Geekery

Tom was good enough to send me two screenshots of my site that he took on his *nix box. Generally good results, but (sigh) not perfect. In any case, I’ve updated my browser compatibility chart with his submissions.

Thanks Tom!

My friend Kirsten e-mailed me earlier today, and one of the things she mentioned was that my website looks “completely different” on a mac and on a wintel box. This got me a little curious, as I try to make sure that things are fairly compatible across the platforms — with one caveat. As I mentioned in a post last July, I’ve switched my layout from a table-based layout (pros: works [mostly] in all browsers on all platforms; cons: kludgy, browser-intensive to render, and considered poor layout by current web standards). By doing this, I’ve more or less nuked the appearance of my site for older and non-compliant browsers, but I wanted the simplicity of CSS layout for site redesigns and to be able to say that I’ve got a truly compliant site.

However, as I know things can be a little tweaky from browser to browser on the two platforms, I decided to try a little experiment. I set up a link (the one mentioned in my previous post) that uses JavaScript to open a 800×600 window (considered the minimum necessary screen width for designing these days, as so few people run their computers at 640×480 anymore) with no toolbars or anything to get in the way. I then tested my main page under 10 different browsers, 7 on the Mac and 3 on the PC, to see how they appeared. The results (updated on 02.20.02 and 02.27.02) are in the rest of this post… have been deleted, as I didn’t want to bother with re-uploading all of the graphics to the new server. The end result was essentially that Mozilla-based browsers worked great, IE didn’t, and Opera, Omniweb, and iCab had definite issues.

This post is more of an excuse to post this link (assuming it works) so that I can do some work double-checking how my site renders in different browsers at a set window size. Feel free to ignore it.

Okay, the new search engine is installed and running. The pages don’t mesh visually with the rest of the site yet, but I’ll get that fixed up some other time — Candice should be over sometime soon, and I wanted to be done with tonight’s ‘geeking out’ before she got here.

I’ve just temporarily disabled the search function as I upgrade to a more powerful and full-featured search system offered by the same company. It should be back up within a couple hours at most (if all goes well). This probably means that noone will notice or care that it was down for a bit…but hey, I’m trying to keep things updated, right?

I went into serious geek mode for a few hours tonight (which, unfortnately, caused me to miss Enterprise because I got lost in code and didn’t realize what time it was until Candice called at 8:30pm) and have made a few improvements to the site.

There are two relatively minor changes to the Archives navigation box on the right hand side of the page. I shortened the monthly display list so that it takes up less space, and added links to the category pages that I talked about in my last entry. I also got the templates for my blog software adjusted so that the monthly and categorized archive pages match the look of the rest of the site — previously they were still using the default style that came with the software.

The most in-depth change is the addition of a very powerfull and full-featured search engine. There is a basic search box underneath the Archives links, and a link below that to a page that explains the more advanced search queries that are possible. Basically, it’s a full-featured, Google-style search function for my site. Pretty nifty!

I’ve also adjusted the colophon to reflect the addition of the new search script.