New format (again)

We’re trying a new format at allpar – as seen in http://allpar.com/model/jeep/patriot.html – which is described mechanically in this weborial article: http://weborial.com/how-to/center.shtml … the hardest part was making it work in Explorer. I don’t think it’ll work in IE6, but most people are on IE7 now, and it will work there, without harming IE6.

The idea is to make it easier to read the pages, which in a wide browser can be daunting. The width is a big wider than I’d like, but it accommodates most tables and photos. To make it easier to hold your place in the articles, I’ve also increased the line spacing quite a bit. I had a border originally, but I dropped that for a cleaner “white space look.” You can see the original format at that Weborial page, with the borders.

This takes a few second per page to install, but with 1,280 pages, I’m in no hurry to sweep the entire site. New pages will be created with it, old pages will get it when they are updated. In a way this will provide a “pre-May-2007″ check so you can see how long a page has sat without updating! It also will help going forward because to make it work I have to make each page conform to the current web standards, and tell them to use UTF-8 character encoding.

I did try doing some en masse but it didn’t work quite as well as I’d hoped it would…

I’m also trying to relieve some of the load on the server, which for some reason seems to be a bit more stressed than in the past despite having a much faster I/O system and more RAM. It’s probably something to do with having other domains share IP addresses. Apparently there’s a shortage of IPs now…