Q: What did one em say to the other em?

A: Who’s your daddy?

Sorry for the limp post; I’m testing some CSS trickery.

This should be red. (even though direct colorization is a no-no)

This part is offset: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua.

This is a quote: At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.

At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.

hermes root # tcpdump -nnvXSs 1514 -c2 icmp
tcpdump: listening on eth0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 1514
bytes 23:11:10.370321 IP (tos 0x20, ttl  48, id 34859, offset 0, flags
[none], length: 84) 69.254.213.43 > 72.21.34.42: icmp 64: echo request seq 0

lsof -i :25

find /var/localhost/www/htdocs -type d -prin0 | grep -0 xargs chmod 755 

I’ve merged my CSS files for my blog content and my non-blog content into a single CSS. Any formatting weirdness you’re seeing is at least in part due to this change.

On that note, what formatting/styling issues do you guys see on the site? Anything standing out to you as bad? Any ideas for improvements? Now that the main parts of my theme are mostly finished I’m moving into CSS mode. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Anyone want to help me reign in my XHTML/CSS? I am a big standards guy but my site is currently hurtin’ for certain. A few of my pages still validate, but most don’t. Bad form indeed. So anyone who wants some easy money getting me set back right, drop me an email.

The time has come to dump Internet Explorer. I know, I know — you may have heard the same thing before from those that think it’s cool to hate Microsoft; but I’m not one of those guys. I’m actually an MCSE and I happen to like quite a few of Microsoft’s products.

Rather than lump me into the Microsoft-basher category, consider for a moment why you use the browser you use, and humor me by entertaining the notion, if even for a second, that switching to another might be worth your while…

Link: Why You Should Dump Internet Explorer

I’ve been using TextWrangler for a while now — a free uber-text editor that’s used heavily by web developers. It’s actually the free, mini-version of BBEdit — which is supposedly everything TextWrangler is and more.

I’ve been thinking that I might want to “step up” to BBedit and buy it to get the features I’m lacking with TextEdit, but then I looked at the stuff and it doesn’t seem all that compelling. It then came to me that if even one or two of the features are useful — ever — then it might be worth it. Why?

Because I love TextWrangler so much. That doesn’t seem to make sense, but I almost feel like it’s good karma to buy BBEdit because I like their free offering so much — especially since it does offer some extra features that could come in handy. I’m going to download the demo and play with it for a bit — just to make sure I’m not being too nutty.

What do you guys think; is it just abject stupidity to “reward” a company in this way?

Edit: Thanks for the input; I bought it. For anyone thinking of doing the same, there’s a $100 discount for anyone using TextWrangler. The details are a bit weird, but it’s a real discount. I got the product for $99 instead of $199. W00t.

Ok, so I’ve finished migrating my pseudo-static content from my Wordpress database to actual directories. It can be reached via the navigation in the top right, or here:

• /study
• /writing
• /tools
• /contact
• /about

Check out the /tools page, by the way; notice that it validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict. Yes. Kneel before Zod. Oh, and my brand spankin’ new custom CSS stylesheet validates too. I made that thing by hand, completely CSS formatted — no tables or nuthin’.

Now for the most difficult part — making an entirely separate stylesheet just for my main page (this blog), aka “Operation Un-Gimp”. This stylesheet, like the one for my static content, is going to be tableless and all that good stuff, but it’s also going to have a left-floating sidebar in the primary content area, i.e. it’s going to look just like you see here, but with no tables whatsoever. I’m redoing the entire thing from scratch.

Wish me luck.

If you come to the site tomorrow and see nothing but a bunch of bright green Wingdings, you’ll know it didn’t go so well.

For anyone interested, here’s the initial few pages under the new custom, static layout I’ve designed from scratch (XHTML and CSS). So far I have /tools, /contact, and /about. If you’re into this kind of stuff let me know what you think.

So I’ve been working on a couple things on the site recently — most importantly an attempt to move all my /study and /writing content to a static format, i.e. not within my blog.

There are many reasons for this, but the overall picture is that I want full, direct control over the content so that I can use the displaying of the information as a learning tool.

The largest manifestation of this is my attempt to learn (and truly understand) XHTML and CSS. I got into this briefly a while back but never did a big project with it in order to pound the information in. This will be that project.

I’m doing two things really: 1) I’m moving my “static” content over to a static directory structure, i.e. it’s not going to be in my Wordpress database anymore getting rendered via PHP. 2) I’m creating my own custom CSS stylesheet, from the ground up, that’s going to incorporate what I’ve learned about the XHTML and CSS (mostly CSS).

This has been extremely pleasurable thus far, and I think I’m starting to finally “get it”. Of course once I’m finished I’m going to write a /study article on CSS. Like most of these pieces it’s going to be a reference for myself more than anything. But as usual I’ll be writing it in hopes that it helps others as well.

The next project involving XHTML and CSS is going to be rather major: I’m going to re-code my blog theme. Using the stylesheet that I’ll have completed for my static content, I’m going to remove all the tables from it and just generally tweak it to my liking. The goal here is to touch and truly understand every facet of the theme (and CSS as a result). I’m enthused about it.

So for my XHTML and CSS editor I’m using TextWrangler, by BareBones Software. It’s the free version of BBEdit — their flagship product. I’m quite pleased with it. Anyone doing this kind of stuff should give it a go.

Anyway, if you guys have any comments on what I’m doing as things progress, do let me know. I’m still very much in the learning phase of things; any input would be appreciated.