This week has been sunny and yet my tomatoes refuse to ripen. I think this weekend, I’m just going to have to give up, pick them all, and line my kitchen with little green tomatoes. We like to think that the cats won’t decide to go bowling with them.
In other more nerdy news, the Fall issue of Computor Companion is online.
Today was a power nerd day, but it was good in the long run. And it made me appreciate the power of the Internet. This morning I was faced with a technological problem. I needed to strip font formatting out of 1,283 Web pages that we are redoing. (Yeah, it’s a BIG Web site.)
For those of you who aren’t into HTML coding or Web page development, the formatting mess I face is a lot like the difference between using and not using styles in Microsoft Word. If you set up a Word document with styles, you’re rewarded with a consistently formatted, readable document that’s less likely to crash than one that’s been formatted with endless formatting codes. (Of course, most people don’t use styles, and I’ve spent way too much of my life fixing bad Word docs.)
In any case, Web pages are the same way. Most people now use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to format their pages. The bad news is that getting an old web page that’s filled with font tags into the land of CSS can be an extremely painful process.
So there I was with 1,283 pages of font-formatted HTML. Yuck. The Dreamweaver help is incredibly unhelpful and I’ve been wondering for ages how you can strip font tags out of Web pages. We’ve worked on a number of sites that have this problem and in the past, I’ve searched online to no avail.
But today, I typed a search phrase (remove font tags dreamweaver) in a search engine, and magically, there was a page with my solution. More than one even!
So the moral of the story is: when the online help lets you down, try the Internet 😉