Blog

Site updates and anything else related to the technology of blogging and my site(s).

It’s still not my fault…

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Okay, first things first.

This is a personal website. I speak for myself, and myself alone: not for my employer, my friends, my neighbor, my government, my country, or anyone else. Just lil’ ol’ me. And, me being me, I will occasionally be a bit — or even more than a bit — of a boneheaded, ranting ass. I might even enjoy it. That’s just the way it happens every so often.

Now, I don’t mind at all if someone calls me on it — matter of fact, it’s a good thing that there are people who will call me on it when it happens. I’d hate to see where I could end up with an entirely unchecked ego! ;)

That said, IE still sucks, and it’s still not my fault. ;) However, progress has been made on that front, thanks to the absolutely mindblowingly incredible technical wizardry of Dean Edwards‘ IE7 hack, which uses CSS and JavaScript wizardry to beat IE into behaving like a modern, standards-compliant web browser. The hack has been installed on the main page of my site (with the rest of the pages soon to follow), and the difference it makes is a beautiful, beautiful thing. Many thanks to bethlet for reminding me of that piece of code.

Last night’s post was written in a fit of frustration (and really, one that I go through just about every time I work on a redesign when I get to the point of battling with IE). While my “screw it” attitude was a bit extreme (and probably wouldn’t really have lasted more than a couple days — I just shot my mouth off this time instead of stewing quietly until a solution was found), I fully stand behind the sentiments behind it. Other people have said it before me, and will say it again later on (though possibly with more tact). Outside of corporate-decreed lock in, there’s really no real reason to be using IE as your primary browser anymore, and there are plenty of benefits to switching to a modern browser.

However, as in the real world IE is (unfortuately) not likely to go away anytime soon, all ranting aside, I will continue to at least make an attempt at supporting it. I won’t code for IE, but I’ll at least do my best not to code against it, either.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. ;)

It’s not my fault IE sucks. Get a real browser.

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I expected this, of course, but it’s still a bit disheartening. I spend a lot of time working up a change to my site design, get the basics up and running, just have a bit of tweaking to do…and then I take a few moments on a break from work and take a look at it under Internet Explorer 6 for Windows.

And cringe.

And you know what? I don’t care. I’m not even going to bother fixing the various oddities that crop up under IE. It’s not worth the time, trouble, and headaches that it would entail.

No Internet Explorer

It comes down to this, quite simply: Internet Explorer sucks. It’s buggy, shares responsibility for many of the security issues in Windows, offers far to many ways for people to compromise your system, and doesn’t support modern web standards. Sure, I know that IE makes up somewhere over 90% of the web browser market, and I know that because of that, it’s quite likely that somewhere over 90% of the people who stumble across my site won’t be seeing it the way that they should.

I don’t care.

Thanks in part to the fact that I do pay attention to modern web design techniques and standards, people using IE are quite able to read my site. All the information is there, it’s just not presented how it should be. But that’s not my fault — it’s IE’s fault — and that’s not worth me worrying about.

Use a Better Browser

As proposed by Tim Bray, Eclecticism now joins the “Use a Better Browser” campaign.

If you were looking at this in any browser but Microsoft Internet Explorer, it would look and run better and faster.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer may currently have the largest market share, but it has been stagnating for a while. There will be no new Internet Explorer version until Microsoft’s next operating system. It won’t be available for several years and you’ll need to pay for Windows to get it.

Meanwhile, other web browsers have been innovating and are becoming more and more popular. Today, these browsers run faster and look better than Internet Explorer.

By using a better browser your experience will be better. Plus, you will help to foster a competitive environment in which browser technology can continue to innovate and make everyone’s web experience more pleasant and exciting.

So that’s that.

Get Firefox. Get Opera. Get Konqueror. Get a Mac and use Safari.

Just get away from IE.

iTunes: “Glory (Cajun Dub)” by K.M.F.D.M. from the album Glory (1993, 5:31).

Happy Birthday to me, new site design

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First things first: I’m 31 today. Woohoo! Go me. :)

Now that that’s over with, I’m also turning on the “new” site design. As I mentioned before, visually it’s only a partial redesign, in that I’ve moved it from a single-column layout to a two-column layout. Code-wise, however, it’s been redone from the ground up. The majority of the work is done though, aside from some work on fleshing out the sidebar and fine tuning things.

Of course, that means that there are very likely bugs. Feel free to post anything you might notice in comments, and I’ll get it taken care of as soon as I can.

(TypePad’s caching mechanisms may be playing games with my stylesheet — while the new stylesheet is in the system, they seem to be serving the old stylesheet. If things look completely wonky at the moment, that’s likely why, and there probably won’t be much I or anyone else can do until the servers catch up with the changes I made. Sigh.)

iTunes: “Difficult Listening Hour – 02v2” by Various Artists from the album Difficult Listening Hour (2000, 1:04:41).

List of Dangerous Bloggers

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Twilight Invasion recently posted a list of people who’ve been fired because of their weblog. Interesting to read the stories other than mine.

