Whatever kind of bug hubby brought home and suffered with yesterday, I have today. Chills, aches, ick! I could nap all day and I just might. But first I'm doing a little work on the new website that I'm adding to my "portfolio." My brother has sent me some joke to add to that site, but I'll probably do that later. The jokes are pretty funny and definitely worth putting on the site. It's just that this other site is such a project. It has a very simple design and should be very simple to use, but making it that way is the task that's not entirely "simple."

The idea is to take a massive amount of information and make it easy to follow by arranging it in no more than 3 levels. That means that the "deepest" link is never more than 3 clicks away from the home page. I think I've got it, but I may have ended up with a 4 levels at this point. If there are 4 levels, I need to work on getting rid of one in addition to creating the content for the site itself. That's the fun part, in some ways, but also somewhat time-consuming.

 January 27, 2002
Sunday
Yet another "spring" day in January! Some people say that we've seen the only snow we're going to have this winter. I've also heard that some of the trees are starting to bud. This tends to alarm many of us, but I got a different perspective the other day from a man who grew up on a homesteaded farm. He has lived the past 50 years of his adult life off the farm and working in the city, but he's continued to maintain the working farm.

He believes that unseasonable weather is good for plants and crops. He said it's hard on a plant to produce abundant fruit year after year. An occsional warm winter gives the plants a break when their buds form too early and freeze before true spring.

Maybe unseasonable weather is good for plants and crops, on occasion, but maybe not so good for people. Hubby is sick with something that's giving him chills and sapping his energy. I opened the window because it was so pretty outside and 30 seconds later started coughing and choking. Shortly after closing the window, all those lung spasms miraculously stopped.

If we needed an excuse to browse and surf, we have one. The pretty day looks very pretty from the window and the internet is full of interesting things to see, read, hear, and do. Here is a short list of the places TheWebPixies visited today:

 January 27, 2002

Sunday

Looks like some clouds are moving in so maybe this warm weather will soon go back to something more winter-like. Haven't checked the forecast lately. It's changed every time that I do check it, so it's hard to draw any conclusion from what the weather service has posted.

Checking some of the links to create this new website, I've stumbled upon some links that might be good for the MMFEHA site. One is a video about germs. It might be useful as something for the members to offer as a resource to the people they inspect. Really, though, it turned out to be a cute video that would make the point to a different audience perhaps. It's fun to watch (kind of), but not necessarily something for a website maintained by a professional public health association. Then again, maybe it would. Perhaps we'll just have to poll the members and find out what they think.

Those clouds didn't seem to hang around for long and now the almost still full moon is high in the sky. I checked Weather Underground to see if that was Jupiter shining closest to the moon and it turned out that it was! Too bad it's so close to the moon that we probably wouldn't be able to see its moons if we got out the telescope. Maybe early next month will be good for viewing Jupiter's moons. That's something that's checked out easily enough!

Here are some of the other web sites TheWebPixies visited tonight:

Cool Jupiter applet
AstroNews Night Sky Report for this week
Links to Birding Sites



 January 26, 2002
Saturday
Today was another "spring" day in January. Except for a few contrails, the sky was a clear blue all day. Now at sunset, there is a pink glow all along the horizon. Even in the east, the horizon glows a purple-ish pink that fades to white before fading back to pale blue.

Every day has its own set of chores and Saturday is no different. If there hasn't been time before now, it's a good time to find coupons and grocery store specials before going out and spending too much money. One good place to find coupons for just about anything is coolsavings.com. That was the first place we tried today when we went looking for coupons and this is what we found that we thought we might use:

    A printable coupon for Gorton's frozen seafood (with a recipe too!)
    A printable coupon for Lysol disinfectant spray
But that's just to get started for the shopping we need to do soon. There were lots of other printable coupons for hair care products, candy, cold and flu rememdies, and more to browse at a later date.

 January 26, 2002

Saturday
It's a cool, clear evening with a bright, full moon. Tomorrow is supposed to be even warmer than today, but tonight it should dip into the 30's.

Tonight is as good a time as any to check the emails in the alternate inboxes that TheWebPixies have scattered here and there. The main WebPixie email address, of course, is TheWebPixies@hotmail.com. That's where we get our website email, but there's nothing new there this evening.

Another good one is evnet2@yahoo.com. Good enough, in fact, to create a small website for it tonight.



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