12/24/09

The "front page" now contains a week's worth of postings, rather than just the most recent day's output. Patronage is low (since the debacle), so I am making it easier to see what's going on here for readers who visit but occasionally. I would like patronage to improve, so tell a friend.

JB

11/30/09

I decided that the marquee announcement of new articles looked a little tacky or kitschish, so I have abandoned that idea for a "Latest Posting" format. From now on the latest posting will be displayed in the main "frame" at startup. If more than one posting occurs in a day, then all posted on one day will be displayed until the next posting day.

JB

11/19/09

Well, hooray! Finally, I have written a design coding that seems to work more or less the same across the landscape of known browsers. FYI, if you are a geek, I was having seemingly insurmountable problems with my CSS file, but as these things do eventually, something clicked in and MSIE began to behave and so did the seven dwarfs.

Constructive suggestions about the design (or rendering on your computer with your operating system, and your browser) will be accepted gratefully. Write to "ironmtn (at) jamesrbrett (dot) com".

JB

11/14/09

I have just test-viewed this new website design through the following additional browsers: "MS Internet Explorer," "Firefox," "SeaMonkey," "Lunescape," and "Safari." The rendering in MSIE is imperfect; the rendering in the others is acceptable, but not as good as in "Opera." MicroSoft continues to program its browser to accept non-standard HTML encoding, which is now twenty years later a problem rather than an advantage. I stopped using over a year ago.

I have been very happy with "Opera," after several months with "Firefox" (which crashes too often on my computer). This website is optimized for "Opera," which I heartily recommend to you for its speed, versatility, and relatively small footprint on the CPU. Opera is used widely throughout Europe. It has an internal email utility, which however I do not use.

I tried "Orca" for a while, too, but although it is faster than any of the others on my computer, it has some critical flaws that made it undesirable for my purposes. I did not launch "Orca" to test the website because of its critical flaws ... an aggressive "default browser" program.

I removed "Netscape" from my computer since it is the least improved browser over the past several years. Too bad, too, because Netscape twenty years ago was the best.

JB

11/10/09

My previous postings can been viewed at my OpEdNews archives page. There are about 150 postings recorded there, many of them headlined at that website. A similar archive of my writings is also available at my American Liberalism Project archive page. In both archives I no longer or never had access to html versions of the postings, so the labor of reconstructing the IronMountain archive is pretty daunting and substantial work on that probably will not take place before the first of the year.

JB

11/8/09

The previous presentation of the Iron Mountain website was destroyed and all archives in that website were destroyed with it. We do not know whether the disaster was an accident or a deliberate attack. I suspect that it was an accident caused by a loose canon at WordPress, the company providing the destroyed website software. In any event, we have decided to go without the frills of RSS and Comments, but believe we have a stronger and less likely to be hacked website. We are now beginning the laborious process of copying website essays printed at other websites back to Iron Mountain. This will take a while, so please be patient. We believe that about 98% of essays presented at the old version of Iron Mountain are retrievable. I doubt we will fetch up all 94 of them.

JB