Posts in the Redesign Category

A very nice redesign has appeared over at scottandrew.com.  Scott didn’t mention anything about it when we had lunch last Wednesday, so I’ll have to berate him for that later.  I’m always envious of people who come up with beautiful, coherent Web designs in the XHTML+CSS space, and Scott’s definitely joined that list.  My one potential quibble is the order of his source, with the page content coming after the entire sidebar instead of before, but since this site does the same thing I don’t suppose I should complain too much.

Today I got what might be my very first anti-porn spam, from “Fathers Against Porn,” and I got it twice.  I thought for a moment about going to download some porn in protest, but decided maybe I’d be better off just deleting both messages with a muttered curse at spamming morality cops and calling it even.

Today I also spotted one of the most severe cases of topic drift I’ve ever seen.  The subject line in question: “Redirection of the root folder and children (was Re: 9/11 Moment of Silence?)”  Wow.

• Scott, Spam, and Severe Drift was published on Monday, September 16th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Redesign category.
• There have been no replies.

A new look for a new year.  Readers of my next book may notice some similarities between this and one or two of the projects.

If the text is too small for you to read, try the “Advanced setup…” link in the sidebar.  There you can define a default pixel size for this site and have the value stored in a cookie so that for the next year, you’ll see the text at that size.

No tables were harmed, or even used, in the making of this design.

Update: I’ve made a few adjustments to the design to step around bugs in IE6/Win.  Apparently, the MS programmers fixed most of the parsing bugs from the 5.x line, but not too many of the layout bugs.  To make things worse, the parsing bugs are fixed in both the strict and quirks modes, so none of the traditional workarounds (like the “box model hack“) work, and so I can’t hide styles from IE6 at all.  If their layout engine were as good as, say, IE5.1/Mac, then that wouldn’t be a problem.  No such luck.

(Thanks to my father for first discovering the layout problems in IE6, and for helping me figure out that I couldn’t work around the bugs without changing my design approach.)

• Monday, 21 January 2002 was published on Monday, January 21st, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Redesign category.
• There have been no replies.

Eric says: The site got a facelift today (thanks to Molly Holzschlag for letting me steal her ideas).  I hope you like it, and let me know if you see any major problems.  Note:  the reason the site looks so bad (but not totally unreadable) in Navigator 4.x is that I did my best to create standards-compliant markup and styles, and Nav4 doesn’t deal very well with that sort of thing.  If you’re using Navigator 4.x, please restrict any bug reports to pages where there is no text, or the layout is so mangled that it’s impossible to read the text.  As for the long silence since the last update—okay, so we’ve been a little busy lately.  I’ll try to be more forthcoming with news in the future.

• Friday, 14 July 2000 was published on Friday, July 14th, 2000.
• It was assigned to the Redesign category.
• There have been no replies.

A note from Eric: I’ve rearranged [the home page] a bit in order to make it more legible in Navigator 4.x.  The earlier display problems were, so far as I can tell, due to the fact that Nav4’s rendering engine is as mind-bendingly awful as one could put in an officially released browser and not actually be thrown in jail for it.  Even now, the display in Navigator is less than optimal, but at least you can read all of the text.  My only other option was to use some sort of browser detection script to customize the content, and I’m just not willing to do that.

• Sunday, 20 February 2000 was published on Sunday, February 20th, 2000.
• It was assigned to the Redesign category.
• There have been no replies.