I just finished taking A List Apart’s 2008 Survey for web professionals. If you’re one, you should too!

Not to be confused with stinky feet, sticky footers are a CSS technique whereby a page footer always appears at the bottom of the page/window, even if the content of the page isn’t tall enough to fill the window completely. (For you HTML-phobes out there, normally all of the content on a web page flows vertically one element after another, meaning that your page “footer” can potentially end up in the middle of the window, with a bunch of blank space below it, if your page content is too short. Not to be confused with Too Short.)

I have seen sites whose owners had solved this problem, but as it’s never really been an issue for me (since I never have too little content to fill a page, I guess!), I haven’t bothered to dig into the solution, until today, when I needed to for work.

The Man in Blue (also known as Australian author and self-identified “web technologist” Cameron Adams), has posted an elegant solution, which has also been floating around in various forums. Read more »

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.