Blog

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

Working out the bugs

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I’ve been getting some great feedback on the new design, and it’s very appreciated. The kind words on the new look are always flattering, and pointing out areas that are confusing is wonderfully helpful. Things that make sense to me as I’m putting it all together don’t always fly in the real world, and I’m never upset by constructive criticism!

A ‘home’ link has now been added to the navigation bar for all the sub-pages. While I’d had the ‘eclecticism’ title linked back to the home page, it wasn’t terribly obvious, so this should clear up any confusion there. Besides, a little redundancy never hurt.

I’m going to need to do a little tinkering to the display of the comments. I decided to break with convention a bit and put the byline of each comment above the post, rather than below, which seems to be a tad disorienting. Breaking conventions is all well and good — doing so at the cost of usability isn’t. Fixing that is high on the priority list.

Next on the priority list will be adding a bit more space between individual posts on the main page and comments in the comment threads. I’ll need to figure out the best way to do that — because I’m using a display: inline; declaration for the h3 tags to set the border just around the text rather than across the width of the div, simply adding a margin-top: 10px; argument won’t work. I could simply add one or two p or br tags to add some lines of whitespace, but that introduces some unnecessary (purely presentational) code, which I’m trying to avoid, so I’d like to come up with a better solution than that. We’ll see how that goes.

How this page looks in Safari

Right now, the lowest priority is fighting with the skyline image at the top. If those of you that are seeing problems with the display of the image could let me know what browser/version/OS/resolution you’re using, as well as telling me that it’s ‘off-center’, it’d help greatly. I’m using Safari 1.0 on Mac OS X, at 1024×768, and the header looks fine to me. I also checked it in Camino (which should match with Mozilla or Netscape, as they use the same rendering engine), and it was good there. It was only in IE/Mac OS X that I saw any issues (and I haven’t looked into that yet). Unfortunately, my PC is dead at the moment, so I can’t test the site on PC browsers from home, but I’ll certainly be looking into it from work.

Anyway, I’m quite gratified that the design seems to be fairly well received, and that any bugs that have been mentioned so far are actually fairly minor. It’s about time I started exploring different ideas, and you all are helping me iron things out a lot. I’ll buy you a drink next time you’re in town. :)

Validation favelets

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Jeffrey Zeldman has posted two ‘favelets’ for easy one-click site validation. Drag them onto your browser bookmark bar, and with one click, you can run any page you’re at through the W3C’s beta page validation service. Very handy.

On a related note, every page of this redesign validated from the get-go. The single issue I ran into was with a link in a story earlier where I’d forgotten to escape the ampersands in the link. The ampersand character — & — should be coded in valid HTML as &, and failure to do so will result in broken validation. Unfortunately, because many database-driven sites use a URL format of http://www.server.com/option1=“sample”&option2=“sample” or some such, you occasionally need to remember to fix the link so that it looks like http://www.server.com/option1=“sample”&option2=“sample”. A minor annoyance, but not insurmountable. Once I got that link fixed, I validated without any further changes needed. Go me!

Well, would'ja look at that?

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And here we go, folks — step one of the new design. It’s not completely finished yet, as all I’ve got active at the moment is the primary content, but the rest will follow soon enough.

Update: Okay, I should have thought to check this first, but this redesign has just proven — again — that Internet Explorer sucks. This may or may not get fixed in the future — I’m tempted to just leave it as-is. I’m doing things correctly, dammit, and it’s not my fault that that program doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. Grrr.

Update: That’s it — we’re live. The only page I have yet to dink with is the ‘About’ page, but considering it’s 4:22am, I need to get to bed. All pages linked in the navbar now work, and there are even more choices for RSS feeds available (Full posts with comments, full posts without comments, and excerpts only). I still haven’t looked into the IE wierdnesses, but that will come. Maybe.

Another idea

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Another possible redesign

Work continues on reworking the design of this place. I think I’ve finally come up with something that I like, too — miracles never cease!

This time, I took some time to bounce around some of the sites that have caught my eye the most. Generally, they tend to be the exact opposite of what I’ve had here for a long time. Where I’ve had some sort of compulsion to present everything possible at once, all on the front page, I’m far more drawn to very sparse, open, clean designs. Yet, for absolutely no reason that I can come up with, I’d never made an attempt at that style.

