Use Tables!

So, first stop: I finally got and pointed the domain name www.gijsk.com to this site. Wordpress has been updated to that effect, or so I think, and hopefully all you people’s DNS servers will be, too, within a few hours/days.

Seconds stop: I’ve published a convenience page with my patches and some handy-dandy xpi files. You might find it interesting, or so I hope :-).

Now I’m off to go packing and do some last-minute shopping for my holiday. I just checked in (and picked perfect seats) from my desk chair - SAS are great so far!

That’s right, Kubrick’s gone, and I’ve attempted to style the blog just like the rest of the site. I’ve tested it in Firefox 1.5.0.3, Opera 8.something and IE7. It works fine everywhere, as far as I can tell, except for IE which messes up and displays the sidebar on top of the content (instead of resizing content/sidebar properly) on lower resolutions (below 800×600). If someone has suggestions on how to fix that, they would be appreciated, but for now I’m done hacking on it. If you spot any other visual problems or whatever, please feel free to comment on those too.

To a server setup by a friend of mine (thanks skelm!). So far I’m on the subdomain http://gijs.codingo.org/ - I will be looking into getting a ‘real’ domain ASAP. I’ll also try to get around to redirecting archer, and in the end shutting down apache on that server. It’s better that way anyway - it’s a firewall, running a webserver too is just extra risk

Yup, I’m officially healthy again. No school yet though, except for my honours course in the evening.

So now I just downloaded IE 7. I kind of like it, I kind of don’t. Here’s what I don’t like so far:

• It still requires a reboot of my machine to install (and probably the same to uninstall). I know, OS integration and all… it still sucks!
• It looks awful, in my opinion, on the Windows classic theme in WinXP. Especially the new tab… thing, which is just a dark grey, well, blob, kind of thing, without any clear function. Unfocused tabs are the same kind of dark grey.
• It thinks about:blank should never end up in the back/forward history.
• I can’t set my homepage to a URL from the clearly visible UI (ie, there’s probably an option in the Options dialog, but the homepage UI only cares about the current tab).
• Not having the menu bar there unless I press the Alt key is inaccessible. It also leads to page shifts when I do want to use it, so that’s kind of annoying. The only way to make it always appear, as far as I’ve been able to figure out, is to right-click the toolbar on the tab bar (not anywhere else, as you’ll get no context menu or the window bar’s context menu) and select ‘Classic menu’. This is not really discoverable either, and I’m wondering how I’d get there without a mouse. Lastly, the menubar is positioned oddly, snuggled in between the url bar and the tabs and other useful buttons.
• The import feature failed to detect my Opera, Firefox, Flock and Seamonkey installs. I’m struggling to understand what else it would want to try to find to import bookmarks, cookies or feeds from (though I suppose for feeds there’d be certain feedreader stuff).
• I said ‘failed to detect’, what I mean is, the option to import from an application is greyed out, which I take to mean (without further indications) that it didn’t find anything I could import from.
• The favourites organizer thing in the menus is fugly. The buttons are badly anti-aliased, for some odd reason because ClearType is now enabled by default, just for IE. The favourites organizer popup in the toolbar closes whenever I delete something, making it hard to remove multiple things. I can’t select multiple items in it, and I can’t delete folders without using the slapped-on-very-long file context menu (why the hell is that there - I don’t want to virusscan my bookmarks, do I?).
• There are no addons for blogging, del.icio.us, Technorati, anything remotely ‘interesting’ from a web perspective. What I did find were various download managers (why do people need those, incidentally?), and an 89-dollar “HTML and Header inspection application”. I’m already missing my Launchy menu, my webdeveloper toolbar (editing the CSS and seeing the results live - Microsoft, catch up here please!), ChatZilla (of course), BBCode formatting, and being able to write my own stuff for it. (I probably could write my own stuff, but it’d be run natively/compiled, which means mistakes you make can easily lead to crashes (such as with the 89-dollar app, according to the reviews)).
• Half the app is in Dutch (my Windows XP, and accordingly IE 6, is in Dutch), half in English (there was no language-specific IE 7 beta download, as far as I’ve been able to find).
• They stashed the Go menu in the View menu (which is large already, and that with 6 submenus too…)
• Unlocking the toolbars doesn’t allow me to move items (at least, I can’t figure out how to do so). By default, my tab bar has a >> sign at the right, under which are the Help and Windows Messenger buttons. I can’t remove these buttons, as far as I can tell, nor can I make them appear on the toolbar normally. OK, it turns out I can make them appear after I right-click the toolbar and uncheck the ‘Lock position’ item. On that context menu, there’s also a Customize… option which allows me to remove them. However, the back/forward/urlbar/refresh/searchbar toolbar thing doesn’t have a context menu (it has the window bar menu, so I can close the application from there…). I’m still puzzled about what ‘Lock toolbars’ does in this case. I can’t move the toolbars above or below the menu bar, from what I can tell, nor can I have a toolbar on the same bar as the menu bar.
• It doesn’t ship Google Search by default (huh?).
• Where is my bookmarks toolbar?

I’m done for now. What I did like was the feedreader. Firefox/Mozilla/SeaMonkey really really really needs something like that. All the Opera and IE people are going to be laughing their butts off every time we open a feed and get a nice display saying that this XML document doesn’t appear to have style information associated with it… We also can’t make live bookmarks from rss urls. Why is that? Firefox won’t even recognize the feed: urls this blogging software comes up with!

Well, since the feedback form is broken, I’m just blogging it, which is much more fashionable anyway:

1. Open MSN Messenger.
2. Ask your friend for an mp3 recording of the last rehearsal of your band. (True story - I’m doing things legally for a change!)
3. Begin transferring file.
4. Wait endlessly.
5. Scream with joy as you (finally) receive your file (optional, see below).
6. Enthusiastically click the link MSN gives you.
7. Notice a nice popup saying that your file has been blocked. What’s more, you can get back to it by going to the file using Windows Explorer and use the Properties option on the file’s context menu to remove it from the list of blocked files.
8. Dutifully open Windows Explorer and navigate to your “Received Files” folder.
9. Look closely.
10. Look more closely.
11. Notice that your file isn’t there anymore.

Recap: MSN sees you receive a file. It will throw a bunch of dice, and apparently in a large amount of cases, decides you’re
not worthy of opening the (possibly large) file you’ve just transferred, and deletes it.

Workaround (hearsay so far): Don’t click the link in MSN, instead, navigate to the file *before* clicking the link.

This sucks. I now have to ask my friend for the same (8MB) file again, and wait another 15 minutes if he’s willing to send it again. He’s currently eating dinner. Thank you MSN, for wasting my time.

Seems like a neat idea, and <gasp> it actually works, too :-).

Congratulations to the developers.

I’ve updated the layout of the main site. I’m probably going to use the same style on the blog in due time, though probably using a sidebar as well (as category and archive links simply fit badly in a header bar like that).

I also added an about page. It has some random blobs I wrote down about myself. You might find it interesting, you might find it horrific, you may hate me for it, like me for it, do whatever. I hope I’m ready for any and all emails / comments I’m going to get on it. Please forgive me any spelling mistakes I may have made, it’s 1am by now and I’m tired. I’ll fix them when I get up tomorrow. Or something.
PS: thanks to Silver and tH for their help on the css stuff. Much appreciated

PPS: Also, it goes without saying that I’d like to hear about any display issues you may encounter. I’ve only tested with Gecko so far, and I’m just about to validate the pages. Good chance that there are still some hurdles to climb before it works cross-browser.

Well, why not, I thought. So here we are, wordpress 2.0 installed. Without a hitch, so far. Oh, you’re wondering why I’ve re-enabled the default theme? Because I thought I’d done a lousy job at the original site layout, and an even lousier job at the wordpress manipulation to fit that layout. Why must 2-column layouts be so hard to get right cross-browser .

I’ll try to come up with a better theme soon. I’m not promising anything though

And we’re done. Somewhat.

The footer is now actually inside
the sidebar. This works fine, as far as I can tell. If you discover I’ve missed some pages, please let me know.

The logo has been
added.

The numbers behind the links have been disabled. It was too much of a pain to get them to display right, and caused all kinds of funny
quirks.

I still need to clean up the css, unfortunately…

So, I’ve hacked the wordpress default theme into looking like the stuff already on my site. It’s not entirely finished, but it works well enough for normal browsing. Things to do:

• Add the logo at the top of the sidebar
• Fix the php for the footer to be stuck in the sidebar, instead of abs-positioned, so the layout won’t go haywire when the height of the window is too small
• Figure out why ‘Valid XHTML’ messes up when resizing
• Generally clean up the stylesheet so it isn’t such an abominal mess of random adjustments anymore, and make it smaller in download size.
• Attempt to make the (number) additions to the categories go behind the links, instead of on a new line. This one’s tough, as the links are set to display: block and to fill up the <li> blocks to make the hover effect look nice. Maybe I can fix it with some positioning magic, because I’m fairly sure trying to make the <li> blocks light up on hover doesn’t work in IE. Incidentally, I have no idea whether this style works in Opera or Safari. If anyone could enlighten me about that, it’d be appreciated. Feel free to comment in that case .