I’m working on a site called My Taipei Baby ~ Resources for pregnancy, childbirth and parenting in Taipei.
I really like O’s 150x800 banners. Have you gotten more clickthru’s on them than others?
I’d like to have the day’s/week’s weather forecast available on my index page. Do you know where I could get something like that for free, that will update it daily? I also plan to use Moreover’s free service for content, so I’m looking for something similar that offers weather forecasts; I thought Oriented had something like that at one time.
I’m actually adding realtime Taiwan weather (airports only) to the front page of ORIENTED this weekend. I’m using a cgi script however. Here’s the code: Nuno CRUCES
You are going to have to be sure that SSI is enabled on your server for this to work.
Regarding the banners – I honestly don’t know. Indeed, I fear it would take me some time and effort to figure it out! Incidentallly, we switched to the 150x400 banners, from the 150x800s because, well, I couldn’t figure out what to put in all that space
Finally got the code working , but here’s what I had to do:
[]My SSI implementation won’t pass parameters – so I had to add the ICAO airport code directly into othe script and reference the script sans icao= parameter
[]I couldn’t play with the time format – i’m guessing this bizarre format is part of the CGI.pm (or some-such module). Can anyone tell me what I can do about that? You can see the source code at the Nuno CRUCES link above[/list]Hope this helps
Why do we want a weather forecast? So we can plan our week, playdates, trips to the zoo or parks, plan for cold/rainy days in.
Gus,
Thanks for the help. Here I was feeling good about using some javascript, now I have to learn about cgi scripts?! No idea what SSI is but I’ll find out. And can I make a suggestion about links? Can you change the color so that they stand out?
How do you think we should make the links stand out more? Darkening them or returning the link underlining??
I’ve been playing around with CSS, but haven’t really spent some serious time picking an effective overall color scheme and format for the site.
Funny you mention Javascripting – I’m scared of that stuff! I actually think what Perl I do know to be easier to follow than Javascript
For a primer on SSI, try www.webmonkey.com – although I’ve never been crazy about the writing of Wired magazine, their webmonkey website is a good starting point for things.
Here’s the breakdown of the script. The code is a bit confusing.
($sec, $min, $hour, $mday, $mon, $year) = gmtime;
–GMT time in UTC.
$time =~ /(\d{2})(\d{2})(\d{2})/;
–parsed time elements from previous script call in the code.
$mon-- if ($1 > $mday);
$mon = 11, $year-- if ($mon == -1);
–modify year and month. don’t really understand why this is done.
$mday = $1;
$hour = $2;
$min = $3;
–replaces the gmt time with the time from the local area.
$time = localtime(timegm($sec, $min, $hour, $mday, $mon, $year));
–uses the perl commands to get the time date format. If you want to change the format of the display, modify the return data. In your case, just ignore all this code and use whatever code you are using to display time in the rest of the site and put it into the variable $time.
Javascripts are a bit annoying but useful in certain cases. It's good to check data integrity for forms.
Thanks for the tip on Web Monkey. Lots of great stuff for beginners like myself and I actually got my first lessons in html there.
Re javascript, I actually don’t know how to decipher any of that stuff; I just go to the freebie sites and copy & paste.
About links, well, you’d be surprised how many people don’t know that something in bold/underline is a link and they can click on it. I just thought a different color would help, maybe both color and underline.
Also, I thought of the jobs board… at the top are the links to Career-Oriented and Teaching Career-Oriented but if I haven’t been there in a while, I automatically scroll down.
If you use FrontPage XP, you can directly use MSN’s weather forecast on your web page. WITHOUT trying to figure out java or cgi scripts, that is. Hope that helps!
Is your website up yet? Am interested in as much info as I can get!
quote[quote]In your case, just ignore all this code and use whatever code you are using to display time in the rest of the site and put it into the variable $time.[/quote]Shoot! I don’t use time on other parts of the website – altho some of the scripts do so automatically (like the Jobs section and these forums) I once tried to write a time script that converted the time from Server time (Eastern Standard Time) to Standard Taiwan Time, and I failed miserably.
If there isn’t any easy fix for this, I’ll probably remove the line about time for now, and maybe wait till LUG.en or for you to get back
Hi Jennifer,
Your thoughts are well appreciated over here good luck in your website
quote[quote]you’d be surprised how many people don’t know that something in bold/underline is a link and they can click on it[/quote]Given this, I’d as soon as leave things as they are for now. Overall feedback remains positive.
I realize that ORIENTED breaks a bunch of usability rules. Yet I’d like to avoid using the underlining for fear that pages would look even more crowded than they already are. I thought lightening them would somehow distinguish links enough from regular text – but I’ll look into going the other way, and darkening links visavis regular text.
Folks,
Please keep the feedback coming – the more specific the better
I have Frontpage 2000, but I’ll look into it. Thanks for the tip.
The Taipei Baby site should be up hopefully, by Mar 1st. We had a pretty generic one put together last year on pregnancy/birthing; now I’m transfering that info to this new web, with other stuff I think expectant moms/new moms will find helpful.
It won’t be anywhere near the size of Oriented–I couldn’t possibly maintain it, newbie that I am. But I’ve talked to a few talented moms who will contribute in the way of short stories, articles, family-friendly activities, birth stories, doctors to avoid (such as the Mad Stitcher).
I’ll be sure to post when it’s up. If there’s anything you’d find helpful, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.
Jennifer
PS Gus, thanks for all you and the moderators do. This site is an amazing resource… I’m always surprised when people tell me they’ve never heard of it.
Please consider sending us a 150x400 banner when you are done – it would be great to do a banner exchange. If you’d like, and you won’t mind, i could even try to whip up something simple.
You should build a module to deal with the time difference. You have a few options:
1-change the time zone of the server to Taiwan’s and then just use localtime() to get the data and parse it to your liking. This might interfer with the forum and jobs since they might be using the system time and changing the time.
2-figure out how the jobs and forums are getting the time and use it.
3- build a new module using CPAN’s Time::Zone http://search.cpan.org/doc/ILYAZ/perl_ste/Time/Zone.pm
use the function to get the local machine’s offset from GMT and the offset from GMT for Taiwan. Add the two offsets to the time and you will get the time in Taiwan.
Hey Jennifer,
Thanks for the info. Sounds like a pretty good idea for a website. I’d be interested in hearing about creches/day care centres, especially english speaking ones! What do expat kids eat, the taiwanese kind of baby food, or plain old Gerber? As a first time mom-2-be, Taipei seems to be pretty daunting in this respect!
Looking forward to the website!!!
