Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

Today is a low-posting day. I’m doing some coding on the site, adding a feature—and relearning a lot of CSS lessons I had forgotten. One of the nice things about the site is that I haven’t had to touch the CSS stylesheets in almost a year, but things have gotten a bit rusty in the [...]

Following up on an old thread, the reason that MSN Search thought my pages were in Chinese and other languages rather than English was a problem with the charset specified for my pages. My site used to specify its charset as Macintosh: <meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=macintosh”>. Unfortunately, MSN’s search crawler doesn’t understand this charset. So [...]

Safari 1.2 is out. Along with all the new features touted on Apple’s site and revealed on ThinkSecret, including enhanced navigational options, resumable downloads, and support for LiveConnect between JavaScript and Java applets, it has what is, for me, the most important feature of all. It supports font-variant: small-caps. Let me repeat that: it supports [...]

Anita was kind enough to point out that I hadn’t bothered to set background or text colors in my new lean mean stylesheet, which makes the page look kind of funny in Netscape 4 or in any browser where you can set your own background color. This is an easy mistake to make when you’re [...]

Interesting article at StopDesign describing real work experience in getting CSS layouts to work across platforms. As those who have been reading the Web Design department through my last redesign will attest, this is a non-trivial challenge; some apparently easy CSS styles will work well in one browser while not working at all in another. [...]

I wanted to fix the new design so that it read well in Lynx (and by extension in other non-graphical browsers, for instance screen readers). After all, Day 10 of Dive Into Accessibility is to present your main content first, and one of the virtues of my previous design was that it did just that. [...]

I made some minor changes to the main stylesheet today to improve the readability of the site. In keeping with some of my recent reading, I kept the changes simple and almost entirely typographical. I had already increased the leading between text lines; to break up the flow and call out the post titles a [...]

I just cleared up a funny problem that I’ve had with my site on IE6/Win ever since the redesign. Only folks who were leaving comments via the Discussion Board or my coeditors would have seen this one; it doesn’t affect most users becauase I generally don’t use tables in my content, at least not tables [...]

I really should hang out one of those old “under construction” signs on this site. I keep finding new ways to tweak and optimize both the HTML and the CSS on the site. The under construction part? It may look funny unless you refresh your browser to force the style sheet to reload. Today’s tweaks: [...]

I have, I think, put the finishing touches on another element of the new design for this website: the print stylesheet. One of the things I wanted to do when I first transitioned this site to a CSS based design was to optimize the print experience as well as the online experience. CSS, through using [...]

I finally got around to putting in proper HRs in my CSS and in the sidebar. The redesign uses a fleuron from the Cronos font (in which the other fleurons and my page title are set) where a horizontal rule would normally go. Of course, this looks pretty silly in Lynx. So I turned to [...]

Scoble says that the Radio trackback feature (which is implemented identically to the Manila implementation on this site) makes his site fail validation. Frustrating when a useful feature like that has to be turned off, but I understand the pain; I’ve been working on validation myself. At this point there are still a bunch of [...]

I think I fixed the CSS bug that was causing my site to crash IE 5 on Mac OS X. The offending rule was for list items inside unordered lists inside the .navContainerSide class, which are specified as floating—apparently having floated list items breaks IE 5. I used the Comment hack to hide the offending [...]

My new site design appears to crash IE 5 on the Mac, and I think I know why—it looks like a problem with the custom list CSS that I use to show the category buttons in the sidebar. If I suppress that section of the sidebar, the page loads, but the same code doesn’t render [...]

I think that most of the work on the redesign is done. As you can see, the site now sports a new logo, new fonts, a different design, streamlined navigation, some new pages, and a bunch of other goodies. So what’s left to do? There are always a few things. I think there may be [...]