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20060508 Monday May 08, 2006

New Colors (again) I've just completed another round of re-working the colors and header images on this site. If you click on the different category headings (i.e. Java, Mac OS X or Open Source), you can see the other color schemes. If you like one of the category theme's better than the default one, let me know.

I also did some tweaks to get everything working in IE. What a pain in the ass that browser is. For some reason, if anything in the "main" part of the website (where the blog entries are) is too wide - IE shoves everything down the page, including the top nav bar and the right sidebar. It's so bad that a simple paragraph with "margin-left: 10px" doesn't work. With Firefox and Safari, it moves over properly and overlays the sidebar if that's what it takes. Because of this, there's a potential that wide posts in this site will make the sidebar drop to the bottom of the page. For the nav bar, I changed it to be absolutely positioned, so it should always be present.

Other IE issues include: 1) the calendar icon is a transparent .png (I'll probably have to change it to a .gif) and 2) the nav bar's "selected" items are up a pixel or two and contain a bottom border. While these are minor issues, I would like to figure out how to make IE more tolerant of item width's in the #main section. Let me know if you have any tips or tricks. Posted in Roller at May 08 2006, 12:47:42 AM MDT 18 Comments

Comments:

I like "The Bus" better. For my age, I think purple is bit too fanzy as default theme.

Posted by Lo Vui Keng on May 08, 2006 at 03:33 AM MDT #

Hey Matt, I'm an avid reader of your blog -great stuff. Its taken awhile but I'm getting used to the new layouts, I really liked the old one -it was very distinctive. The new layout is growing on me. I think that "The Web" section colours would be cool to use for the default theme.

Posted by Alan Hicks on May 08, 2006 at 03:55 AM MDT #

I vote for the green...

Posted by Rob Misek on May 08, 2006 at 06:27 AM MDT #

Hi Matt,

I think the colors are much better now! And the logos also... ;) I'm not too much into purple, but the rest is pretty cool - especially the "Open Source" category.

Congrats!

Posted by GB on May 08, 2006 at 06:58 AM MDT #

Just add the following to your .daypermalink class and your .png file will appear transparent in IE. 
.daypermalink {    
    filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='/themes/andreas08/images/calendar.png',sizingMethod='crop');
}

Posted by shaolang on May 08, 2006 at 08:57 AM MDT #

I really appreciate your views and hard work on java technologies. My vote is for the green under the Java section.

Posted by MA Poitras on May 08, 2006 at 10:39 AM MDT #

Shaolang - thanks for the tip. I added it, but it doesn't seem to work.

Posted by Matt Raible on May 08, 2006 at 11:13 AM MDT #

Saying something negative is no fun, but I'm not a fan of the Raible Designs logo at the top of each page. Other then that I love the new color schemes.

Posted by Erik Weibust on May 08, 2006 at 12:39 PM MDT #

Sheeit - it figures you wouldn't like my fancy new logo. ;-) I kinda like it personally. If nothing else, you have to admit it's better than the old one. No?

If you'd like to propose another one, I'd be happy to take a look at it. ;-)

Posted by Matt Raible on May 08, 2006 at 12:54 PM MDT #

1. Raible designs logo... sucks?! ;) 2. I don't like purple theme. I vote for green.

Posted by 83.131.54.227 on May 08, 2006 at 12:56 PM MDT #

Hey! No more bible study page! Looks great Matt. I like the Java (green w/ mountains) color scheme the best...

Posted by Vu on May 08, 2006 at 12:58 PM MDT #

The "Java" one is the best....more natural, Montana-esque feel. This is not a commercial site (save that for the Virtuas ones) ;-) so I think the Java one is best suited for your personality and the goal of this site.

Posted by Matt F on May 08, 2006 at 01:27 PM MDT #

The new logo is a HUGE improvement over the old one, but sorry to say, I'm not a fan of the new one, either. Disclaimer, this criticism is coming from a guy using the vanilla black and white default MT theme unchanged for 3 years.

Posted by Erik Weibust on May 08, 2006 at 01:38 PM MDT #

For those of you who simply said "green" - do you mean the theme from Java or The Web?

Posted by Matt Raible on May 08, 2006 at 03:19 PM MDT #

I went to check out "The Web" link : http://raibledesigns.com/page/rd?catname=/The+Web and noticed that a connection to paypal was being opened. So I kick up fiddler and sure enough a SSL connection is being established and left open. This is caused by the PayPal link for CSS Framework contest. What I dont understant is why simply decaring the form causes the connetion to be established. <form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post"> .. </form>

Posted by Sanjiv Jivan on May 08, 2006 at 08:53 PM MDT #

Harlow Matt,

I'm so sorry that the css didn't work (as I didn't test it before "submitting" the solution to you, and I was kinda brain-dead then :-p).

Anyway, the "solution" below has been test and should work ;-)

.entry a img {
	display: none;
}

.entry a {
	float: left;
	width: 16px;
	height: 16px;
	filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='calendar.png',sizingMethod='scale');
	background /**/:/**/ url("calendar.png");
}

The only caveat to the solution above is that you will have to substitute the correct path to your calendar.png file.

Hope this helps.... :-)

Posted by shaolang on May 08, 2006 at 09:19 PM MDT #

That's pretty weird Sanjiv. Another strange thing that's been happening to me (ever since I upgraded to Roller 2.2) is this site renders as HTML-only (just the text) in Safari. It happens about 1 out of 3 times - and I've never seen it happen on another browser, but I've been able to reproduce it on many different OS X machines.

Posted by Matt Raible on May 08, 2006 at 09:20 PM MDT #

OK - I've changed the default theme to be the green mountains. The purple theme has been moved to the Java category. I'll look into reworking the logo tomorrow - possibly removing it in favor of text.

Posted by Matt Raible on May 09, 2006 at 12:22 AM MDT #

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Matt Raible is a Web Architect who enjoys developing applications with open source technologies. Contact me for rates.
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