Month: November 2011

playing with css

As many coders do, I work on personal projects on the side, especially lately as I’ve been doing contracting work and job-hunting. Building software is apparently one of the things I on some level can’t not do — I get antsy after a while and need to write some code. Lucky for me, then, that people are happy to pay me well to do something I enjoy. 🙂

Right now I’m working on a site (in Python and Django) which will allow you to take things you have written and turn them first, as a MVP, into a PDF of a book, and eventually directly into a physical book, via one of the print-on-demand services.

Because I want the site to be friendly and easy to use, I have been lately working on the styling of it. Going into this I knew very little CSS — anyone who has looked at the source to this web site (please don’t, it hurts) can attest that much of it is left over from the bad old days of tables that characterized the web when I started it. This is where I am right now, after a couple evenings’ hacking (click for the HTML version):

 

I’m pretty happy with it so far. Right now it’s aiming to be pure HTML 5, and I made a couple design decisions in moving from my Inkscape mockups to this CSS mockup because they were easier to do in pure CSS. More browser backwards-compatability things, many of them enabled by JavaScript, will be along as the code moves towards being in actual production and out of the mockup phase. I’m confident at least that things will degrade functionally — if IE 6 users don’t see rounded corners, they’ll survive, and if they don’t see the placeholder text in the author field either, it’s a UX hit but doesn’t impair the functionality of the site. All my PUT and POST calls still work. (This example is of course straight HTML. Clicking the submit button doesn’t do anything.)

Let me know if it breaks in your browser. (Why yes, this is partly a backdoor attempt to get some browser compatability testing, how could you tell? 😉

new server

If you can see this, it means that DNS has updated and the site has successfully transitioned to a new server. Updates will happen in a staggered fashion as DNS caches time out and requery, the worst-case latency being four hours, so you may see this update on the site well before you see it in your RSS reader, for example.

The motivation for the switch was that the old server which was hosting this site had become kind of a Christmas-tree box (services hanging off it like ornaments, without much regard for their similarity), and the site is important enough to me as a marketing tool that I didn't want any downtime (hi, potential employers!), so I've moved it to dedicated hosting while I rebuild the old box.

Known issues: As a consequence of the move, many older blog posts will appear to have been updated very recently. Older versions of ikiwiki, the software I use to run the site, pulled page creation and modification time off disk rather than from the version control system, and new server means new disk means new creation and update times. I wrote some code to fix the creation times, but that means that everything I touched looks as though it was updated last Sunday, because it was. Rest assured that nothing material has changed. (And if you don't believe me, the Internet Archive will probably provide older versions of the pages.)

I believe everything else to be working properly, but if you see anything that's broken, please let me know, either by e-mail or in the comments.