Comments on: Invalid Gnome

By: Simon Willison

Simon Willison — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 20:54:57 +0000

Well, the redesign appears to be out now and it’s much worse than I expected – blockquotes for indentation, paragraphs with non-breaking spaces in them for added vertical spacing – tag soup if ever I’ve seen it. Yuck.

By: Al

Al — Sat, 06 Mar 2004 14:13:56 +0000

Mog, the default templates for MT can be viewed here, the only table is for the calendar which is arguably tabular data. Regardless, for me, it's pretty much a moot point since I can't recall the last time I used a default template for more than an installation. That said, I too am coming to prefer WordPress (and recently Textpattern) for the simple reason that I have a reasonable grasp of PHP but Perl baffles me. MT also generates a few too many pages for me and I've never quite seen the advantage of storing everything in a database if your going to create a slew of static files anyway.

By: mog

mog — Fri, 05 Mar 2004 05:09:42 +0000

Well, I looked at the source code at MT and they used tables. The site promoting the product as well as several MT sites I have been to used tables, so I wasn’t inclined to use it. Since then, I have had the opportunity to guest post at several MT blogs and it reminds me a lot like Blogger with the page rebuilds. I prefer WP. Much nicer from my point of view.

By: Al

Al — Thu, 04 Mar 2004 20:09:05 +0000

I remember when Lockergnome did the redesign and though I’m not certain, I seem to recall it validating. Checking now there are more errors than I was inclined to count — I wonder if part of the regression is due to problems keeping the site valid with whatever they use for a CMS. On the other hand I haven’t read it with any regularity recently, what used to be a valuable resource now seems like little more than a platform to pimp the latest affiliate deal and they don’t do a very good job seperating the advertising from the editorial content leading to unecessary confusion.

Mog, I’m not sure what you mean by tables in MT. As best I can remember the default MT templates have always used CSS. I imagine it’s possible an early version used a layout with tables but I certainly don’t recall that being he case.

By: mog

mog — Thu, 04 Mar 2004 06:15:42 +0000

I can’t see going backwards. The main reason I went with b2 and then to WP for my blog was I didn’t want to do tables. I wanted something I could change with just a different stylesheet. MT had tables, MT was a no go. Simple.

By: Scrivs

Scrivs — Wed, 03 Mar 2004 23:31:46 +0000

I had to post my own little snippet on the whole situation: Why Go Backwards?

By: Joe Grossberg

Joe Grossberg — Wed, 03 Mar 2004 22:52:46 +0000

“it was one of the ugliest sites I’d ever visited, and the bizarre look turned me off from subscribing to the newsletters even when I had heard several recommendations, because I assumed they must be unprofessional.”

It’s true; another unstated benefit of RSS is that people will still read you if you have good content and awful design.

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 03 Mar 2004 21:57:25 +0000

Lockergnome has been going down for a while now. Ever since they got rid of most of the original staff, it just hasn’t been the same. The personality is mostly gone, the quality has diminished and I’m just unsatisified. I used to read every newsletter, I have for the past five years…has it really been that long? Now though, I rarely read the issues. I still save every one but I don’t look that them that often.

Funny, almost.

By: Stew

Stew — Wed, 03 Mar 2004 21:41:53 +0000

Why am I not surprised?

While I don’t know the guys who work at lockergnome all I can imagine is that they were never happy with CSS and like the oldway because it’s how they learnt and their was is right. This happended to me just today See here for my post on my own blog

By: Kevin Francis

Kevin Francis — Wed, 03 Mar 2004 12:24:33 +0000

uh oh, regression.