Apparently, this list should also include Stephen Stewart, though with only a post-by-post method of trawling the archives, I didn’t attempt to dig backwards through 18 months of posts to see if there’s a more specific mention on his site.

Anyone else?

Well, that’s one solution

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I love whatever algorithms Google uses for their AdSense program. Much of the time they’re dead-on, but every so often, you get some wonderfully bizarre and hilarious combinations.

For instance, upon reloading my page after adding my last post, I got the following set:

Google's Drinking Advice

iTunes: “One Week (Dave’s Big Beat Extended)” by One Week from the album One Week (1998, 6:16).

Watch what you blog!

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It was bound to happen — and realistically, it probably has been happening, just now we’re getting news stories about it — US intelligence agencies are starting to keep an eye out on weblogs.

Some blogs are whimsical and deal with “soft” subjects. Others, though, are cutting edge in delivering information and opinion.

As a result, some analysts say U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials might be starting to track blogs for important bits of information. This interest is a sign of how far Web media such as blogs have come in reshaping the data-collection habits of intelligence professionals and others, even with the knowledge that the accuracy of what’s reported in some blogs is questionable.

Still, a panel of folks who work in the U.S. intelligence field – some of them spies or former spies – discussed this month at a conference in Washington the idea of tracking blogs.

Personally, I think these guys are just trying to find an excuse for why Fark keep showing up in the CIA webserver logs…

(via Anil)

iTunes: “Little Horn” by Marilyn Manson from the album Antichrist Superstar (1996, 2:43).

TypePad IDs are TypeKey IDs!

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Has this information been made public yet?

Mark Pilgrim‘s b-links pointed to this post that uses Six Apart‘s new TypeKey comment registration system. Even before reading the post itself, I noticed the “sign in” link for TypeKey, and since I’m curious about how it is going to function, I figured I’d see if I could set up an account.

I hit the sign in link, and then went to the registration page. When I put in my usual login name, though, I was told that that ID was already in use. Since I hadn’t signed up for TypeKey previously, this came as something as a surprise to me.

Suddenly curious, I went back to the sign in page and tried logging in using my TypePad login — and what do you know, it worked! Nifty — apparently, anyone who uses TypePad to run their weblog auto-magically has a TypeKey login.

(Moments later…) Aha — apparently I wasn’t the first person to discover this: Michel Vuijlsteke pointed this out in the comment thread. Damn, and here I thought I was getting a scoop….

(A few more moments later…) Argh — David Ely beat me to it too. ;)

One downside I’m seeing right away: when I leave a TypeKey-authenticated comment, my name shows as “djwudi” rather than as “Michael Hanscom”, and I can’t seem to find a way to change that. Hmmmm….

So now the question becomes, when do TypePad users get to start playing with TypeKey on our weblogs?

Alexa website reviews

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I didn’t notice this last night when I was poking around with Amazon‘s A9 search engine, but Amazon has tied the search results into their Alexa website ranking tool with a little “Site Info” button at the tail end of search result. Part of what Alexa provides along with traffic ranking and site information is the ability to add reviews for the websites, in much the same way that people can post reviews of books, music, or anything else that Amazon sells.

Interesting. No reviews for me (not a surprise), but now that A9 is out and potentially sending more people towards the Alexa info pages, I may need to keep an eye out on that just to see if any pop up.

What did amuse me while looking at the info that Alexa has for Eclecticism is their graph of my traffic ranking:

Eclecticism traffic spike

Gee — can you tell when I got Slashdotted? ;)

iTunes: “Pick Up the Phone” by Swingerhead from the album Swing This, Baby! (1998, 3:07).

Ecto for Windows

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A few months ago Alex Hung, one of the regulars in the TypePad User Group, announced that he was working on a Windows-based application for posting to TypePad and MovableType-based weblogs that he was calling TypeWriter. Not being a Windows user I didn’t have a lot of use for this, but I watched his progress as he posted updates on his project in the forums.

Earlier this week, Alex, Adriaan Tijsseling, and Joi Ito jointly announced that they have joined forces, and TypeWriter has now become Ecto for Windows.

Congrats to all involved!

(via Boing Boing)

Kinja

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So all the buzz over the past few days (aside from whether or not Google’s e-mail service is an April Fool’s Joke or not) has been Kinja. Essentially, Kinja is yet another web-based news aggregator, this time with the stated goal of exposing more weblogs to people who aren’t already sucked into the weblog world.

Of course, I’ve signed up, added all the feeds I subscribe to (hooray for data export and import), and made my Kinja page public so that anyone can stop by and get an idea of what I’m pumping into my brain each day.

Being a long-time NetNewsWire user, I’m a bit underwhelmed…but then, Kinja wasn’t made for people like me, but rather for the “unwashed masses” who still think that USA Today and Fox News are the best places to get all of their reading material. Still, it’ll be interesting to see if this goes anywhere.

iTunes: “Open Arms” by Journey from the album Pop Music: The Modern Era 1976-1999 (1981, 3:20).