The Geekorium

My personal Wordpress theme is finished. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do since I first installed Wordpress, and I’ve finally managed it. It isn’t fancy, but it’s mine from start to finish (with the help of some online guides).

My stats since the beginning of the year show the percentages of browsers that visit my site, with IE on top. So I’ve tested it on Opera, Firefox, Safari, IE7 and IE6 - if anyone else finds problems, please let me know and I’d be happy to take a look at it.

To those of you using Internet Explorer 6

(it looks like this ),

I strongly recommend you switch ASAP. You can download the latest version of Internet Explorer, Opera or Firefox. There are others, but those three are the big players. IE6 doesn’t handle some very common web site tricks, and it takes a lot of work behind the scenes to make your favourite websites look like they do on such an out-of-date browser. This site is broken in IE6 (no footer - help appreciated), but about a quarter of my very few readers still use it, so I had to accommodate them. If everyone moved on though, life for web developers would be much easier. You can check out my article on making the switch to IE7 on edublogs

Enough preaching - enjoy the new look NunnOne - with external links clearly marked and my Creative Commons licence proudly displayed. One day, I might bundle my theme up into a package and offer it to all.

Update: 2006-04-06 It’s over and I lived!

I’m getting this in early, in case I forget or don’t have time on the day - April 5th has been declared the First Annual CSS Naked Day. No my web site is not broken.

This is a minor big deal in the web world. Credit to Dustin Diaz for coming up with the idea.

To those who don’t understand: CSS is a web maker’s tool for styling a web page. In the early days of the web people used all sorts of tricks just to make their pages look good, but they often only worked on one or two specific Internet browsers. So someone using Internet Explorer might see a pretty web page, but someone else using a Mac’s Safari browser might see something else entirely. Not to mention that all these crafty tricks twisted the information in the web page into nooks and crannies all over the page - making it difficult to extract the information using the ‘wrong’ browser or a web page reader such as a blind person might use.

The people who make decisions about the Internet decided it would be better for the information to be set out logically on the page, and have the pretty designs added later (this was in the original plan for the Internet, but it kinda got forgotten by a lot of designers). CSS is a way of ‘prettying’ a web page without changing the underlying information, and leaving the info accessible in a logical and sensible way. Web designers can make a basic page, and then use different CSS ‘style sheets’ to make the page look a certain way on a computer screen, a different way on a tiny mobile phone screen, even sound a certain way on a web page reader!

If you are here on the 5th of April, you can see this site sans CSS, and you should still be able to find your way around. In effect, this is how a blind person might ‘see’ my site, so it has to still be usable or I have failed to make my site fully accessible. Other sites listed at the above site are going naked too, in an effort to promote this idea of ‘usability’.

If you aren’t here before or after the 5th, you can still see what I’m talking about if you use Firefox, by selecting the View menu > then Page Style > then No Style, or in Opera: View > Style > Usermode.

Select View > Page Style > Basic Page Style in Firefox to go back, or View > Style > Authormode in Opera. It is also possible to do something like this in other browsers, but it can be more tricky.

So enjoy CSS Naked Day, and in the spirit of this nudieness, a lewd joke:
Q: How do you titillate an ocelot?
A: Oscillate his tit a lot!

OK, that’s a bit misleading, as I don’t in fact love opera as entertainment. I don’t even love it as a web browser. I am however giving it a shot as my default browser. I had been using Firefox, and whilst I appreciated the ability to customise it to the n^th^ degree I was finding it slower and slower for my usual browsing.

So I switched. I may go back, but I like the speed.

I must have the best and latest of everything. This holds true for me as long as my budget holds up. In fact, its less ‘latest and greatest’ and more ‘what people are willing to give me’ most of the time. Not that I’m cheep, just that I’m poor.

Not that it would make much difference I suppose, who wants to pay for stuff you can probably get for free. Take software for example. I’ve found free versions of almost every app I’ve wanted to use. When I first got my computer I spent hours searching online for free software to make the tiniest of jobs simpler or quicker. Because I could.

For about a year I used Safari on my Mac. It was free, it came with Apple’s design and endorsement, and could therefore be trusted to integrate itself into the operating system without hassle. I started subscribing to rss feeds at about the same time that Apple released Tiger, and with it the new improved Safari 2.0. Safari 2.0 had lots of cool stuff I was sure I needed, but couldn’t afford the upgrade to Tiger. Then Safari started crashing. A lot. I tried to fix it but to no avail. I had already tired of Internet Explorer at my all PC workplace and switched to Firefox. I thought, why not do the same at home?

I haven’t looked back (except maybe the once I’ve started Safari by accident using Quicksilver, and I felt a wave of nostalgia for its beautiful brushed metal). Firefox gives me a clean consistant experience between work and home, and allows me to do amazing things like keep my bookmarks in sync (now even easier with Foxmarks). But it got me thinking… How many things can I keep in sync between work and home?

Then I ‘discovered’ Web 2.0… what a find! I can create documents, keep a calendar, write to-do lists, even write screenplays, all from my browser, allowing me to access these things from anywhere. I’ve gone-a-hunting for as many useful sites as I can find. My next post I’ll be listing the best ones I’ve found so far, and the ways I’m using them.