Zzot!

A couple of days ago I finally checked out my current site on my PC at work. Sure, I could have tried IE7 through the magic of Fusion, but I don’t have my History of Internet Explorer VM on my MacBook Pro. I like their products as much as the next geek, but seriously — where the hell is my snapshot manager?

Anyway, my website. I learned something important when I looked at it in both IE6 and IE7. Okay, I learned two things. First, the background was more peculiar in IE7 than IE6. Strangely, the background was doing what it was supposed to in IE6. In IE7, on the other hand, the entire page flipped from the main background to the footer background whenever the top pixel of the footer was above a certain point.

Second, the color was wrong. If your monitor’s color reproduction matches the one I have at work, the simple, light green gradient is gone, and The History of Human Nausea expressed as a 182 byte PNG takes its place. Otherwise, things looked okay. I haven’t decided yet whether I’m going to switch to colors that degrade gracefully or just declare certain monitors as too lousy to bother with. I’ll probably fix the IE7 issue though. Eventually.

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Aside from the normal messing around with my style sheets, I added an early version of a Pepper I’m working on this week. I had a QuickTime checker in there before, but it was triggering the information bar in IE. Sure, “works in IE” isn’t exactly my driving concern here, but still. Let me know if you see any new¹ errors, warnings, or lost goats wandering around my website.

Speaking of IE, I haven’t looked at my latest style sheets in IE, so the whole place could be an unintelligible mess for all I know. Visually, I mean. You know — for different reasons than it usually is.

1. …or are “still seeing old” for that matter. [↩]

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More random tinkering with my website:

• Upgraded to the latest point release of WordPress.
• I switched to a more orthodox site layout, instead of the bizarre, half-assed crap that I had going on before. Consequences (intended and otherwise) include:
  • More stuff “just works” than used to, including almost anything related to how up-to-date stuff is (which hopefully will have more benefits than consequences).
  • I retired one of my private plugins, which served only to make part of my screwball setup work.
  • For the moment, authentication isn’t done over SSL (as it should be).
  • CSS files (or anything else belonging to my current theme) are no longer served over SSL (as they shouldn’t be).
  • You should have seen the mess that made of my live-preview in MarsEdit.
  • Spammers seem to be getting far less confused on the way to my form submission URL, resulting in a meteoric rise in the length of my spam queue — sorry, anyone trying to comment on my site who doesn’t have my e-mail address.
• I switched anti-spam plugins. Nothing against Spam Karma 2, mind you — it’s quite good, I just wanted to check out Akismet.
• Retired another one of my private plugins that now duplicates a core feature.
• Switched from WP Cache 2 to WP Super Cache, because the former wasn’t working properly on my site. Why cache a site that nobody reads? Why not!

Update: April 30, 2008

Found another one:

• All permalinks in my feeds have been invalid since I did this. I thought the only thing of consequence I had broken by not moving Mint properly was its up-to-date link — I was wrong. Bird Feeder was using the old hostname in the URLs it constructs.

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I’ve been messing with my site again, so don’t be shocked the next time you go to the actual web page. The color scheme is almost certainly not final — its just some random set of light-on-dark colors produced by fiddling with the color picker in TextMate.

Aside from the obvious throwing stuff around the page willy-nilly and splashing geegaw colors on everything, features include:

• A Tag Cloud. I was getting a lot of threatening phone calls
  from the Web 2.0 police for not having one, and my
  cat just couldn’t stand the stress any longer.
• Breadcrumbs. Sometimes. They don’t work properly in pages yet.
  In fact, they don’t work properly anywhere other than date
  archives and single entries.
• Asides. You wouldn’t know from how things look in the feed,
  but my site presents asides differently from regular posts.
  Oh, and I might start doing them.
• The footer no longer claims I haven’t written anything in two
  years. Then again, maybe I haven’t written anything in
  two years. It’s hard to tell sometimes.
• What little of consequence you could formerly do from my
  archives page you can now do from every page. So don’t
  bother going to the archives page to do it. You don’t
  need it. And it isn’t one to go to.
• Broken Stuff. I don’t know what or where, but I assume there
  is some. And there’s probably twice as much of it for people
  who still use IE, although I doubt any of them read my
  blog.

Site Info | Tagged Asides, Color, TextMate, WordPress | Permalink | No Comments

Okay, I rebuilt the site again. Since I didn’t just copy the theme over, there will likely be some formatting quirks. On the plus side, since Wordpress is one-click installed now, hopefully we can stop counting the lag between Erwin updating his blog and me updating mine in months.

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Apparently my About page has been broken for a while. When I killed the Markdown plug-in for my WordPress install and edited all my posts back to straight HTML, I apparently forgot to do the same for my pages (in the WordPress sense of what a Post is versus a Page). So my About page was a holy mess. Now it is legible again.

In other news, I was thinking off-and-on this week about adding some plug-ins that modify the comments system,¹ but decided to hold off until there’s a non-zero likelihood of someone using the comments system other than as a freak accident.

Oh, and I messed around with the PHP engine that WordPress runs in, and as a result things should be a bit peppier.

1. Gravatars come to mind here… [↩]

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This evening, exactly unknown days after adding myself to the waiting list, I received my Google Analytics invitation.

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I went through all my (published) entries last night and changed them from Markdown to straight (X)HTML, and fixed the various attached images while I was at it. There shouldn’t be visible changes, but if something is wonky, let me know.

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Most or all of the PHP on my website is running via FastCGI now. This shouldn’t really effect anyone, but I’m curious whether it shows up in my database usage stats from DreamHost.

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Feed URLs are (hopefully) getting redirected, but entry URLs are not; I just modified the permalink fragment of all the old posts en masse, so the old and new should be the same URL.

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