Design frozen-ish

Okay, I haven’t checked it in anything but Firefox, though the CSS should be simple enough not to screw up in any major browsers. What you’re seeing (assuming you’re not reading this from the year 2045 or whatever) is the base design from which I’d like to do some innovative crap. Like a floating livesearch menu that expands from an unobtrusive (yet omnipresent) design element and sits translucent on the side of the screen. Amongst other things. It’s not amazingly groundbreaking, I guess, but I’d like to do it nicely/well.

Maybe the breaking down of chronology could happen at some point, but I don’t really have any great ideas as to how to do that effectively. I also haven’t bothered to validate this thing yet. Should do that at some point. It’s semantically fine, though.

And now, for a quick spot of live site editing

Posting this probably means the RSS users are going to come crawling out in force to watch as I break stuff, but whatever. I don’t really mind, enjoy, if you get kicks out of that kind of thing. I’m playing with styles/my template for a little bit, because I’m bored of it and ridiculously sick of how slow Firefox renders position:fixed and my Google ads (and you can say it’s because Google ads markup sucks all you want, but the fact is Firefox is the only browser that has any significant problem(/s) with it). Mostly because I’m bored of it and am putting off work on… a handful of other sites. Oh, and study, but that doesn’t matter/count coz my next exam is still over a week away.

Think of it as CSS Reboot a day or two late. Or whatever. I’ve actually had the base of the stylesheet ready for a while, but it was initially designed as a print version. Then I decided it was simple (which is what I’m aiming for a lot lately) and looked niceish. I think I was subconsciously (or maybe not? I dunno) taking off Anne’s now-not-so-recent site redesign, which basically involved reverting to a single column with clear readable text and disabling comments more often. I’m not so keen on the latter as last time I tried to do that people got annoyed, and it was mostly just because (I think) I was posting dumb angsty stuff I didn’t really want people replying to. Maybe. Or not. That might’ve been the time before… I can’t remember, too long ago. I’m also not so keen on big rants about hardcore markup stuff. I could deal with living in Scandenavia, though, because those countries are cool. I don’t really know why. I told Tori this today and she gave me weird looks like I’m stalking Henrik Ibsen. I’m not. I just think he’s a cool playwright, and am appreciative of his characters and ideologies. Heh, on more trivial matters, I like the idea of extended character sets because it gives me an excuse to use UTF-8 more often.

Anyway. Whatever. Before I start making changes, mostly for historical purposes, this design involves large expanses of white, a fixed-width layout (so I can think about worrying about photos less), and none of the larger graphical elements from SC500 are being retained. I’ll probably find it boring around February, (I’d say sooner, but I’m going to be AFK for nearly a month, so that extends its novelty value somewhat further) at which point I’ll probably go with something complex(-er).

Having said that, my present design (the one I’m about to start implementing) could gradually evolve to a more complex beast, in which case I’ll get sick of its evolved complexity and go back to something simple again. Ah, design. It’s cyclic.

I also have some interesting ideas for livesearch/navigation, loosely based on Shaun Inman’s present site and Matthom’s recent comments on search. Which I want to implement quickly to beat him to it ;-) Basically it’s figuring out a layout that intuitively combines search, whilst remaining “blog-like” (because I value that, see my comment on Matthom’s original post) and visually simple.

A whole new meaning to jailshell

• (20:25:24) josh: we should spoof their website :P
• (20:25:27) josh: or something
• (20:25:29) swylie: lol
• (20:25:36) swylie: but stupid people would start entering their bank details
• (20:25:39) josh: actually no, i cant be stuffed :p
• (20:25:41) josh: ah yeah
• (20:25:41) swylie: and we could be arrested for fraud
• (20:25:44) josh: badness :(
• (20:25:49) josh: haha
• (20:25:55) josh: my nigerian scam email came TRUE?!
• (20:25:55) josh: :p
• (20:26:02) swylie: haha
• (20:26:18) swylie: mind you, i hear they give you free food in gaol
• (20:26:23) swylie: or jail
• (20:26:37) josh: yeah… but because of the nature of the crime there’d be no free bandwidth :’(
• (20:26:37) swylie: depending on whether you want it to read right, or be politically correct
• (20:26:42) swylie: doh
• (20:28:37) josh: (heh, whereas if you get arrested for murder, you can make a small fortune running a datacenter from your cell ;-) it’s secure, there’s free regulated power (for security), and you can stay onsite 24×7!)
• (20:28:49) swylie: haha
• (20:28:56) swylie: i could do murder…
• (20:29:01) swylie: mwhuahaha
• (20:29:03) josh: hence, criminals make the best hosts *nods* :P
• (20:29:07) josh: lol
• (20:29:12) swylie: hahah
• (20:29:14) josh: man this is worth blogging
• (20:29:17) josh: one sec :p
• (20:29:24) swylie: we should put that on the base10 site
• (20:29:29) josh: lol!
• (20:29:38) josh: caption: good thing we’re just resellers, huh?
• (20:29:38) josh: :p
• (20:29:48) swylie: “base10… because criminals make the best web hosts.”

p.s. It’s a joke. Don’t take it seriously. Our web hosting (details here on our site, due for a revamp) can take over the world without aid from the prison system for HVAC/power! ;-)

Roundcube

Roundcube is a cool AJAX webmail client.

Via Karmakars

Literally lost

<erno> hm. I’ve lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds to ping, it works completely, I just can’t figure out where in my apartment it is.

I always thought that bash.org quote was fabricated until just now. I literally lost my router. It was responding to ping, it worked completely (I was using the web inteface), but I had no idea where it was. I looked in the usual place and it was gone!

So I rebooted my cable modem instead (the BigPond connection was “there”, just not working. Happens once every month or two.), went to the web interface and reconnected, and all was good.

I think it might have fallen somewhere underneath our Commander PBX, but I’d need to move a not-insubstantial desk full of cables and various IT gear, and risk disconnecting some of the 12 or so network connected devices, in order to see it for sure. Meanwhile, it’s out of sight and working perfectly!

Working perfectly, that is, as a basic Internet gateway. If we were using its horrible unsecurable (you can do MAC based auth, but only if you’re prepared to enter the MAC addresses of LAN devices, too. I’m not. It’s also impossible just to grant wireless Internet access and block off the LAN — I’d be perfectly happy leaving the AP wide open if I could do that, because bandwidth should be free. Yeah, whatever, I’m a ‘net commie.) wireless, I imagine reception would be rather poor in that RFI nest! (Assuming it’s where I think it is)