Code Style: Site log, July 2008

In this section

The Code Style site has evolved by gradual refinement and accumulation of features and content. This review is part of a fully backdated site log and archive that sheds light on when, why and how particular features were implemented.

This log is sometimes updated several times per week, sometimes with a long overdue backlog of items. Many log entries refer to the Code Style Java package that delivers the servlet services and utilities used to manage this site.

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Reverse chronology

CSS style guide refresher, 26^th July 2008

Updated CSS style guide section pages and site home page with stronger calls to action and updated the Code Style CSS article with additional introduction, new section breaks, example code and a re-arrangement of section on pure CSS layouts. Added a link to the Anchor Points: Cascading Style Sheets page, updated text, added new section headings, updated the section standfirst and boxout heading.

Removed synchronized blocks from FaqCategory and FaqQuestion classes which have been showing some category sort behaviour. Corrected a bug in the FaqSection class where the PreparedStatement for the doUpdate(Connection) method was assigned the wrong value for the primary key field. Added a check for a null parent Section to the FaqDataEditor class to help debug; throws a new IllegalStateException with a diagnostic error message.

Added a new set of answers to the font survey FAQ and regenerated FAQs with corrected category sorting.

Font survey

Created a new SQL script to produce a 2 column list of FAQ sections and their parents.

SELECT trim(parent_name) as parent, trim(section_name) as section
FROM section
ORDER BY parent_name, section_name;

Created a new PSFTP upload script for the text ad selector servlet and customer discount classes, with Windows batch scripts to run.

Text ad price adjustment, 19^th July 2008

Updated the text ad service pages with new prices and a new arrangement for right-hand boxout panel.

Font survey results without JRE fonts, 14^th July 2008

Retrospectively purged the font survey database of records of the JRE fonts Lucida Bright, Lucida Sans and Lucida Sans Typewriter, and re-issued the font survey results. These fonts are available to the font survey applet but will not normally be rendered in the browser through CSS rules unless they are also installed on the operating system.

Latest updates to the Code Style font survey results:

Windows font survey results
Mac font survey results
Unix family font survey results
Combined survey results for all platforms

Created a new subsection boxout for the Web fonts FAQ and increased the padding above the NewSection class of h2 elements:

.NewSection {
  padding-top:      2em;
  margin-top:       1em;
}

Excluded JRE fonts from font survey submissions, 10^th July 2008

Excluded JRE fonts from font survey applet submissions by adding them to the "Logical" fonts array for Dialog, DialogInput, Monospaced, SansSerif and Serif fonts, which were already excluded. The fonts installed with the Java runtime were incorrectly being included in font survey submissions, these fonts are available to Java but will not normally be rendered in the browser through CSS rules unless they are also installed on the operating system itself: Lucida Bright, Lucida Sans and Lucida Sans Typewriter. Re-deployed the font survey applet with version number 1.1.0.

Standard page layout for font sampler servlets, 9^th July 2008

Changed the FontSampler servlet header output to use the standard 3 column page styling and added the global navigation bar. The font sampler servlet pages are amongst the most popular landing pages for the site, but the minimal site navigation with the wide format page styling pages was not encouraging people to investigate the rest of the site. Made various other changes to adapt the sampler pages to the narrower layout and lead people through to the font survey results pages in particular.

Amended the standfirst text for ImageSample, removed back navigation link and added menu box navigation for the main font survey results and generic font family pages.

Amended the standfirst for TextSample and removed document level fragment anchor navigation. Removed pop-up comparison link, added NewSection class attributes to h2 headings to break the page up. Added menu box navigation for main survey results and generic font family pages.

Altered the font sampler style sheet, Sampler.css, to the new font image layout:

.FontImage{
  clear:            none;
  margin-left:      0px;
  margin-right:     0px;
}

Also amended the CSS note field in the AbstractSample superclass to use strong instead of em markup. Changed the standfirst text in CompareSample and added text ad and sponsorship boxes and added a menu box for main font survey results.

Extended font survey results for Linux, 5^th July 2008

Updated the font survey results, with a new full Linux and Unix font survey results page including results beyond the top 40.

Latest updates to the Code Style font survey results:

Windows font survey results
Mac font survey results
Unix family font survey results
Combined survey results for all platforms

Processed all content on the site to check, correct and standardise spellings and remove repeated words. Overall, 99 pages and FAQ items were affected by mostly minor corrections. Re-generated all FAQ pages with amended spellings and re-deployed.

Removed secondary "Why pay for premium content?" server side include from all premium content stub articles. Created new PSFTP and Windows batch scripts to upload premium content stubs only.

Previously on Code Style

These backdated pages record detailed changes to the Code Style Web site since July 2000, when development first got underway. Some pages may refer to documents or features that have since changed or are no longer part of the site, but the archive is checked to ensure there are no dead links.

Site log, origins to present

Month: Year:

For a summary overview, see the annotated site log contents.

July 2008 on Code Style