Troop 53
Website Information

Technical Information

The original Troop 53 web site was built in October, 1997. At that time I had no clue what it took to build a site. Our Committee Chairman and I just decided that it would be cool to have a Troop 53 web site. So I downloaded some software and learned as I went. A local ISP provided a meg of server space and that, along with some fancy linking to my personal server space at AOL at the time, comprised our web site. In fact, a good bit of the original material used on this site came directly from our old site (thank God for CSS and SSI!).

Eventually we outgrew the server space we were allotted and started looking into how we could expand. The "nix" was put on the "free" web sites such as Geocities and Tripod. A domain name was the answer to our problems. After some trials and tribulations (including being taken for over $150.00 by one hosting "service"), troop53.net was launched in August, 2002. Now there are acres of server space in which to play and access to all kinds of server-based goodies that we couldn't use before. I have had a lot of help along the way — many people were willing to share their knowledge and resources — and we now have a site that outstrips anything we could have dreamed of in 1997.

This site has been, and continues to be, a learning platform for me and I am always trying out new ideas and techniques. Although these things are tested before being let loose on the web, things can go wrong — sometimes horribly. Please, if you find something that's broken, doesn't work, or is otherwise screwed up, let me know!

I used to test our old site on 3-4 browsers before uploading any new stuff. I have pretty much given up on that now, although I now check things out on my iPhone just to be sure it's compatible. First because our logs show that the majority (60+%) of our site visitors use the latest versions of Internet Explorer (most of the rest use Firefox). Second because I have simplified the structure and style of our site and made it relatively browser-neutral. And third because the latest versions of currently popular browsers seem to agree a lot more on presentation than during the IE/Netscape Navigator war of the late '90s.

The HTML on this site takes advantage of some of the capabilities of the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox, IE, Google Chrome, and Opera, although it should degrade fairly well into older versions. Because JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and eXtensible Markup Language (XML) are used, some things may not look the same or even show up in older versions of these browsers or in alternative browsers and OS's. For the most part these differences only affect the presentation of the content, not the content itself.

Most of the pages on this site are now "XHTML 1.0 transitional", a few are still "HTML 4.01 transitional", and I have recently started incorporating "HTML5" form attributes into this site. I have found out that declaring the DTD (Document Type Definition) breaks a couple of (admittedly non-standard) things so I have not actually declared DTDs yet. But, DTD declarations being the exception, most of the pages comply with XHTML standards. The Cascading Style Sheets used on this site comply with CSS 2.0 standards (with a bit of CSS3 thrown in for fun) with the exception of the properties defining the colored scrollbars (one of the things that breaks when declaring a DTD). I find it a bit odd that IE has had the ability to display colored scrollbars since version 5.5 (1998?), Opera 8.x+ does as well, and the W3C has not seen fit to include them in a CSS standard yet. Not that the W3C should ever standardize something just because Bill started it, but it is a neat effect. And since more than 70% of the world uses Internet Explorer it has become a de facto standard. However, the more I use Mozilla Firefox and Opera the more I'm tempted to trash the colored scrollbars, declare a DTD and be W3C compliant in both the HTML and the CSS.

Having problems using/viewing parts of troop53.net? See this Help/FAQ page for possible solutions and answers.

Thinking of building a web site for your Troop? Or thinking about a makeover for an existing site? See these helpful hints & tips — well, I think they are helpful, anyway. I have 10+ years experience in building web pages/sites and, although I still have a lot to learn, maybe my successes and failures will help someone else.

If you have any questions regarding this site or have any suggestions for improving it, please contact me!

— Kevin Mahoney