This isn't the first change I've made in one-and-a-half years, but it is the largest as I've created an entirely new page, 'Fun Things', and I've also started to edit my old pages to feature actual thumbnails that link to full-sized images in order to reduce load.
It's shocking to think that almost a year has passed since my last homepage update (although I have added a few things that went unnoted since the last announcement). I am going to add a photography page since that's my latest hobby. It began when I borrowed a DSLR from a friend of mine about two months ago, and I'm now using a Nikon D7200 with a Nikon AF-S 18-300mm f3.5-6.3 lens. I'm not very good at photography, but I'm trying!
Two more audiobooks. One is an English translation of Hsu Chih-mo's famous poem Second Farewell to Cambridge; the other is an unfinished excerpt of his essay The Cambridge I Knew.
I added two news audiobooks. One is on the formation of the Great Eight-Island Country (a flattering name for Japan); the other is on Buddhism's introduction into Japan during the Nara period.
Why did I make a new website? Wasn't the old one fine? No! I'm a terribly silly man who leapt into creating that website without a care in the world. Oh, if only I knew about 'frames' when I was 19! The navigation bar —a clumsily constructed thing— was assembled with basic HTML and duct tape that was written directly into each page. I'll explain this in the clearest manner I can: each webpage is built using a computer 'markup' language called HTML; from these .html webpages you can load elements from other pages —such as .css, .js, .php, or even other .html pages. The navigation bar is something that you will update frequently, and it ought to be displayed on every page; for your own sake, you must reduce the required maintenance of your website to a minimum. One step to reducing this hassle is to reference a single document that will act as the navigation bar in all your other pages.
How does one do this? In my case I'm using 'frameset'. If you look at the source code of my website you'll notice that it's very brief. This is because the only information immediately viewable is actually the code for index.html (this is the page the internet accesses when loading samzpoketoo —the true homepage, if you like). index.html establishes the layout for the website, which is divided into three segments: a 'sidebar', a 'banner', and a large section called 'main'. It commands that within each of these frames another webpage should be loaded: nav.html, banner.html, and home.html. This means that if I ever feel like updating the navigation bar, or the website's banner, I only have to change a single webpage —unlike the old website where I had to edit everything!!!!
It isn't perfect, but it satisfies me. The website functions because the links written on nav.html include the line target="main" which demands that when you click a link it will load the content in the 'main' frame. What happens if you force the link to open in a different manner by, say, opening it in a new tab? Well, it loads the page without any of the frames. What you end up viewing is the naked structure of the page, without any of the amenities that make it functional. At any rate, it's a much better foundation than the one that preceded it.
Matthew 7:24-27To provide a little further clarification: if you click the navigation links normally, you'll never actually leave index.html. You're reading the contents of home.html within a frame of index.html. If you click on 'Audiobooks', you'll end up viewing audiobooks.html within a frame of index.html. That's how frameset and target ="main" work together (with "main" being a variable).