So, this is where I think I’m heading at the moment. The navigation bar at the top will take care of all the extraneous crap. ‘About’ will lead to my about page, which will absorb things like my music and reading lists. ‘Past’ takes care of my archives. ‘Comments’ will catch the last n comments made (I’m waffling on this one, actually — it seems a little silly to have a page just for that, but it’s also really nice to have a quick reference of when someone’s said hello). ‘Elsewhere’ will handle both the blogroll and the Destinations feed (just how, I’m not sure yet, but that will come). And lastly, ‘Feeds’ will hold my RSS feeds (which I plan on expanding to include an excerpts feed, a full post feed, and a comment feed).

At least, that’s the basic concept to start with. As always, questions, comments and words of wisdom are greatly appreciated!

Update: A quick list of inspirations, code examples, and other ideas as I work on this. Links may be added here as I go.

Just an idea

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Possible design tweak

I’m tinkering with ideas for the design here — kind of fun to do, but it’s definitely not one of my strong points (something that’s driven home when I keep seeing people come up with designs like this). Part of what I’m working with is something to seperate out the sidebars a bit. As it is now, I feel like the three columns blend together a bit too much, there’s no real visual distinction. I don’t want to go back to the boxy-borders look I used to have to separate things out — while it’s extremely simple to do by adding borders in CSS, it’s not very visually interesting.

So this is one possible idea I was dinking with tonight. Not a major redesign, and it pulls the columns out on their own while still pulling the eye into the center where the main content is with the lighter color. I’m just not entirely sure I really like it. Too grey, maybe? Hrmpf.

Someday I’m actually going to come up with a good, clean, attractive design. Until then (and that day may be a long, long time coming), I’ll keep poking, prodding, and stumbling around.

Rule #1: Validate

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Having problems with the design of your page? Things working in one browser, but not another? It happens to all of us, and it can be pretty frustrating when it does.

The number one way to fix issues like this is simply this: validate your code.

As Mark Pilgrim pointed out back in May…

Newbie Designer posts a link to a test page, asking for help because it doesn’t behave as expected in this or that browser. Guru Designer replies, telling Newbie Designer that their page doesn’t validate, and that they should go validate their page before asking such questions. There is no further discussion; no further replies are posted; no one else is willing to help.

Why does this happen? Why won’t we help you?

The short, smart-alec, Zen-like answer is that we are helping you, you just don’t realize it yet. The full answer goes like this:

  1. Validation may reveal your problem.
  2. Validation may solve your problem.
  3. Valid markup is hard enough to debug already.
  4. Validation is an indicator of cluefulness.

There’s even a new version of the validator that gives more helpful error messages and tips to get them fixed, though it’s still in beta right now.

Bottom line: valid markup is a Good Thing™. Sure, it’s a bit of a pain, and it can take a little time to get used to the conventions involved in writing valid code. The amount of time, effort, and anguish involved in solving niggling little browser issues that valid code saves, though, is more than worth it.

(Oh, and in case you were curious — yes, this page validates!)

Oh, this'll be fun

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I need to print, read, internalize, and (possibly hardest of all) understand the [Apache mod_rewrite documentation].

Why?

This is why. If I’m understanding what I’ve read so far, everything I want to do can be done purely through mod_rewrite. But, as of this writing, I have no idea how.

This could get interesting.

Three hours later…

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You may have noticed that I’ve put a surprising number of posts up for this early in the day. That’s simply because I’ve spent the past three hours watching Windows XP chew through security updates, software patches, and other sundry changes to the OS. Running a web browser was about as intense an activity as I wanted to tax the machine with during that process.

Now, three hours later I can finally get to work doing what they pay me for — but that’s only because I got sick of watching a stalled progress bar, force-quit the Windows Update program, and told it to sod off. My security updates were done anyway, it was just chewing on some less critical patches, so I’m not too worried.

Frustrated, and quite willing to toss the computer out a window, if only I had one.

But not worried.

Fair and balanced

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Comedian Al Franken has a new book coming out soon: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.

In response, Fox News has decided to sue Al Franken over his use of the term “fair and balanced”.

So, in order to honor this fine legal milestone, and in the company of many other weblogs, this weblog’s tagline has now been changed to “Fair and Balanced”.

Feel free to join in the fun!