David's Astronomy Pages Web Site

Images Sessions

Home Page

Images (S574)

	Web Site Creation
	Web Site Style Changes Jan 2006
	New Domain & Html Refresh 2015

Web Site Creation

Web Site was created and first released in December 1999, under the name "David's Astronomy Pages" and has been regularly updated since that date.

The web site is a direct copy of the html pages that I use on my home computer for organizing and presenting my astronomical images and observations, allowing me to access my astronomical resources from any computer connected to the internet.  Of course a side benefit is that I can share my hobby and astronomical observations with others. 

Home Page Picture (1999-2005)
	Composite image of a number of celestial objects taken with film camera Moon Orion Star Trails Comet Hale Bopp Solar Eclipse (Aug 1999)  Jupiter

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Web Site Style Changes Jan 2006

Home page was completely re-styled in Jan 2006.   (See old page)

Home Page Pictures (2006)
	Image of myself next to my Roll-Off Roof Shed Observatory (original colours converted to blue scale), overlaid onto a  CCD Image of part of a star field in Auriga near IC 405
	False colour image of M109 in Ursa Major (2006-01-01). (original image)

Addition modifications where made to styling at the top of individual web pages.

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New Domain & Html Refresh 2015

The Astronomy Web Site is in the process of being refreshed and moved over to a new domain.

New Domain :

Through 2014/2015 my web site began reaching around 300 MB in size, exceeding the web space size and bandwith provided by my ISP account with PlusNet (250 MB).  With frequent email compliants from my ISP and with no growing room for putting up videos created from my All-Sky Camera  I'm therefore decided to move by web site to a new host (justhost.com) which provides larger webspace (50 GB) and higher bandwidth. 

I'm taking the opportunity to use a new domain name for my site  www.astro-richweb.net

For the time being a 250 MB subset of my Astronomy Web Site will still be available at the original web location www.richweb.f9.co.uk

Updated HTML :

For many years I've used Frontpage 1997 and later Frontpage 2000 for building the web pages used on my site, and consequently comprises a mix of HTML 2 and some HTML 4.01.  Whilst Frontpage has a nice user friendly interface, it is was discontinued by Microsoft many years ago and does not have any design support for HTML 5.  Whilst web pages still display ok in latest version of Internet Explorer (11) and Safari, they don't display fonts in the manner original intended.   With some 870 separate pages a degree of non-uniformality is also apparent.

I've therefore decided to refresh by website to use a more up to date Web Builder and to adopt more recent W3C standard.

For the time being I using Web Expression 4. Like its Frontpage predessor, Web Expression has also now been discontinued by Microsoft, but it is free and has reliable facilities for replace htm code and tag based on rules and for compatability testing that allows me to move away from pre-HTML 4 code.    I don't like the design view. Whilst I can understand that it could never represent the WYSIWYG view of every browser, I wish it would get a lot closer and would at least use the font size from CSS or at least a smaller (more correct) representation of 16 pt default size.

The process of converting 870 pages is a slow one, even though by workflow is speeding up. Large amounts of work can be achieved using a set of global replacement /deletions. The use of CSS (cascading style sheets) is allowing me to build in improved uniformity across the site and will make updates in style easier to make.  However some manual manipulation is required to fully migrate each page.

For the time being I will bring the code up to the '4.01 Transitional' standard:

The one incompatability to the 4.01 Transitional standard is that I continue to use a Frontpage Web Component to display the Last Modified Date in the footer of each page in my chosen date format.  This is because the code is just one line, once the alternative document.modifed is not in desirable format and I haven't yet adopted a cross site solution to reformatting the document.modified date.  The code will need to be some 15 lines long.

For time being I'm reliant on using <Center> tags to see tables centered in the pages in Web Expression 4 design view. Unfortunately the software doesn't recognise the HTML 4.01 Strict methods of aligning tables using either <div style="text-align:center"> or   <table style="margin-left: auto;margin-right: auto;">

I'm not yet happy in moving to HTML 5 standard as the attribute 'name' is not permitted for the <a> tag which has always been the traditional method for creating bookmarks. Web Expression 4 doesn't recognise "id" identifier as bookmarks in Design View, which makes it harder to build hyperlinks, other than by using the 'code' sheet.  This is noted to be an issue with other web software that I've tried.

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