New Site!
After having this domain and plans to post a blog (or something) here for almost a year, I have finally gotten around to doing something. The funny thing is I did the whole thing in about a day, although admittedly it is pretty much a huge hack.
I started with big ambitions: I was going to make a website with blog articles, rants, and tutorials. I was going to have comments sections for each article, an RSS feed, and a nice admin interface for everything. It was going meet the latest XHTML and CSS standards; it was going to render exactly the same in every browser from Opera 1 to Firefox 3, including every version of Internet Explorer released during my lifetime. It was going to have a beautiful PHP backend (ok, now I’m having trouble keeping a straight face), with wrappers for every database function and abstractions for each reusable code tidbit.
Needless to say, my goals have not been met. I feel pretty proud of what I’ve accomplished in a day, though, so I decided to put it up and update it as soon as I get a chance.
The design is based on a very nice 3-column layout that I stole; so nice, in fact, that after I finished the CSS and layout it rendered perfectly in IE6 and 7, even though I had only been testing it in Firefox. Amazing. I haven’t checked to see if the finished product works with IE, but it should. It seems to work fine with Firefox 3 and Opera 9, so I’m happy.
I’m not done with the PHP, but at least it is reading the articles out of the database. I’d forgotten how annoying PHP is, but I quickly remembered as I hacked out some of the ugliest code I’ve seen. I also have an aversion to MySQL (I’m a Postgres fan), but it’s all my host has. The biggest thing I still need to add is an admin page to post new articles; right now my method involves copying and pasting into the database :P
Well, that’s about it for now. Keep posted for updates! I already have plans for some articles that I should put on paper (or phpMyAdmin, as the case may be) within the next week.
Update: Upon further inspection, I was pleased to find that this site passes XHTML and CSS validation. I was much more pleased to see that it renders well on a variety of OS/browser combinations, including Linux/FF3, Linux/Konqueror, Linux/Opera 9, Windows/FF3, and Internet Explorer from 5.5 to 7. There is a small bug in IE 8 beta 1; square bullets are rendered as huge open boxes instead of the little solid squares that every other browser uses. This little gem is apparently a result of the font I’m using and is a fine example of the utterly ridiculous browser behavior web designers have to put up with. Of course, this is a beta browser, so it may well be fixed by release. Little annoyances, though, are hallmarks of the IE experience for web developers—this may well be its own rant someday, but for now let me just say that Microsoft, after years of criticism on this front, has yet to introduce its IE team to many of the finer points of web standards.
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