Yes, that's right! I have joined the few, the proud, the CSS'd! Mostly in an effort to teach myself CSS, but also because the log has had the same interface since it shifted to Greymatter, I think. How can I call myself a weblogger if I don't change the look at least every other month!? (Well, actually, I don't, but that's beside the point.)
At first, I thought I'd do something thrilling, something zippy, something with color and verve and all sorts of fun stuff!
And then I got a little practice at this.
And then I looked at my stats.
And then I realized that (1) making something zippy and thrilling and colorful -- and insert whatever the proper form of "verve" is for this sentence (vervacious?) -- would give me more gray hairs than I already have. And it would still break in either Netscape 6, Mozilla or Opera; (2) I also realized that for reasons I wottest not, I have an amazingly steady number of Netscape Communicator 4.X users -- the percentage has never dropped below 28%, and this past week has stayed above 50%. I didn't want to do something that would break badly in Netscape. But mostly, I just wanted to finish the damned thing sometime with my natural life span. Thus, something simple with lotsa boxes. (But, of course, you can't see its purple-bordered goodness in NS4.)
Mind, the archives log did break in NS4, but I don't care all that much about that. (Though I wish I understood why NS4 thinks the proper font size for that page is MONSTER.) It's also not terribly happy in Opera, but it's liveable. The only truly puzzling thing at this point is that for some odd reason, Greymatter has taken to throwing off 500 Server Errors for no apparent reason. It actually does what I tell it to do, but then gives me an error, which it's never done before. Ah, well. As long as things happen the right way, I don't much care.
And, as a happy side effect, I wound up with an extra new template for the journal -- it seems that you can get DIVs to wrap around each other in the most interesting ways sometimes ...
5:01pm, amended: Of course, if I'd known how much more difficult it was going to be to make it really REALLY work after I'd posted this entry, I'd'a stood in bed. Or at least left it alone.
5:05pm, amendment the second: On the other hand, somehow -- and I've really absolutely no idea how -- I've now got a three-column layout that actually works in both Netscape 4.7 and IE. On the other hand, it actually bites quite a lot of ass in Opera 5 (and not in the good way, no) and Mozilla and Netscape 6 -- the bottom part does, anyway. For some reason, it wants to set the text outside the actual DIV statement for the brown part down there. Eh. Figure it out later. For now, the current layout should actually work for 95% of the people who hit this site. I think.
5:16pm, amendment the third: Fixed! Woo-hoo!
Copyright © 2001, Iain Jackson, after-words.org
[Archives: 2001 and after]
Archives before February 5, 2001
Search entries:
12/19/2001: vive la france
12/19/2001: princess, redux
12/19/2001: yemen and rumsfeld
12/18/2001: you're NOT in the army now
12/18/2001: interesting donation
12/18/2001: shame on winn dixie, indeed
12/18/2001: saudi princess
12/17/2001: new resolve
12/17/2001: a victim of the attack ... yeah, right
12/17/2001: polluters ho!