orangeacid.net

This blog is on hold

I’m resigning from this blog for a few months.  I have put up my notices on the homepage, and I have taken down everything except the blog, which I will keep for the time being for archive and to explore my thoughts occasionally.

This is obviously something that I regret having to do, but my studies and exams are more important at the moment and I’d rather this site be anticipated as something that is soon to take off than something merely mediocre.

When the site returns it will be with an entirely new theme, built from scratch and optimized for future updates.  It will be cleaner, leaner, and optimized.  It will be beautiful.  Code is poetry, don’cha know.

The final DiDA deadline is on Wednesday, and after that it’s solid revision until my exams.  I am then presented with a 10-week holiday, 4 weeks of which my girlfriend will be in Malaysia and during the whole of which parties and gigs occur in the evenings… so I will have long, free days in which to code.

I’m looking forward to it.

Downtime

I went to Poland for a few days a week ago, and came back to discover that my website was down.  This took a few days to sort out and still isn’t completely resolved, so sorry for the ‘deadness’.

Photography and Photoshop tips and tricks on the way!

Quick fix for strange CSS link behavior

Posts on GTD and photography for Scenes and Emos in the pipeline, but just a quick update - something that I discovered working on a website for a school project earlier. If you’re not into webdesign, give this one a miss.

If you’ve any experience in semantic webdesign/xHTML+CSS, you will know how… well, frankly what an arse IE is to code for. One of my pet hates is the way that it handles the :hover pseudo class. Firstly, it only works on links, and secondly, I personally have encountered a large number of seemingly unexplainable errors that occur after the link has been followed.

First, some background theory.  The order of a CSS document is important - if two styles for an element exist, the last property will always win. Because of this, it is important to put your pseudo classes in the right order. This order is:

1. :link
2. :visited
3. :hover
4. :active

It is easy to remember this if you remember that you will have a love/hate relationship with pseudo classes - that’s link visited hover active.

This is fair enough, but sometimes certain properties won’t work after the link has been followed in IE<7.

OK. So, the solution?

Leave off the :link pseudo class. Your styles will work (as far as I can tell) just fine, without the strange, seemingly random errors. If in doubt, add a blank and pseudo-classed selector for each link.

Platform Update

I will be updating to WordPress version 2.1 in the following minutes. Site function may be disrupted for a while.

Update: The update went smoothly and all systems are stable and running. Captain.

First impressions:

• All of my plugins work fine. Hoorah for backwards-compatability!
• Spell check works fine but disables the Fox’s spellchecker.  Hooray for cross-browser spellcheck!  Boo for incompatability!
• The bug that occasionally causes the automatic link-maker to freeze is going to really annoy me before long.
• The touted auto-save probabaly doesn’t work.
• The new image-manager is nice.
• The import/export feature is going to make developing for orangeacid.net on my local server much easier.

New WordPress released, Project 365 update

It seems like forever since I have been here.

It is 12am here, but I feel that I must write at least something tonight.  So here it is: WordPress 2.1 has just been released with a whole host of new features and improvements (grab it here).  Amongst other things, my favorite features look like they will be:

• Built in spell checker (how can anyone survive without Firefox’s built-in dictionaries?)
• Auto-save (just like gmail; no more accidentally pressing backspace outside of a textbox and losing 20 minutes worth of waffle)
• Customizable homepages, sans-plugins

I will install this tomorrow, all being well, but I can almost guarantee that this will screw up my homepage and will take several hours to fix - which may span across several days depending on how much time I have to spare.

In addition to continuing my eternal quest to learn PHP proper, I have been taking at least one photo every day as part of my ‘project 365′.  I mentioned earlier that I would host these online, but I am having some trouble with this currently.  They should be on this site in some form or another early February, even if this means that they are integrated into my main blog.  I am currently debating whether to keep an online photo-diary, or just display the pictures in some sort of gallery.

Problems with WordPress

Just a quick update - the reason that you haven’t been getting any large posts or Project 365 goodness recently is that my publishing system WordPress is throwing a wobbly.  Not entirely sure what’s happening, but something to do with filesizes.  I hope to have it sorted out in a few days.

The new site design is coming on too… more on that soon.