Liam The Lemming's "Hey Look At Me" website


Wow. Visitors. There's a novelty.
Hi everyone. *waves invitingly*


You're probably wondering what the point of this site is. Well, it kinda has more than one.


Firstly, it's a wee bit of a showcase for my skills. I can do HTML, I'm fairly nifty with CSS, I'm pretty decent with ASP (well, I'd have to be, otherwise the content retrieval mechanism would be a bust). Oh, and plentiful JavaScript, leading to the behaviour of the dropdown, the PNGs appearing properly in IE5.5+ and other bits and pieces.


Secondly, it's a way of proving to myself that I can actually do stuff on my own. I've been meaning to build a website for ages, and I'm finally getting my act together and finishing it off.


Beyond that, it's a website all about... well, me, really. Bear in mind that it's not supposed to be a masterpiece of formality, so the content will lean very much toward the casual - almost like your average rambling journal.


(Hmm, I really need to get that blog search sorted out. I know I can do it.)


Regardless of the content, however, it shows how comfortable I am with web technologies. Having said that, if you're viewing this page, it means one of three things:


  1. You're using a browser which doesn't support Javascript and cookies and the document.getElementById Javascript method
    2. 

  2. You've disabled either JavaScript or Cookies, or both
    3. 

  3. You're using a browser my code doesn't recognise as being standards-compliant.


So, what to do about that? Well, I anticipated that there would inevitably be browsers out there that I hadn't heard of, or that just plain didn't support current W3C standards (eg Lynx), so I incorporated a fallback mechanism.


You can read more about it here. Simply put, I render this page first, then I check for JavaScript, cookies and the getElementById method. Here's how it goes:


Do we have JavaScript?

If so... can we write a cookie?

If so... does the browser understand the getElementById method?

If so, write a "standards here!" cookie and reload the page.


Now... lets see what browser you're using... *gets out magnifying glass*
You seem to be using uh... I can't actually tell. *scratches head*.
Jeepers. Is that even an actual browser?
Congratulations. You've stumped me. I have no idea what you're using.
I can't tell what browser you're using - it could be anything, and I've done some pretty exhaustive checking.


It's not Lynx or Links. I can smell that coming a mile off.


I can get every flavour of Netscape. Even the icky tasting ones like NETSCAPE 4. (Urgh!)


MSIE is blatant, as is Opera.


KHTML-based browsers like Konqueror and Safari are easy to spot, as are Gecko-based ones like Firefox.


I can even pick up on stuff like Mosaic.


So what the hell kinda browser you're using is beyond me.


Which is why you've got no flash-bang prettiness. No Javascript, no CSS, nothing dynamic. Nada.


If your browser can actually handle that, don't just sit there. Write and tell me! I don't want to leave any browser behind if it's  up to the task.


And if you know and I don't, I need you to tell me.


So tell me.