sw’as

My favourite browser has just had a mega upgrade. It is probably fair to say that the every day internet user doesn’t really appreciate the importance of web standards and compliance by web browsers. It’s for this reason that most people blindly stick with Internet Explorer. I could go into a big long explanation of why web standards are important but it would:

1. bore people
2. have been said better before by others
3. bore people

Any body using Internet Explorer on this site is subject to the ugly banner. If for no other reason than to avoid the ugly banner I ask you, please try Firefox. You won’t regret it.

Note: I’m currently experiencing early addopter tax in the form of many extensions not working. Of course new users won’t need to worry about his, though you will grow to know and love many Firefox extensions.

Get it now!

Ok, so the redesign. The site looks different but is it any good? Well I know it wasn’t up until Friday if you were viewing it in IE. Man it looked terrible (and it’s still not perfect). There were some other goals for the redesign as well most of which I think I’ve met.

The IE Thing

Please IE users. Do yourself a favour and get a more standards compliant browser.

If you’re using IE you will be getting this ugly block above the posts telling you you should switch to Firefox (my preferred) or Opera. The really neat thing is that this box is displayed simply through IE’s own flaws. Check out how.

Google Ads and Affiliations

You might notice that Google ads have reappeared on single post pages because I like the idea of making money from this website…but I don’t. My previous stint with Google ads, which lasted about seven months, earned me a grand total of US$4.37. I need to get to US$100 to cash out, so it could be a while. I have also added an affiliations page because I have been linking to heaps of Amazon products recently. But again it’s not for the money (I haven’t made a single cent out of Amazon yet), I actually like the products I’m linking to and it would be silly not to at least have the possibility of earning some money from my recommendations (if anyone follows them).

Other Redesign Goals

The other goals were basically:

• Main menu buttons should have cool as can be icons - learn to design icons
• Fluid design
• Summer/spring feel
• No specific times of day on each post
• More visible discussion - I need more people to comment

Well I totally failed on the first one. I did manage a fluid design so you should be able to view the site reasonably nicely at any resolution (although the menu will wrap an look ugly if you’re silly enough to still be on anything at or below 800×600). I think the design feels fairly summery, I could be wrong. Laura did ask If I wanted everyone to think I was a girl due to the overwhelming (it’s not overwhelming is it?) use of pink. I don’t, and I’ve since found a better colour but haven’t bothered to implement it. Thanks to the Time of Day plugin I now don’t have specific times of day for each post^[1]. More visible discussion has sort of been achieved with Brian’s Latest Comments plugin now populating the sidebar, but I still need more people to comment.

1. This did totally break my daily, monthly and yearly archives pages but luckily I don’t really use them. I also have more plans for the time of day thing but they might be a while. [↩]

I have come across some interesting bad behaviour from Firefox and the Flickr site. I recently started using Flickr after holding out for quite some time. And when I finally get around to doing my photo album upgrade and turning it into a right, proper WordPress plugin I will be trying to ensure people who use it can host their photos on Flickr if they wish.

Anyway, back to the bad behaviour. I have twice seen this in the past two days and I can’t for the life of me figure out why it might be happening. When I load a Flickr page (it doesn’t always happen mind you) from a link on another page like from here, this is the result:

You might notice a not-so-subtle blue tinge. Now if I copy and past that address into a new tab there are no problems at all; the page loads quite normally. But this is where it gets even more interesting, if I scroll down a little on the blue tinged page this is what I see:

That’s right, the blue tinge only affects the visible area when the page loads - nothing below that.

I haven’t looked into the code at all to try and find the cause; quite frankly I don’t have the time or energy. However, this still intrigues me. The problem doesn’t seem to effect IE or Opera. If anyone has any clue as to what this could be please feel free to let me know.

On a side note, late last night I got my very first comment form someone I didn’t know. Thanks greymullet. And he has a very good point too. I see all sorts of problems with their theory - and I really don’t have much idea about such things. Who knows, maybe it would have worked IF THEY COULD GET IT INTO ORBIT!!

It took me a while to track greymullet down. I simply couldn’t believe he had found my site out of the blue, and he hadn’t. He must have linked from a comment I made on this post from Michael Heilemann. So there you go.

If you are viewing this in Internet Explorer you will probably find that some really werid stuff is happening to the menu when you run the mouse over the top two links in the menu.

I’m working on it. BUT in the mean time GET A BETTER BROWSER!!. You need to: