MaW’s Blog

Well here’s the tweaked look. It’s tested only in Safari 2.0 and Firefox 1.5, both on Mac OS X, so please let me know if something breaks horribly in another browser. If that other browser is Internet Explorer, don’t expect me to care very much. Many sites can’t afford to alienate Internet Explorer users, but I can and will if I have to. That said though, it should still all work, it just might not look right.

The drop caps in entries should degrade gracefully to normal letters in Internet Explorer, as it doesn’t support the :first-child and :first-letter selectors. I had to make some compromises there to support Safari, rather disappointingly: the font sizes are specified in absolute values (points) rather than in ems, because if you specify them in ems, Safari reserves the space for the drop cap correctly, but draws it one box height too low.

Needless to say, that looks like a big stinking bug to me.

I am, I think, the most pleased with this iteration of the blog template. Hopefully that will stave off the compulsion to fiddle for a while.

The best bit is, virtually all of the modifications were done with CSS – the markup changes are minimal.

Just upgraded to the initial release of Wordpress 2.0. Things seem to be working (mostly), but I mucked up the template a bit in the process due to some ancient hoop-jumping I’d forgotten about. So the layout of files is now cleaner, but the template’s a tampered-with version of an older iteration of the design.

Still, nice to have a little freshness from time to time, and I suspect the majority of people who do read this site use the feeds anyway, so the template is of little significance except in the unusual event of them posting a comment.

I do intend to do something better some time, but I’m not a very good web designer so…

Oh, and for some reason the font size for the posts is completely different in Safari to in Gecko-based browsers. Answers on a postcard? It’s probably got something to do with the vast pile of different CSS rules affecting every element on the page, due to inheriting from the Classic template.

Must do something about that. Ho hum.

This site transferred to the new improved wonky last night. Hopefully everything’s now migrated correctly, although I note a little confusion between whether it’s www.alledora.co.uk or alledora.co.uk in the blog’s internal links. Both should work, but it would be nice if it could decide on one and stick to it, don’t you agree?

Email will be moving some time as well, as will, eventually, everything else hosted on wonky. I’ll do a proper blog entry some time I’m not so busy trying to catch up with my nanowrimo word count — I’m currently almost five thousand words behind pace.

Yes, the site’s been down for a while. Wonky, the server it’s on, was compromised via a hole in one or more webapps running on it, so we shut everything down and have gradually brought things back after making sure they’re all running suitably up-to-date versions and don’t have any nasty holes in. Some other wonky sites are still down, but this one and Thought & Memory are back.

The stats compiled from the last few days show that about 70% of hits from identified browsers are from IE, or from things pretending to be IE. I can see I’m going to have to make the markup more Firefox-specific.

Interesting search terms… ‘police eyesight standards’ is one that’s been hovering around in the stats for a while, largely due to me moaning about them. One hit from ‘first day cachelogic’ — I wonder who that was? We’ve not had all that many people start lately. By the way, I’m leaving CacheLogic in about a month’s time, so that’ll be completely irrelevant by then anyway. Ho hum.

And someone came here looking for a way to cook pork fillet. I wonder if my recipe was successful or indeed even slightly interesting. Leave comments, random visitors! Don’t worry about being offensive, if you are I’ll delete them.