About this site's lack of design: Yes, it's supposed to look this way — I'm helping create a new sandbox theme for WordPress (see it on GitHub).

Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Suffering from chronic idiocy since 1977

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Monday Updates

OK, so it’s really Tues­day, but since Mon­day hasn’t offi­cially ended for me…

The side­bar has now been updated to reflect most of the changes made by the win­ning entries of the Side­bar Redesign Con­test. The new look has checked out in IE 6/Firebird on XP, and IE 5/Safari on OS 9/X, but let me know if you see any oddities.

I’ve also made some changes to the images in the side­bar. All rollovers are now han­dled by CSS (no more JavaScript rollovers!), and I’m also using Pixy’s Fast CSS Rollovers. The book ban­ners at the bot­tom of the side­bar use just one image each (images: DWWS ban­ner, Speed ban­ner), while the Style Switcher rollovers all use the same source image (view switcher image). This cuts down on the num­ber of HTTP requests needed to load the page (before: 10 images; now: 3), and there is no more delay for the hover images to load. Very cool.

In addi­tion to these new items (some other posi­tion­ing has been tweaked in this site’s pri­mary css file, so you may have to reload/clear your cache if things look odd), I thought I’d point out (for those of you who haven’t noticed) the header graphic on every page of this site. It’s a PNG file, with no col­ors other than white and gray (view image). The color is vis­i­ble through the trans­par­ent areas of the image, so the image has to load only once, even when a user switches styles. To allow users of IE5.5+/Windows to view this trick, a handy bit of code by Young­Pup tells IE how to prop­erly dis­play the trans­par­ent por­tions of the image.

I’ve been han­dling the image this way since the cur­rent site design was launched, but I’ve never thought to say any­thing about it. It’s cool enough that I fig­ured it was about time.

As always, let me know if any­thing doesn’t work as adver­tised, and I’ll get right on fix­ing it.

This item was posted by Dan Rubin on Tuesday, September 9th, 2003.

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5 comments on “Monday Updates”

  1. Posted by Adam on Tuesday, September 9th, 2003.

    Fuck­ing brilliant.

    (par­don me!)

    The ol’ gal’s slim and good lookin’ Hav­ing you raise her skirt and point out all her juicy bits helps too!

    (who said that?)

    Makes it eas­ier for us to make some of our gals’ bits bet­ter, thanks Dr Rubin.

  2. Posted by Anne van Kesteren on Tuesday, September 9th, 2003.

    How about all images in 1 file? Saves some server hits :).

  3. Posted by Dan on Tuesday, September 9th, 2003.

    Adam: Aw shucks, ’twas nothing ;-)

    Anne: I did con­sider this, but then I thought about my san­ity, and I real­ized it was OK to leave it at 3 files :-) It cer­tainly makes it eas­ier to change things if I add/delete a style or a banner.

  4. Posted by Arikawa on Tuesday, September 9th, 2003.

    Dan,

    Looks great. But I now I cant seem to find the syn­di­ca­tion link? Moved to a new com­puter and get­ting my aggre­ga­tor set up again…

  5. Posted by Dan on Tuesday, September 9th, 2003.

    Thanks Arikawa — the links for this site’s RSS feeds some­how dis­s­a­peared from the side­bar a while ago (I can’t imag­ine how that could have happened… ;-)

    I’ve added links for RSS 0.91 and 1.0 — since I haven’t spent must time at all look­ing into the depths of the RSS world, feel free to coach me (e.g. do I need to list both 0.91 and 1.0?)