Here’s more stuff that web designers might find interesting and everyone else will find either irrelevant or won’t even notice.

I kind of liked the abstract image I had as the background of the pages in this new site design (which, if you’re interested, can still be found on my IE6 users’ “welcome” page), but I was never completely satisfied with how it was just shoved into the upper left corner of the window. So I took a horizontal cross-section from a very colorful portion of that design, stretched it out into blurry vertical stripes, and made it the new background.

But, you may notice, there’s a bit more to the background than that. Once again it’s the magic of PNG alpha channel transparency at work. Read more »

Further knocking Apple down from its pedestal (not that I’m not still a rabid fanboy as mentioned in the previous post), we have this further proof of my theory that although Steve Jobs usually has impeccable instincts, once he gets something stuck in his craw, no matter how outlandish it is, Apple simply must go through with it.

I’ve been thinking this a lot in regards to the grand trilogy of Leopard GUI design decisions that have been widely criticized by the world of Mac users (including myself): the translucent menu bar, the 3-D Dock, and the Stacks icons. But now here’s some proof that this really does go on (if you accept it as proof, which I do in this case), from the hardware side. The left side, to be specific, of the current MacBook line. I happen to be sitting in front of one right now, and I can vouch for this. The left side is “squishy,” right where those two screws are. They’re clearly not attached to anything! Therefore, they must be purely cosmetic.

Which is pretty ridiculous, when you think about it.

The new WordPress 2.1-based version of room34.com is here! I’ve been tinkering with this for about a month now so I’m very excited to finally have it online. And I think WordPress has really taken a major leap forward with version 2. (My loyal reader may recall that I had previously moved to an earlier version of WordPress, only to abandon it a short time later. Frankly, looking back I’m just amazed that I actually used it for 8 months; it seems like it was much less than that, but maybe that’s just because I’m thinking about how I only had Drupal running for about three days.)

There are still a few things left to do: some pages have missing content or broken links; I’m still working on a top navigation bar with dropdown menus (for now the navigation is buried below the fold in the right sidebar… look for Points of Interest and the various links that follow); and there are a plethora of WordPress plug-ins I’m eager to implement.

I’m also moving the photo albums of the kids over into Gallery 2. There’s a lot of work left to do on that, so I apologize to family and friends who are looking for photos. They’ll be back online soon, I promise! (I mean, “I hope!”)

And finally… in the time that I’ve been working on this, I’ve written a few other new blog entries (six, to be precise), which I never bothered to post on the old site. But they’re here, below, so read on!

Just a friendly reminder to clear your cache… or at least force a refresh. I’ve recently changed a few elements of the design of my site, including the background image. So if you’re still seeing the orange band on the left side (and, now, repeated behind the body of the page), please refresh!

You should be seeing a tiled background of isometric cubes (think Q*Bert), and various font styles have also been updated.

Not that you care. But if I wanted the orange band to still be there, I’d have left it!

I’ve spent the better part of the past two work days trying to figure out a weird scenario where a few elements in a heavily CSS-based page layout are inexplicably shifting a few pixels to the right. It is generally happening in pages that have content in the left column, whereas pages that do not have content in the left column are displaying normally. However, there are a few pages with empty left columns that still don’t display correctly. Comparing the source code, I discovered that some of the empty left columns nonetheless contain comment tags and those comment tags are what seems to be making the difference. But strangely, it’s the pages that have left column content or have completely empty left columns that are breaking, whereas the only ones that are not breaking are the ones where the left column block contains only comment tags.

Once again, the mysterious Microsoft voodoo amazes and confounds me.