Miscellaneous
I've had the traditional Julian May experience on re-reading the Saga of the Exiles. I read volume 1 and was impressed and delighted all afresh. I ploughed through volume 2 happily enough. Volume 3 I skim read in a slightly bored fashion, gradually losing interest as one key character after another was either bumped off, or transformed into a small red jewel and left to meditate for 6 million years.

Volume 4 went back on the shelf unread.

So now I'm reading Olivier Butler's "Xenogenesis" series. Enjoyable, but I am slightly depressed by her view of humanity. I know people are inclined to be xenophobic and violent, but I truly believe that there would be a greater variety of responses to an oo-weird alien invasion, and that a smaller proportion of the population would be quite so trigger-happy. Still, I'm very grateful to Chris (winolj) for lending them to me.

Last week I had  a very good day in London with my bro and his family. The Tower of London is much more interesting than I remember it from a visit some 30+ years ago. The actors/interpreters added a lot - a skit about Henry's court life with lots of ranting, hair pulling and sword fighting, plus a long session of firing seige engines where my bro was part of the team that sent a water-filled balloon flying across the moat.

Saturday was spent with Wychwood, doing a little display at the Northmoor Trust (they manage Wittenham Clumps near Dorchester on Thames in Oxfordshire, one of my all time favourite sites). We did Saxon and Viking food in an attempt to lure people out of the Children's Food Festival and into the visitor centre. I did not see "Ray" (you know, Raymond...) but WW did manage to get themselves on the radio and into the Oxford Mail. Freya made cheese, we all made stew and flatbreads were also made and nommed. Hot though. I wore my spangly new nettle dress with the linen tablet weaving, partly because J&J hadn't seen it and they got the fabric for me. But it's hotter than linen, and my wool smokkr didn't help. But we survived, and then went into Oxford to find that somebody had opened a tap above the city. Sploshed through the rain and ate Noodle Bar tasty food, then quick drink in the pub before home to collapse.

Sunday we went to visit <lj user="purpleperil">. Al did lots of hard work dismembering a sofa and mowing the lawn, while Peril and I moved a few bits of furniture and then played with the KITTEHS!!!! Tabitha and Nicodemus are gloriously kitteny, very pretty, alert, playful and friendly. Also very healthy, bright eyed and bushy tailed! Nicodemus has not quite got the hang of windows though - there were several loud thumps as he charged into the (closed) french doors! I got him to sit on my knee at one point, but he promptly fell off, leaving a tidy set of four claw marks! Then Peril bought us chineefoo, bringing a delightful afternoon to an unexpected and delicious close.

Now it's time for me to get back to my old friend, Joomla. I *think* that at the close of play yesterday, I had pretty much got my template working. The wrinkle is that I want a fluid layout with resizable text, but for the menu/tools sidebar to have a width set in ems so that when you resize the text, the sidebar adjusts its size to fit the layout. Normally this would be a simple matter of a few floats, but in Joomla, the main content is squirted in as a bewildering variety of table (and css) layouts: each type of content (e.g. article, contacts page, links, newsfeed, blog, forum) is not unsurprisingly laid out differently. And there is a problem that IE6 in particular (but all browsers to some extent) tend to push the content down below the sidebar instead of next to it. The obvious floats layout failed - I think it might work if you had fixed width or fixed proportions for your page elements, but that isn't what I want. Brutally doing them as two table columns ought to have worked, but failed for the forum: it wouldn't expand to fill the area, and bits of it disappeared. Finally I got something working by dismembering the negative margins three-column layout from A List Apart, throwing one of the columns away and swapping the other from right to left. No really, that was the only thing that worked. And one of the pages STILL goes wrong in IE6, so I have written a loathsome hack to call in a special stylesheet for just that page. It's loathsome because if I change the name of the page, I'll have to change the php. What I would like is to detect the type of content, which I am sure is possible but I can't find out how and I'm out of time to fiddle with this.

Anyway, I am a bit nervous about looking at it this morning in case it's broken itself! Hey ho, off we go...