Category: Site News - Page 7 - UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

The pleasure (and pain) of independent discovery

I was pretty proud of myself when I came up with the solution for the dropdown menus I use in the navigation bar in my current site design. They don’t require all of the cockamamie JavaScript most older solutions did. They surely don’t work in older browsers (I’m guessing), but that really doesn’t matter now. Most significantly to me, though, I had never seen a solution that worked like what I am doing.

I guess it was just a lack of looking. There’s even a term for this approach, Suckerfish Dropdowns, although I’m not doing exactly what they recommend as far as IE support is concerned. However, I haven’t actually noticed it being necessary.

Now that may well be because I’m not even trying to support versions before IE 7, what with all of the transparent PNGs I’ve got everywhere. But still, the solution I’m using works great across all of the browsers I’ve tested: Firefox 2.x, Safari 2.x/3.x, and IE 7. The only complaint I have with it is that the positioning differs slightly between the browsers: the menus appear a few pixels higher in IE than in Firefox or Safari, such that they’re jammed up against the text of the menu header. But if I move them lower, the necessary contact (or really, probably overlap) between the menu header and the menu itself doesn’t happen… and if there’s a gap of even 1 pixel between the bottom of the header and the top of the menu, the menu will disappear if you don’t mouse over it fast enough.

Geez. I read a paragraph like that last one and I just have to ask myself, what am I doing with my life???

Version SNAFU

Today I updated WordPress for an “urgent security release,” and as usual there are unexpected side effects. For some reason now, my sliding sidebar panels no longer work. No JavaScript errors; they just don’t do anything. I blame a Scriptaculous update that is probably embedded within. I hope within the next 24 hours to diagnose and fix the problem, but for anyone (emphasis on “one”) who’s wondering why the panels aren’t working, here’s a semi-explanation.

Update (1/1/2008): File under SEU. I think the problem was simply that I needed to clear my cache. The first suspicion was aroused when I fired up MAMP, ran the site locally, and found that the sliders were working just fine. At any rate, I re-uploaded all of my theme files plus the Scriptaculous and prototype.js files, cleared my cache, and now it’s working.

New t-shirt design: 1974

I’ve just added a new t-shirt design to my Born in 1974 shop on CafePress. This new design pays tribute — in a suitably retro cheesy style — to the glorious year of my birth.

And while you’re there (since I know you’re on your way at this very moment to buy one), don’t forget my other retro-ish designs, Seven Days without Pizza Makes One Weak and Old Old School (featuring a truly “old school” media format).

Checking Wikipedia, I discovered some celebrity birthdays of note: I was born a week after Jenna Fischer (Pam from The Office) and 11 days before Lark Voorhees (Lisa from Saved by the Bell.) I’m also within a month or two of Kate Moss, Tiffani Thiessen (another Saved by the Bell alumna), Christian Bale, Seth Green, James Blunt, Mark-Paul Gosselaar (more Saved by the Bell), Jenna Jameson, Da Brat, Victoria “Posh Spice” Beckham, Penélope Cruz, Jewel, Alanis Morissette and Derek Jeter. And that’s just in the first half of the year.

Sheesh. And my greatest claim to fame is the freakin’ Chewbacca thing.

Sidebar enhancements

You may have noticed after the current site redesign that the sidebar panels now sport toggle buttons that allow you to open and close them with slick Scriptaculous sliding effects.

I’ve taken this a step further by using cookies to store your panels’ status, keeping the same panels opened or closed as you go from page to page (and between browser sessions… but since it’s client-side, it doesn’t follow you to different computers).

The next step will be to add handles, allowing you to change the order of the panels as well. Stay tuned! (Or not.)

For the geeks among you, I’ve facilitated all of this additional functionality by writing some object-oriented PHP for handling the panels. It’s much cleaner and less prone to error.

Are you a web geek? Can a 404 error page excite you?

If the former is true, it proves the latter. I’ll confess “yes” to both.

Today at work I was doing some miscellaneous web-related research (aimless surfing? no, no, never), and I came across a page of creative 404 error pages that inspired me to finally do something interesting with my own 404 error message.

Having lived in Atlanta (area code 404), I initially set out to do something that played off that. (I know, very original. I just wanted to make sure not to settle for “Tha 404.”) But it wasn’t long before my roadgeek tendencies kicked in and I thought of something even better.

Here’s my 404 page. (The image at right is a spoiler, of course.)

The sign image is (mostly) my own creation in Photoshop: I swiped the shield images for I-16 and Georgia 404 as SVGs from their respective Wikipedia pages, and the font is courtesy of another roadgeek. Whenever I start to question myself, I am reassured that there are others out there even sicker than I am.

Incidentally, there really is a Georgia 404, although the only place you’ll see a sign for it is on a small spur route near Savannah. Georgia’s Department of Transportation has a funny little quirk in that it has given all freeway-grade roads a state highway designation in the 400 range. (I suppose the “4” indicates 4 or more lanes.) As far as I know (and as this PDF from the GDOT website seems to confirm), there’s only one road in the system for which this is the main designation, however: Georgia 400, which is a main commuter artery running north (well, northish) from Buckhead out to the north-central suburbs and beyond into Deliverance country, since both I-75 and I-85 veer off diagonally out of the city (into the northwest and northeast suburbs and beyond into Deliverance country).

All of the other freeways in the state have a “4xx” designation too, but there are generally no signs indicating such, because they all also have a familiar designation, usually an Interstate number.

As it happens, Georgia 404 is better known as I-16 (hence the double shields on my sign image), which, interestingly enough, is not really “interstate” even though it’s an “Interstate”; it starts in Macon and ends in Savannah.