Although I was relatively happy with the most recent design on this site, I just found it to be too cluttered once all of the detritus of my actual blog posts got thrown into the mix. So I’ve taken the same basic layout (including my ongoing issues with clear: both which I just haven’t had time to resolve) and stripped out most of the visual elements: I’ve replaced the pungent green gradient background with plain white; I’ve removed the light green background on the sidebar; I’ve changed the background of the nav bar to extend across the page and given it a splash of the gradient color removed from the rest of the page; etc.

It’s all a bit plain now, of course, but that’s kind of the point. However, the design will be evolving over the next few weeks as I work out a proper solution for the header area (even including, perhaps, the glorious return of the “34 photos” gimmick I was doing a year or so ago, now that I have a camera in my pocket at all times, and can snap more images of the number “34″ around the city).

I know you care!

Update: Guess what. Screwed up in Internet Explorer. Awesome. More hugs ‘n’ kisses for Ballmer. Looks like it might just be a simple z-index thing, though, so I’ll fix it once I finish running the obligatory Windows Update.

A recently-departed (as in left for another company) coworker stopped by my desk on his last day to drop off a backup CD I had burned back in 2001. Today I popped it into the drive to see what curiosities lurked within. I was delighted to discover one of my trademark “Miscellany” folders, with a bunch of random stuff in it. Unquestionably the most interesting artifact was a screenshot of Microsoft’s website, as it appeared in 1994.

I’m simply at a loss to explain this design. Clearly many most all web designs from that early need to be cut a little slack, and I doubt any of them have truly aged well. But even through that lens, this site is inexplicably hideous.

I’m certainly not the first person to look back in time and mock this design, of course. But “usability guru” Jakob Nielsen used it in an article he wrote back at the time, and it’s still lingering on his site with a new introduction written in 1997. (Frighteningly enough, if the conclusion I draw from my brief perusal of the long and boring highly usable article is correct, he’s actually praising this design.) Personally I think Nielsen’s views are overrated, and that if he really knew as much about usability as he is supposed to, his website would look a lot different (and he’d also realize he no longer needs to cater to the bandwidth limitations of those running 28.8 kbps modems — but I digress; besides, these guys rip into him much better than I care to). But it’s still an interesting look back in time.

But not in the way that the Cheat is off the hook.

I fixed the IE6 CSS problem I ranted about yesterday, and it was perhaps one of the more satisfying solutions I’ve encountered where IE is concerned, because all it required was that I remove a few lines of CSS code that turned out to be unnecessary anyway.

My approach to CSS is one of building a solid page structure and then fine-tuning the details until I have exactly what I want. A side effect of this is that sometimes I leave in unnecessary definitions along the way. If they don’t alter the output in the browsers I test (Firefox always, Safari often, IE7 at least once or twice along the way), then it’s good.

But in this case I had an entire definition that was completely unnecessary. It wasn’t hurting anything in Firefox or Safari, but it was doing all sorts of crazy crap in IE6. Naturally, in such a situation, I blame Microsoft. Read more »

Drat.

As I was assembling the current site redesign, I took extra care to ensure that this time around it would be compatible with IE6, as much as a I detest it. I got rid of all of the 24-bit transparent PNGs, opting instead for minor design alterations that could rely instead upon 8-bit PNGs, non-transparent 24-bit PNGs or JPEGs. I even tested the code for the navbar to ensure that it was properly floated and that the drop-down menus worked.

But then I must have gotten into a fine level of finessing the placement of certain objects or… something. At any rate, I’ve done something in the past few days that, now that I bother to check, apparently breaks the navbar in IE6.

I’ll have to futz some more and try to undo whatever I did (and hope it isn’t something that’s critical to the perfect layout in every other browser out there). In the meantime, my apologies to my one regular IE6 visitor. (You know who you are.) Oh well, at least I have a regular visitor.

OK, that was an incredibly lame title; I guess I’ve just read too many headline puns in Entertainment Weekly over the years.

Anyway, I’d like to take a moment out of my ongoing obsession with translucent menu bars and open source operating systems (OSOSes?) and turn to the “dark side,” if you will. (That’d be Microsoft.)

A few weeks ago I took a training course for work. The course was not actually on Office 2007, but the computers in the training room were equipped with it, and it did come into play a few times. This was my first exposure to this version of Office, and needless to say I was stunned (and not necessarily in a good way) by the radically altered user interface. Read more »