Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - Wed, 20 Apr 2005

Still haven’t heard back from Pensaworks (the Spd E-Letter authors). This is strange since they’ve always replied in a few hours when I have previously contacted them. In the meantime, I came across yet another problem (a somewhat different one) that their program causes me.

Their program runs on my web hoster’s computer. Every time I use it, the webpages it generates has a menu at the top with all the possible commands available. Now this menu looks very nice and is well laid out. But the trouble is that every time I load a page or even bring down a submenu, about 12 graphics are loaded. These 12 graphics each add a line about 700 characters long into my server log file. Using the package for about a half an hour the last few days added 3000 lines into to server log file totaling about 2.5 Megabytes a day! Instead of my log growing by 2.5 Megabytes, it grew by 5 Megabytes a day. I developed a database program a long time ago to analyse my log files, and I usually download them once every couple of weeks. But these extra graphics are adding to the logfiles so quickly that I may infringe on my 100 MB web limit on my account if I don’t download them every 4 to 7 days now.

I know there are a number of possible solutions: Turn off logging, switch hosting plans, buy more webspace, etc. I don’t want to leave my current plan since I’ve been grandfathered with unlimited bandwidth, which is almost impossible to find anymore.

So I decided to replace Spd E-Letter’s menu with a Javascript/XHTML/CSS menu instead that would be all text based. I found a few nice free-for-use code for menus, and implemented one that looked nicest to me in about 15 minutes. Then after it was all set up, I discovered that selecting a submenu would move everything on the page down to make room for the menu. When an item was selected, everything on the page would jump up again. This was terribly annoying and needed to be fixed.

Three hours later, I finally found the right option to add to prevent this. It was a “position: absolute” statement on the CSS style for the drop-down menu. Now that’s learning things the hard way!

So it only took 3 hours and 15 minutes to solve that problem after I was sure I had it cornered in the first few minutes.