Sunday 26 April 2009

Could they mean "Wish we were there"?

Like all self-respecting towns, counties, states, etc, the Canadian province of Alberta spends zillions of dollars trying to attract tourists to spend money in their area. Their Tourism Board has a great web site with a whole load of videos extolling the delights in store for the visitor. One of them apparently features a couple of children running across a beach with the sea lapping gently on the golden sand behind them. Nothing unusual in that, one might think. But Alberta doesn't have a coastline.

A curious local contacted the Tourism Board to ask the location of this beach, thinking perhaps that it was on a lake of which he was unaware. They eventually confessed that the beach in question wasn't actually in Alberta, it was 5,000 miles away at Bamburgh, north-east England!

I tracked down the Alberta Tourism Board web site in the hope of watching this inspirational video but when I tried to play what I thought was probably the correct one (they have quite a library), my browser told me that I needed additional plug-ins to do so. I tried to install the missing plug-ins, but still had no luck. Then it occurred to me that this might be because of the browser I use (Firefox) and perhaps I would have better luck using Internet Explorer. So I tried opening IE, but it wouldn't load because of a faulty program. I remembered that this had happened before, but I couldn't remember just when it went faulty so I didn't know what date I should use to restore the operating system.

This morning I had a brainwave - I looked at the newspaper site, and here is the video! Better still, I can try embedding the video.



Wow! It worked!

That reminds me of another frustration I have suffered during the last couple of days. I have recently redesigned the Lions web site and I have since spent some time surfing other clubs' web sites to see if there is anything further I could do by way of improvement. I noticed that a couple of them had a little Lions logo appear in the tab and in the address panel at the top of the screen. I wanted that! By looking at the source code for one of the sites I discovered the little logo is called a favicon, so I Googled it and found where I could get one of these little graphics and the code I needed to insert to display it. The code had to go into the index page, but our site is frames-based. All the same, I put the code in the index page - and nothing happened. I put it into one of the frames - still nothing. Then, all of a sudden, it appeared as though by magic, but just as suddenly, disappeared again.

I came to the conclusion that if I wanted a favicon, I would have to dispense with the frames, so I spent a couple of hours reworking the site. Success! And here it is.

2 comments:

(not necessarily your) Uncle Skip said...

I like what you have done with the club website. I may steal the favicon for Anderson.

(not necessarily your) Uncle Skip said...

Who am I kidding? I will steal the favicon