Archive for the 'Web Design' Category

I have added support for category-specific RSS feeds (actually, they were there all along; I’ve just ‘turned them on’). Each category listed in the site sidebar now has a corresponding feed icon. Simply click the icon and you’re set to subscribe to that category’s feed. I’m not entirely happy using the RSS icon here, and I may switch to using a purely text link (removing the category post count in the process).

I have squashed a few ugly CSS bugs here at this site:

• Internet Explorer 7 should no longer show a horizontal scroll bar on every page
• The italicized text in the header should no longer be clipped on the right
• Font sizing rules in the comment form have been improved

I am aware of several serious IE-specific bugs over at Born Geek, and I’ll work to fix those ASAP.

I have finished migrating Born Geek to WordPress 2.5. Read more about it over at the corresponding news post.

This weekend, I hope to migrate Born Geek to WordPress 2.5. I’ve gotten tired of having to deal with the quirks of Movable Type, and I think WordPress has evolved enough to support what I want it to do. Performance issues should be interesting to watch, though I intend on employing the handy WP-Cache plugin to help out. Hopefully the transition will be a smooth one, but expect some down time at one point or another. All my Firefox extensions, along with the update manifest, will remain up so that updates remain available.

For some time now, Firefox has supported an experimental CSS technique for rounding border corners (-moz-border-radius). The rendering engine in Firefox 2 does a barely acceptable job with this, though the rounded corners don’t appear to be uniformly sized, nor are they anti-aliased. Cairo, which drives the rendering engine in Firefox 3, does a much better job at handling the rounded corners, and the results are quite nice.

As such, I’m offering some ‘eye-candy’ to those users who visit this site with either Minefield or a Firefox 3 beta build. Those users will now note that code blocks (pre elements), as well as comment blocks, have nicely rounded edges. The end result looks great, and I hope you agree.

The Acid3 test for web browsers has been released. Drunken Fist has a number of screenshots that show the failure rate among the various top browsers. There are some really interesting results from the tests:

• Safari 3: 39% success (latest nightlies are up to 87%)
• Firefox 3: 59% success
• Firefox 2: 50% success
• Opera 9: 46% success
• IE 7: 12% success
• IE 6: 11% success

Safari is the surprising top dog in the list, but what I find most interesting is that Firefox 3 (which passes the Acid2 test) only hits 59% in the new test. I would have guessed that being Acid2 compliant would mean being nearly Acid3 compliant. Apparently, that isn’t the case. It looks like web browsers still have a long way to go in the standards race.

I’m in the process of tweaking the theme at this site. Specifically, I’ve made a number of changes to the comments portion of each page; it seemed a little too cluttered to me. I have also removed the post navigation portion on each individual post page. Does anyone use that? If so, I’ll put it back.