A quick note about Dive Reports
Any reports gratefully received, about diving or things vaguely associated that would make interesting reading, and not just for 2008, past years reports are also relevant. Just give me the text and pics if possible, and I can put it all together.
Also if anybody would like to comment on experiences with their diving equipment, this might be of interest to our fellow divers. Constructive criticism only please.
LaureB, Webmaster, August 2008.

Thursday 16/10/2008
I have been trying to get php to run on the Virgin Blueyonder web site. This is because it would be useful to be able to use php in the web coding if necessary, although at present the emphasis is on JavaScript. An advantage of php is it's server based, so it runs on the server machine, not on the client's (user's) browser. So clients do not need to have JavaScript on their browsers, although I think that most people must have this these days, still.
Anyway, I am no php expert so started playing around with some examples in a book. Loaded them onto the other site, anderlen.com and they worked fine. Loaded them on the Virgin site (anderlen.co.uk) and they wouldn't. So looked on the Virgin help and it says php will run, gives an example which runs, says they don't support it but it should run. Look in some of the Virgin coding and it's used there.
So get on to the Virgin tech support; they were very helpful and after a long 'phone call which included a lot of asking around apparently, they said nobody there knew anything about php and the only info was on the web site. I said that this does not even work so what else could I do. They replied talk to Customer Relations and I was transferred over. Another very helpful person could not help so said someone who could would ring me one evening. They did and I explained, they did not know anything about php but could transfer me to Second Line who would be able to help. Another very helpful person who after explaining again said they did not know anything about php and had not had any training either so could not help.
So that's it folks. There is nobody in Virgin Media (and I've talked to almost all of them except Richard himself, and I doubt he knows about php) who knows anything whatsoever about php, although their website says it can be used and their example works, and they use it in their coding. So don't use php in a web site that will run from Virgin Blueyonder. And this is from the Country's only supplier of hard wired cable internet.

Tuesday 7/10/2008
The website has gone fixed-width at 1000 pixels with the side columns at 150 pixels each. And background colours have also been put in to make things look a bit smarter. This could not be done by html alone and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets, apparently) had to be used. On reflection and looking at the World Wide Web Consortium site at www.w3c.org, W3C The worldwide Web Consortium , some of the html I used to start with is now not supported (deprecated), for instance the font tag, and was never intended for page formatting anyway. So when I introduced CSS formatting, the width became easily controllable in both Internet Explorer and Firefox. I now need to incorporate CSS throughout the whole site in order to make the formatting more controllable. This will be an ongoing task in my spare time (ha ha!).

Although some popular web sites use a fixed width of 1000 pixels, I am not sure this is the best setting because low resolution monitors will not display the whole width, which is annoying. Of course, if it's properly programmed, the web coding finds out what resolution the client is using and resizes accordingly. But that will have to wait until I find out how to do it !

Immediate testing showed that Firefox did not handle background colours as expected, and the "" had to be removed from hex numbers. Firefox only recognises #FFFFFF whereas IE will use this or "#FFFFFF". This lead me to look at how to control colours on a web site and various experiments with JavaScript.
Want to see a table of pretty colours? Then try this table of colours with their RGB (red green blue) decimal codes . It may take a few seconds to run so be patient. Note that the starting ones are dark because there is not enough light at 64 0 0, the starting value. 0 0 0 is black. This table produces 3072 colours, or 12 x 16 x 16. By special request I might add some coding so that it will display the hexadecimal codes instead of the decimal ones. (Done, hex and decimal now, Webmaster 19/10/08).