Weblog is changing to Seneea on Blogger

This blog, Whatever News Updates will be pulled down as of September 2010, but until then all blog entries relating to ClassNotes123.com which has been the predominate topic on this blog will be moved to the Seneea blog located on Blogger.

Updated Sitemap .xml Format for ClassNotes123.com

Today I reran a sitemap generator to update my .xml sitemap resources for the site. Part of the maintenance on the site which I have been lagging behind in lately, but as of this evening I did resubmit the new sitemap.xml to Google webmaster tools. My traffic has maintained a slight up-growth in July, although I have not been adding as much new information. All my focus has been on correcting the html and xhtml issues I’ve brought up in past blog entries.

Solar Power and Battery Problems, SATCOM

Three more homework problems and solutions added to the Satellite Communication class dealing with satellite power issues, and a remaining orbit geometry problem I left out in an earlier post. Spacecraft battery power demands are examined, also a problem looking at a spinner satellite designs solar power efficiency has been provided. These items are located at:

HW 12 - Solar Power
HW 13 - Orbital Geometry
HW 14 - Battery Capacity

xhtml 1.0 vs html 4.01 - My Head Hurts

The hands down winner in my case is xhtml 1.0. I know there’s a lot of debate out there about what Doctype to use, but after running into error after error with html issues, I’m finally mading the switch to xhtml 1.0 and wow, it works! What a concept.

Oh here’s been my dilemma; most of my site was coded in html and I made an initial error on my pages which causes the entire site to be viewed as html 1.0 transitional and an encoding scheme of windows-1252. I found my error and started the massive conversion over to html 4.01 and also fixed the encoding issue to iso-8859-1.

My thought process was simple. If my site was already coded with html tags, why go through the hassle of adding closing forward slash tags, such as page breaks, etc. Simple enough I thought, a few header changes and all would be good. Turns out I was grossly mistaken. Once I made the switch from html 1.0 to html 4.01, all the paragraph segments on my pages lost their formatting. Some worked in Internet Explore while others worked in Firefox. The fundamental problem is, html does not require you to close smart tags, even if you try to force it, sometimes it just doesn’t work.

In my stylesheet, I had my paragraph statement setting the up, down, left, and right margins using the div statement. In IE one paragraph would be ok, followed by the next paragraph; but in Firefox, because there was no paragraph smart tag closure before then next opening p tag. The second paragraph would be shifted over twice; that is it would nest the two smart tags together. Gurrrr! Not want I had intended.

So, in light of these really annoying issues I’m finally making the switch to xhtml 1.0 which does allow me to close the tag when I want, rather then leave it up to the browser. My advice, make the switch! It just makes sense. You get to control when things are open and when they are closed, it’s that simple. And let’s face it, I’m not a true coder by no means. I’m a hardware and EM guy so all of my discoveries here have been extremely painful to include a lot of WTF moments.

Cheers all.
ClassNotes123.com

Revisiting and Revising html 4.01 Code

Errors, and invalid code mixing between html and xhtml has cause me to stop in place with any new content development and revisit all the current uploaded pages on the site to make any necessary corrections. One big issue I ran into was the Encoding error that I detected using the w3c validation service.

Such a minor mistake, but often catastrophic in the coding world was the content-type declaration, where I had the following: charset=ISO-8859-1. Turns out in both html 4.01 and xhtml 1.0, the ISO in this instance can not be capitalized, it must be: charset=iso-8859-1. If it is not, web browsers will default to using windows-1252 in my case. So any formatting items maybe lost for this silly mistake.

I also unfortunately mixed both html and xhtml code which has caused a lot of errors, event to the extent where some pages are defaulting to the doctype: -//W3C//DTD HTML 1.0 Transitional//EN rather then the html 4.01 or xhtml 1.0 versions I had intended.

New Page Graphics for PLL Experiment

This weekend I added two additional pages to the phase lock loop, reverse engineered integrated circuit experiment, specifically two graphic files. I’m also continuing my efforts to correct many of the pages I had header issues with as denoted in a previous blog post. The new pages I just added are:

Phase Detector VCO Feedback Signal Graph
LM565 PLL Implemented using Discrete Devices

2009 Q1 and Q2 (early) Traffic Statistics for ClassNotes123.com

Two days early, but here’s the traffic statistics for my site. I ramped up pages and content throughout the first quarter of 09 and have continued to add pages over the past few months. Although, much of my recent efforts has been focused on optimizing pages and correcting some silly html coding errors which unfortunately are on just about every page. Oh well, on the positive side of things it provides me an opportunity to review each page and make any necessary changes.

As for the traffic statistics on ClassNotes123.com, there was a ramp up of visitors throughout Q1-09 followed by a predictable plateau in Q2-09. There was a slight roll back from the peak in mid March, which I’m attributing to the typical educational schedule in the northern hemisphere where most of my traffic comes from.