Over the next few days, as I have available time, I will be tweaking the design of this site. My ultimate goal is to merge my blog with this site, closing the former down once that's complete. The style changes I'll be making are in anticipation of that move.
If you spot something broken, let me know by leaving a comment here, but just be warned that things will be in a state of flux as I make updates.
After thinking about it for a while, I've decided to remove the Software section of this website. The applications that were posted were all relatively ancient, and saw little (if any) download traffic.
The contact form at this site has been restored. If you see any additional problems with it, please let me know by leaving a comment on this post.
I am aware that the contact form at this site is broken (though I'm not sure why). Until I get some time to fix it, if you have a bug report or question, simply send me an email at: removed
My apologies for the inconvenience.
Just a quick note to let everyone know that contact via email should be back up and running here at the site. Comments are also a good way to get in contact with me (plus they benefit everyone).
I've recently had a perfect storm of email woes here at this site. Last month, my email servers changed at DreamHost (for reasons I still don't fully understand), breaking all of my approved SSL certificates (not to mention my SMTP settings). Around the same time, I updated to Thunderbird 3.0 from 2.x. The new interface is bizarre, and I've only had problems from day one of the upgrade. As such, I am now actively working towards moving all of Born Geek's email (including this website) to GMail.
Unfortunately, someone is apparently squatting on my domain over at Google Apps. I attempted to reset the account password there, but no secondary email address is on record, making things much more difficult for me. I have started a manual password reset process (via proving to Google that I do indeed own the domain), and hope to have things up and running by this weekend.
Long story short, any direct emails sent to me through the contact form at this website may not be answered for a while. Please bear with me during this painful process.
Over the holiday break, I stumbled upon a wonderful article describing several CSS tricks to add eye-candy without images. I've been using rounded corners here at the site since the last theme update, and thanks to this article, I'm now employing drop shadows. The effect is subtle, but adds a lot to the design; in short, I like it.
The style rules for adding drop shadows are very simple, though proprietary; it's a shame this stuff can't be standardized properly. Here's the code to use a drop shadow (the values shown are the ones I'm using on the site):
#myelement {
-moz-box-shadow: 1px 1px 3px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5); /* Firefox */
-webkit-box-shadow: 1px 1px 3px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5); /* Webkit */
box-shadow: 1px 1px 3px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5); /* Standards way */
}
The article even details the appropriate style code for Internet Explorer, but I haven't included it here, mainly because it's ugly. Other effects that the article explains are glow (the opposite of drop shadow, essentially), gradients, rotating images with CSS, transparency, and a few more advanced tricks. It's great that this support is built-in to most standards compliant browsers. So long to those annoying images that try so desperately to do the same thing!
Update: So it turns out that adding this eye candy significantly reduces scrolling performance in Firefox (quite an annoyance). Chrome doesn't have this issue, so it's clearly a Firefox problem. Should I keep the shadows and suffer the performance hit? Or should I chuck them and keep things snappy?
Also, Webkit browsers don't support the inset modifier for shadows, which means you see even less eye candy in Chrome, et al.
Update 2: I've removed the drop shadows for the time being. After all, this stuff is experimental.
I've been looking at my visitor statistics for this website (as I always do), and I thought I'd share some interesting information. The most popular posts at this website are surprising to me, and I'm not sure I could have guessed which ones were at the top. Here are the top five posts for the month of October:
I find it quite bizarre that my article on batch file exit codes is at the top of the list; and by quite a large margin! Apparently, there are a lot of people out there confused about this subject (and rightly so). Also, I never would have guessed that setting up NTP was popular enough to even register. But there it is coming in at number 2! Some of the other articles are less surprising: Firefox 3.5 being slow is an obvious search (since it is indeed slow ... though it's gotten better with subsequent releases). And Mint.com seems to be gaining in popularity around the web, so I can understand people looking for reviews on the service.
I've always enjoyed looking at site stats and, while this website doesn't see near the traffic that its sister Born Geek does, it's enjoyable to see that my articles are indeed being read.
I accidentally blew away the .htaccess file used here at Born Geek. If you spot any links or pages that don't resolve properly, please let me know.
I have tweaked the style sheet here at Born Geek, adding eye-candy support to WebKit enabled browsers (Safari and Chrome). I've also squashed some minor bugs. Let me know if you spot something that needs correcting.
I've whipped up a quick logo to dress up this site a bit. The previous plain-text heading was a bit boring (as one reader rightly pointed out), so hopefully this is a step in a better direction. Other minor style changes have also been made (sidebar headings should now look a little better, for example).
Thoughts? Constructive criticism? Comment away!
I have squashed some bugs from yesterday's theme unveiling:
Born Geek has been given a new set of clothes! The old design was, quite frankly, an eyesore. This new layout is simpler, cleaner, and much easier on the eyes. Gravatar support has been added. And visitors using Firefox 3+ get extra eye candy (so switch today)! Not everything is complete in this new theme, so expect to see minor tweaks and fixes over the next few days. It's been tested in Firefox and IE 7. Your mileage may vary in anything else. As always, let me know what you think and if you stumble upon any bugs.
Also note that you may have to force a refresh if you visited the site recently, so as to pick up the new style sheet!
The contact form here at this website has been fixed. I did some debugging after my recent breadcrumbs issue, and managed to forget to restore things back to their original state. Many thanks to Archaeopteryx for finding and reporting the issue.
I'm really on a roll for bugs this month, huh? :oops:
I have had to turn off the breadcrumbs feature here at this site, due to an unfortunate bug causing my contact form to stop working. My contact form is not a part of WordPress (it's a standalone package), and I'm sure that the root cause lies in that fact. I'll work on fixing this issue after the holidays.
Many thanks to Ingo for pointing out this problem.
A recent Lifehacker article on the Top 10 Tools to Get Blogging Done featured my oh-so-handy CoLT extension. Unfortunately the article linked to the old URL, for which I failed to provide a redirect. This problem is now fixed, and the broken URL now redirects to the new location.
You've got to tell me about this kind of stuff people!
I have (mostly) completed the conversion of this site from Movable Type to WordPress 2.5. As always, there will be plenty of tweaking over the next few days. If you find anything out of the ordinary, please leave a comment on this post, or contact me directly. I've done my best to prevent broken links on the site, but there's always a chance I missed something.
Moving Born Geek to WordPress offers several benefits:
I have yet to turn on any WordPress caching, so please excuse any slow performance for the next few days. The WP-Cache plugin apparently has a few issues with WordPress 2.5, and I haven't yet investigated the alternate WP Super Cache plugin.
The contact form at this website has been updated. If you run into any problems, simply leave a comment on this posting letting me know that something is broken.
I've tweaked this site to use an improved means of search engine indexing. WordPress ships with a less than perfect SEO setup. As such, many incoming search queries were hitting pages that no longer included the requested terms: stuff like archive pages, category pages, etc. This duplicate content problem was easily solved by using the following snippet of code in my header.php file:
if(is_home() || is_single() || is_page())
echo "\t<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index,follow\" />\n";
else
echo "\t<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex,follow\" />\n";
I now ask search engines to only index those pages that are either a single post, page, or the home page itself (my photo album also gets indexed, but that's handled by the photo album software itself). Nothing else gets indexed, but all page links are followed, so that the target pages can be indexed as necessary. This should lead to improved search engine hits, leading people directly to the content they were looking for. Win-win for the user and for me.
As I recently mentioned, the way I was handling the "skip to main content" links on this site wasn't as accessible as I had originally thought. I have fixed this issue, and hopefully things will be much better. Please let me know if anything looks odd or out of place.