Category: News
Shaking Things Up (a little)
Some of us in Lawrence felt the earthquake centered near Pawnee, Oklahoma, about 250 miles away, a little after 7:00 (CDT) this morning. I was in the kitchen and didn’t feel it. I heard what sounded like small hail or big water drops hitting the roof and the metal vent pipes up there. This seemed strange, as the sun was mostly shining, hardly any clouds. I looked outside and there were no water spots or hailstones on the pavement. While pondering this and wondering if I was really awake, Becky came in and asked if we just had an earthquake, because she felt the bed shaking. I turned on the local radio station, which was broadcasting from the farmer’s market, and reports were coming in from people who said they felt an earthquake. The folks at the farmer’s market didn’t feel it, though. After listening to more of the callers, it sounded like most of the people who felt it were in their beds; people who were up mostly noticed ceiling fans moving back and forth, or things on wall shelves rattling. Apparently, bedsprings help transmit the quake motion to a body lying on it. As for myself, I decided the quake had shaken the cottonwood tree enough to cause a bunch of cottonwood nuts to fall out onto the roof. As the day wore on, I forgot to go out and confirm this hypothesis. I know, cottonwoods don’t have nuts (do they?) so it would’ve been dead branches or something. Hey, the squirrels have started hoarding for winter, so it coulda been nuts, or acorns!
It was a beautiful day, but we didn’t get out to enjoy it, as we both felt like shit. I puked up my breakfast and morning pharmaceuticals, and Becky’s neck and back hurt too bad to do anything. So it goes at the old folks’ home.
Redesigning the Website
April 10, 2017
Genealogy, General, News
Comments Off on Redesigning the Website
John
FYI, I’m in the process of redesigning the Chappell Family Website. Originally designed in the early 1990’s, I’ve upgraded from time to time in order to keep up with developments as HTML progressed to new versions, now HTML5, and as stylesheets were adopted and advanced, now CSS3. We always had to deal with different monitor sizes and pixel densities, but the range was mostly from 800×600 pixels to 1024×768 pixels, though some folks had larger monitors. With the advent of the “mobile web”, however, the new catch-word became “responsive”. Web pages now have to “respond” to screen sizes ranging from 320×480 (mobile phones) to desktop monitors and flatscreen TV’s. Google, of course, is a major driver of “responsiveness” due to its control over search results. It now prioritizes “mobile friendly” websites – those that are designed to look good and be user friendly on smartphones. Many websites are now designed on the “mobile first” principle – make your initial design for smartphones, then add whatever is necessary to make it also work on larger screens. So, now we have to design web pages for viewing in smartphones, small tablets, large tablets, laptops, desktops and flatscreen TV’s; not to mention wrist watches. I’m not even trying for watches. :eyepop: :boggled: :faint:
So, I’m making The Chappell Family Web Portal a “responsive” website that hopefully looks okay on everything from phones to flatscreens. However, there are a lot of pages here, not even counting blog articles. Since hardly anybody visits this site, anyway, there’s not a lot of pressure to get it done. If you happen to be one of the few visitors who drops by these days, you’ll find some pages are fine in your smartphone or tablet, other pages not so fine yet. As for this blog, it would be easy to make it mobile friendly by simply switching to one of the thousands of prefab responsive themes that are available, but it’ll take some work to make it look like the rest of the website. I’m trying to retain the old “look” as much as possible.
I wanted to let y’all know what’s going on, because I decided to go ahead and launch new pages as they become “fit to print”. If I wait until it’s all done, well, who knows if I’ll even live that long! The Ancestry section of the site is getting priority. I’m always hopeful that some as yet unknown (to us) relative will find the site and get in touch. It’s really really cool when that happens, and I wouldn’t want a distant, or near, cousin to pass us by because our site wasn’t mobile friendly.
John