Ok, I think we’re back to normal. I have ZenPhoto installed, the ZenShow wordpress plugin in place and apparently working. Now I just need to get some more photos added, and then get to work making the gallery fit in with the rest of the site look and feel.
And I consider this a hobby…*sheesh*
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And now comments work again. Thanks Doug for pointing that out!
No, it’s not another Naked CSS day…I was playing with ZenPhoto and trying to integrate it into WordPress when I fracked something up (I’ve been watching back-to-back discs of Battlestar Galactica. Frack is my new word)
Now it’s Friday, 5 o’clock, and time to go home. Karma for working on my personal site at work I guess.
Frack.
As a webdesigner, one of the struggles I face on a daily basis is making my pages appear the same in as many browsers as possible, mainly Internet Explorer and Firefox. Trying to adhere to W3C standards and making the pages look and act the same can be a frustrating, time-consuming process. When using tables to do layouts, it was fairly cut and dried (with the odd gaps appearing in Netscape), but using tables is a no-no (at least in the standards world. I admit, I’ve resorted to table based layouts when pressed for time. Bad Shad!). While building my current project for work, I was experiencing a problem where Firefox wasn’t showing my layout like IE was, and for a change IE was presenting the layout correctly.
One of the things to be aware of when building layouts purely in CSS, is that every browser will treat the HTML markup( p, h1, h2, br, strong ) differently. For instance, in Firefox, an H2 tag might be given a margin of 2px while in IE, it might be 5px (I don’t know the exact numbers). Suffice to say, the difference can be big. When doing the above said layout, I gave an H2 tag within the layout a margin of 0 and padding of 0. And that fixed the issue I was having.
Just thought I’d pass that along.
I’ve decided, at least as far as my own journal is concerned, I will not be worried about IE. I don’t think I should have to load up special javascripts just so I can display PNGs properly. I’ll strive to make the layout compatible and the same in both broswers, but as far as graphics go, if I want transparency, I’ll be using PNGs, which IE won’t support. So, if you don’t wish to see a grey box around any graphics from here on out, get a real browser. Firefox comes to mind. Camino and Safari as well, if you’re on a Mac.
Would you believe I’m contemplating a re-design?
Or at the very least, color change. I never seem to be satisfied. I wish I could just get something finished, and then decide how to lay it out, color selection, etc.
This is another geekish post, which will probably just annoy Treva s’more.
It never fails…I always have problems getting scripts or plug-ins or similar items installed properly. It should be a simple thing, but I always make it a lot harder than it is. Previously I’ve had problems getting the WPG2 plug-in working. Recently, I have struggled with the Super Archive plugin and the IE/PNG transparency fix, neither of which I was successful with.
Currently, I’m attempting the lightbox script. It’s a nice, elegant way to display your photos without necessarily having to leave the page and go into a different gallery program, though I guess it’d be possible to set that up as well.
My point is I never get these types of scripts to work without a lot of blood, sweat, swearing and tears of frustration. I’m not dumb…I know these scripts aren’t hard to figure out. Whenever I ask for help (usually from my brother), he has it fixed in two seconds, and I can tell he’s probably just shaking his head thinking “what a dumbass”.
why Why WHY do I have such issues with these things?!
Camino is a browser created specifically for the Macintosh based off the Gecko engine. It recently celebrated it’s 1.0 release and I downloaded and installed it with the hopes of moving away from Firefox. Firefox, while a very good browser, was created for the Windows platform and ported over to Macintosh. I’ve noticed issues with it that, while minor, are starting to irritate the hell out of me.
So I downloaded Camino with great anticipation, looking to move away from Firefox. I imported my bookmarks in, and used it for a whole day. I even downloaded CamiTools and CamiScript to increase the functionality. Camino is a great browser, quick, responsive, and those irritating issues I’ve had with Firefox have not been an issue. It looks and feels like it belongs on a Mac.
However…
I find myself switching back to Firefox quite often, either to use the wonderful Web Developer extension, find out specific colors using Colorzilla, or to use something as simple as right-clicking (yes, Macs can right-click…just need a mouse with two buttons!) to view the background image to see how the author coded the site. Half the stuff I’ve come to depend on isn’t available on Camino. Which is a shame, I really like the Camino browser.
I’m going to take a page out of Jon Hick’s playbook, and keep both readily available. I think I’ll set Camino as the default, and when needed, I’ll launch Firefox. And hope someone develops a CamiTool or CamiScript that’ll at least replace my Web Developer Toolbar.
Obviously, I still have some sidebar work to do, not to mention comments, archives, etc, but I think I’m liking this layout/design a lot better than the previous two quickies I had up. I noticed that the titles of my posts/date posted/comments section looks quite a lot like Sarah’s. I didn’t intend it that way, but I obviously liked it and it stuck in my head. I used the nifty corners script for the round corners in my header, not sure how she did hers. And I noticed we used the same clock icon, which I got from FamFamFam. Not sure if she got hers from the same place.
So Sarah, if this is too much like yours and you’re upset by that, let me know! I’ll do something else with it (but those rounded corners are sweet, I’ll probably keep those somehow).
Otherwise, it’s the same old same old. I did go back to Firefox/Thunderbird. SeaMonkey just felt outdated, and I missed little things, like the Google search on the toolbar, rather than as a sidebar like SeaMonkey had it.
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For those of you on IE, you might’ve noticed that the logo has a very light grey background (it’s pretty hard NOT to notice actually). This is due to IE’s inability to handle the PNG transparency. I found a script that fixes it, but when I impliment it, it removes my spiffy corners. Guess I’ll have to work on this…stay tuned!
I’ve decided to just leave this work-in-progress layout up, and I’ll add bits n’ pieces as I go along. Obviously there’s a lot of work to do still, but at least I’m a bit happier with this than I was the last one. And the brown layout I had (Which most of you had the fortune of not seeing) was hideous. Wonderfully ugly. I don’t know why I spent the time with it…
In other news, I’m currently testing SeaMonkey, which is basically the Mozilla Suite re-packaged. I use Firefox and Thunderbird on a daily basis, and each time I lauch them both, they launch two seperate instances of the gecko rendering engine. By using SeaMonkey, and launching only one instance, I’m hoping to improve performance. I’ve noticed there’s a few quirks and such that I miss from Firefox already (extentions, integration with Adium, etc…) that I’m hoping are addressed in subsequent releases. I haven’t gotten rid of Firefox and Thunderbird totally, yet, but if SeaMonkey can keep it’s head afloat, it might stick around in my dock.
So let’s see…that brings the total count of browsers on my Mac to 11. Wow. Aside from MS Internet Explorer, I think each of them have their own plusses which makes me keep them around. Plus it’s good to check page layouts in various browsers now and then.
So I finally get around to do a somewhat new design, and you know what? I already don’t like it. Not only is it too restrictive, but it’s not very different. I was hoping for a layout that was more unique, or if nothing else, a fraction of a difference than the average CSS Blog layout. I don’t even know if I want to fix the comments now (yes, they’re borked too).
Bah. Now I’m depressed.