Free the web: boycott IE6

free the web says:

Internet Explorer 6 is holding back the future. IE6 is the bane of every web developer's life. Released in 2001, IE6 fails to even properly support the CSS 1.0 standard from 1996. Supporting IE6 prevents us from using cool new features, standard with up to date browsers. This erodes user-experience for everyone. Additionally, the hacks and workarounds that web designers are forced to use degrades their code, and this limits progress in other areas. Above all it's simply a waste of millions of hours of human potential.

IE7 is better, but still a problem. Encourage people to get a better browser, of which there are several: Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Google Chrome, for example. Or better still, encourage them to switch from Windows to Ubuntu. :-)

Upgrade of three websites to WordPress 2.3.2

I have now upgraded three more websites to WordPress 2.3.2, so they are all done now. This time I made no mistakes in the sequence of work, so each upgrade went fairly quickly—but in each case I forgot (despite my notes) at least one tweak until I noticed that the site wasn't displaying quite right and realised that I had forgotten to activate a plug-in or replace a file in the theme or do something equally trivial.

More travel photo albums

I've been using JAlbum to put together digital photos albums for a bit over a year now. I started with a fairly simple design for the album from my trip to Europe and used the same design (with colour changes) for several Australian trips. In the meantime, JAlbum (a free, open-source program, written in Java, that runs on Linux, Mac and Windows) has gone through several upgrades, and so have the album themes. A few weeks ago I was playing around with the latest iteration of the basic Chameleon theme and found a combination of options (including colour scheme) that appealed to me. So I'm now using that theme for some of the albums from our 2004 around-Australian trip. The first few albums from that trip are still in the old theme; I'll update them to the new theme later. The first of the new-theme albums is from the flight I took over the Kimberley from Kununurra; it starts here.

Upgrade of one website to WordPress 2.3.2

Today I upgraded my Taming OpenOffice.org website from WordPress 2.2.1 to 2.3.2. I misunderstood some of the instructions, and ended up spending far more time than I should have in recovering from my mistakes. Eventually I succeeded in getting everything working, and I now have notes to help me avoid making the same mistakes next time. Only 3 websites to go!

My editors' website was hacked!

Today I discovered that my technical editors' website had been hacked sometimes in the past few days. All my pages got turned into blog posts, and a bunch of spam sites were listed on the blogroll. <sigh> Damage control time! At least everything appeared to be there, even if it was goofed up. I fixed the blogroll easily, and then figured out how to edit the database and change the designation of the pages from "post" back to "page". Fortunately, Dreamhost provides easy access to tools for editing the database. The hardest part was remembering my login name and password combination for the database (different from the FTP login).

New Avalook website goes live

Although many pages of my Australian travel website (Avalook) have yet to be moved into WordPress, I've made the site live. Pages that have been updated are in the new (WordPress) style, and the others are still visible but in the previous (home-grown) style. I decided that if I waited until I had moved all the pages into Wordpress, the new site would never go live... or at least not for another year or more... not least because I'm more interested in getting some photo albums done and online too.

Technical editors' website redesigned

After months of off-and-on work on my editors' website (setting it up in WordPress), I've finally got it to the point that I'm ready to reveal it to the world. And so I have! http://www.jeanweber.com/newsite/ The design (template) breaks in Internet Explorer. I don't have the time or energy to figure out how to fix that. I'm no longer doing this professionally, or with a view to attracting clients, so I've decided to be bloody-minded about it. I put a note on the first page that says "get a browser that supports standards". Some pages are out of date, so I still have a lot of maintenance work to do, but at least the major conversion work is done... except for the old newsletters, which will gradually be converted or absorbed into the main site.

Another live WordPress website

Friends of OpenDocument's new website just went live. http://friendsofopendocument.com/ I learned lots more things about WordPress while doing this site, because I wanted to turn the old news items into blog entries and I had to tweak the template to show the blog info on the static pages. I was really happy to find a theme that had almost the same colours that I had used in the original site, so the existing logo fit right in. I just had to tweak the colour for the header background a tiny bit to match the logo. I'm also quite pleased that I was able to figure out so many things without asking anyone, just searching the web for info.

Taming OfficeOrg.com website redesigned

My first WordPress-based website is now live: http://taming-openoffice-org.com/ It still needs some tweaking (both the content and the navigation), but I'm generally happy with it. I learned a lot working on it, tweaking the CSS and some of the PHP files (especially the header and sidebar). I never want to use a template or theme the way it was originally designed! ;-) I read a lot of how-to's and other online info to get as far as I did. I found some WordPress extensions that have helped a lot, but it's obvious that I need to learn a lot more about PHP to be able to do much more personal customizing. As I expected, this WordPress-based site is much easier to keep up-to-date than the old site was. I'm thinking about adding a blog for OOo-related topics, but considering how rarely I blog on any topic, I'm not sure it's worth doing. Meanwhile, I've started working on the updated site for Friends of OpenDocument. I chose Taming and Friends as the first sites to convert, because they have smaller amounts of existing content compared to my other websites. I'm really keen on revising Avalook and Technical Editors' Eyrie, despite the huge number of pages, but I want to learn what I'm doing with something less daunting. I've found really nice-looking templates for those two sites, so that's encouraging me to get to them soon.