IE8 Fail
So apparently the combination of my latest WordPress theme (Lightword) and Google's code syntax highlighter for Python, makes IE8 go insane. The syntax highlighter for C/C++ seems to work fine with IE8, but when IE8 tries to render a page thats displaying Python code, the browser hits some sort of null array error. The worst part, is that instead of handling the problem gracefully, IE8 doesn't display ANY of my Python code. I'm currently displaying Python code on my site without syntax highlighting, and am trying to find a solution to this idiotic problem.
Me
I've always tried to keep some seperation between my internet and physical presence, especially when it comes to this blog. I don't want my roommates knowing that I write unflattering articles about them on my website, and nor do I want some random dude that lives in the middle of Montana (i.e. nowhere) knowing everything about my day to day life ('cause thats just kinda creapy).
Most personal blogs have a little "about the author" section, or something that describes the writer and their personality. But because of my desire to seperate my internet and physical self, I've never really written one, until now. So here's a suitably vague description of me.
I like computers, and reading, and mucking about with Linux. I tend to go through phases where I get obsessive about one single thing. Right now, its bikes, before it was watching old reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I often have trouble concentrating on anything; when I'm in class I'm thinking about fixing my bike, and when I'm watching TV with my roommate I'm thinking about my math homework.
I have an extremely active imagination and am capable of keeping myself amused for hours on end without moving an inch.
I often wish I were smarter.
Being Remiss
I've been unexplainably remiss in my blogging duties lately, and there really hasn't been any other reason for my lack of blogging besides the fact that I'm extremely lazy. I'll be leaving for school tomorrow, so I'll soon be blogging with even worse regularilty.
Hopefully, I'll be able to finish up one or two of the drafts in my archives before I leave, so that my blog doesn't look as though its been deserted.
That's about I have to say for now.
Site Update
Yes, I know, I've been seriously slacking on writing the past week. I've been writing quite a bit tonight, these past few hours, but I want to spend some time to edit them before I publish them, so I won't have anything new till tomorrow morning. Sorry to all you people eagerly awaiting the next chapter in the exciting saga of my HP dv2910us review.
Remeber folks, patience is a virtue!
Oh! And BTW, I re-found that stupid snake that I ran over with my bike. Here to read more on that.
Lightbox Effects
So unless you've spent the last few years never clicking on an image on a web page, you're quite familiar with Lightbox-like effects (and if not with the name then at least with the effect itself). Here's an example of Lightbox2 for those unfamiliar with it.
When I say "Lightbox-like," I am referring to any kind of "effect" that allows for embedded pop-ups of images and other forms of media (i.e. flash videos, etc). The benefit of Lightbox, aside from the aesthetics, is that it doesn't result in an actual pop-up (which are often blocked by a pop-up blocker on a modern browser), or require the user to navigate to another page and then hit the browser's "back" button to navigate back to the main content. The basic idea is that Lightbox makes a visitor's life easier, supposedly.
I have two problems with Lightbox-like effects. Firstly, the Javascript files required for the effects tend to fatties. The Lightbox2 Javascript files take up 18Kb, but Lightbox2 also requires the Prototype and Scriptaculous libraries which take up 172Kb. Its not a big deal if you're site is already heavily AJAX-ified and already uses Prototype and Scriptaculous, but not everyone's site does. Quite frankly, I find it to be highly annoying that I spend so much time slimming down my images and making sure that people without lightening fast Internet connections can easily access my sites, only to have Lightbox, which is supposed to improve the visitor's experience, bog my site down by requiring 190Kb of Javascript files. There are of course, many alternatives to Lokesh Dhakar's original Lightbox and Lightbox2, many of them which are much lighter in memory. I stumbled across this helpful "Lightbox Clones Matrix" a month or so back, and it usefully lists memory sizes for each "Lightbox clone."
Server Uptime
I'm currently hosting my site with railsplayground, who provide a fairly decent hosting plan for just 5 US dollars per month. Up until the this year, server uptime with railsplayground seemed to quite good. But this year, especially in the past month or so, uptime has been pretty flaky. Today, the server my site is hosted on was down for well over twelve hours, and my site just can back online an hour ago. Hopefully, this is just some weird funky thing going on with my server and this won't be a problem again. I really do like railsplayground and I don't look foward to having to seek out another hosting service and move all my crap over, but if problems continue I may very well have to.
New Site Design
I began a major rehaul of my blog's visual appearance two days ago, and I've been tweaking it up until now. My new theme is based mostly on Designer-daily's "Gone Fishing" theme. I decided that my old theme, which was another stock theme from the wordpress themes database, was too "light-colored."
Old visitors may notice that my blog is now significantly darker in color, though still blue. Also, my old "Pure" theme was built to accomadate monitors that have a maximum horizontal resoultion of 800px, whereas my current theme is slightly wider then 800px. In the past I have always tried to make my webpages render nicely on older computers. Now of course, I doubt that anyone still has a monitor with 800x600 resolution, and if they do they probably aren't reading my blog.
I made some changes to the stock "Gone Fishing" theme.
- I changed the default font-type to Verdana, which in my opinion is a prettier font (for some reason, on my Linux boot, Helvetica looks like a flock of birds crapped on Times New Roman)
- Changed some font sizes around in the main CSS stylesheet
- Shrank the right sidebar significantly, thus making the main column much wider. Who the hell needs that much space for a side-navigation bar?
- Dumped the default banner which depicted a sketch of a fish's mouth, and replaced it with my own custom banner. I really needed an image in there to spiff things up and I thought the fish was kinda ugly, so I stuck in Tux the Linux penguin.
Keeping the stock theme was out of the question, not because I think its ugly, but because I don't want people looking at my blog and seeing a "canned blog."
Categories
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Archives
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Comments
- jim on Miyata 914 – Acquisition and Review
- CatalystForChaos on The Parable of the Bicycle
- CatalystForChaos on The Vampires of Twilight
- Michael on HP dv2910us (dv2700) – Summary and Conclusions
- chi on HP dv2910us (dv2700) – Installing Linux
