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Pure CSS2 Drop-down Menus. Drop-down menus without JavaScript? Enterprising designers like Stuart Robertson and Eric Meyer have created standards-based pull-down menus using the :hover pseudo-class to display other elements. By Andy King. 0529 [WebReference News]

Unfortunately all of these proof of concept menus do not support IE completely because of the sparse :hover class support. I still find www.gazingus.org use of a little javascript and css to be a more pragmatic approach.

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Geese on the lookout!

We live at a moment when our relationships to each other, and to all other beings with whom we share this planet, are up for grabs.

Carl Sagan

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Cleaning up the blog category pages

Today I worked on cleaning up the blog category pages. Radio is very inconsistent in the way it updates category pages. I set the theme and unset the theme to make sure no files were left on the community server. I changed the navigation items so that they referenced index.html. I seemed to get newer and more consistent results when I used specified index.html rather letting it default. Then I cleaned up some html 4.01 validation errors when I inserted links in the post. I did a lot of research into renaming categories. I got it looking better but I am not sure when the data will be truly consistent with my actions. The local server and the community server are still not in-sync.

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Mark Pasc, Kit and Stapler

I finally worked with two of the tools that Mark Pasc has kindly provided to the Radio community. They can be found at markpasc.org/code/radio/. I had been hacking around Radio trying to clean up some category web pages when I went back to his tools. I had installed them sometime ago but I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with them at the time. I first looked at kit and turned on the preference to allow me to past date my posts. I really wanted to force Radio to update the templates out on the internet since they were correct on my local website. I previously tried to publish the site and categories and was partially successful. One category got updated. While I was mucking around I checked out Stapler. It made more since this time when I read the help file so I set it up to read the news page at Legacy Farm. It worked so I setup the subscription in my news aggregator. That was cool! It gives me some ideas. While I was at it I realized that I was not subscribed to the default feeds for comments and errors so I set them up, too. That is when I realized some people had left comments. Oops!

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Styling Block Quotes

I finally implemented the Block Quotes styling Simon discussed in his continuing series on CSS. You can see it demonstrated below. For some unknown reason Simon used png files for the quote characters and the resulting file size was a little over 1 Kbytes each. I created my quotes images using the Century Gothic font and saved as a gif. They are a svelte 199 bytes.

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Seeing Islam as 'Evil' Faith, Evangelicals Seek Converts. At the grass roots of evangelical Christianity, many are now absorbing the antipathy for Islam that emerged last year. By Laurie Goodstein. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]

A nice article that is surprisingly even-handed on displaying the different point of views. I tend to side with Ergun Caner who says,

Apologetics is defending your faith, and polemics is critiquing others. A Muslim has the right to to worship Allah, and I have a right to stand in front of that mosque and tell them that Jesus saves. That's the hope for Iraq, the hope for Afghanistan.

I know most people who are curious about Christianity do not want religion stuffed down their throat. I think Rebecca Manley Pippert says it multiple times in Out of the Salt Shaker the importance of being yourself. Our humanity is one of the most important tools God uses to bring people closer to Him. Forced conversion is more likely to start wars than bring more people to God.

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Undelete

I decided to buy a server and workstation copy of Undelete from Executive Software. I think most of the functionality of this undelete software was included in Netware. That was one feature I missed when I installed my W2K network. I was surprised that M$ did not offer it but they never offered one of the best features of WordPerfect, Reveal Codes, either.