Stephen's Statements A little bit of everything from Stephen Duncan Jr, a Programmer/Web Geek working in the defense industry

Today, I found the first reference to my name in my Bloglines search feed. