Friday, 2 May 2003
Yet another busy, productive week is just about over. Spent the vast majority of it on research. In the software corner, I made some small steps towards launch 1.0 and Pester 1.1, but not much to speak of—too little spare time.
Given my almost complete lack of creativity in the area, Web design is tedious, but necessary. I've been slowly redoing web.sabi.net and expanding rileys.us, removing hacks for old and non-compliant browsers. It feels so good to throw out markup with attached comments like this:
<!-- TOPMARGIN works for iCab (doesn't understand CSS, but at least the same metrics as IE/Mozilla work). MARGINHEIGHT is for Netscape 4.x, which doesn't understand CSS properly, and is just weird. -->
or this:
<!-- Netscape 4.x needs the extra align, or it gets confused. Sigh. -->
Everything I change gets tested on Camino and Safari, both of which I use every day. Yesterday I briefly tried IE 5 Mac, IE 6 Windows, and Opera 7 Windows, making a couple of changes to accommodate them. For any other Web browser (including Opera 6, which I notice mangled quite a few of my pages), you're on your own.
Porting my photo album generating script from Frontier's website framework to Python was the biggest part of it. Templating is now pretty ad hoc, but it works reasonably well, and works on the server, meaning I no longer need to support and maintain Frontier/Radio on my parents' PowerBooks so they can post photos. My original reason for picking Frontier for this job was its ability to run under Mac OS 9, but Python does that too, and it's still being updated for that OS (until 2.3 final is out, at least).
Since the last screenshot I had posted was dated 2001, I collected a couple more current and interesting ones here. Compare the new CSS-only (almost) design with the Mockups page, which uses an older HTML-styled template.
I still will move this site to PyCS some day. As UserLand's community server has been quite reliable over the past several months, I'm not in a rush.
1:52 AM
