For better or worse, there have been a number of stylesheet updates around here, so you may notice things looking slightly different. First off are the shadows behind the main content box, for whose sake non-semantic elements were added to this page for the first time ever. How quick we are to sell out!

Speaking of selling out, text advertisements may appear at the top every now and then. Yes they suck but it’s the holidays and extra cash is always nice.

I moved the background image for the post titles from the anchor element to the h2 element to prevent the blinking when you rolled over the titles in IE on Windows. My Mother will be sorely disappointed as she thought that was a rather cool effect I had done intentionally. I wish!

Tantek and Eric informed me that my site was completely borked in respectively Mac IE 5 and Safari. This site is an experiment, so I make no guarantees as to browser compabilitiy but I try to be good about testing things on browsers available to me. Last night I used Greg’s Powerbook to see what was going on. It seems Safari was having trouble with some commented out content (the ads that are temporarily disabled) so I moved that from HTML comments to PHP comments. Commenting things out server-side is actually a much better practice because it keeps the source code maintainability for you the author but hides the comments from any visitors. There is also a savings in bandwidth, but in many cases that will be minimal. So as a best practice go from:

<-- Three extra divs added because prima the donna designer just HAD to have his shadows. And my idiot boss agrees with him. -->

to:

<?php /* :-- Three extra divs added because the prima donna designer just HAD to have his shadows. And my idiot boss agrees with him. And they'll never see this comment. MUHAHAHA! */ ?>

As for Mac IE, I wasn’t sure where to begin. It doesn’t handle the float on the menu list items well so instead of a nice tabby menu you have a series of giant honking bars in the header. I could go to display: inline for the navigation list items and work with the horizontal menu from there, but I’ve always prefered having the list items floated and the anchors as blocks, which you can’t do when the containing list element is inline. If I remember correctly Eric helped me around this problem before on the WordPress site (thank you!) by giving the items a fixed width, but I don’t have the space to burn here like I did on that menu.

Checking over my stats, Mac IE users make up approximately 2.1% of my viewing audience over the life of this site, and closer to 0.9% over the last month. Uowever is this low and declining number because other browsers are now in vogue on the Mac and IE hasn’t been updated recently to quench Mac users’ insatiable desire for upgrades? Or is it because my site looks so bad in their browser? The world may never know.

So the moral of the story is: the web is a jungle and watch your comments when on Safari.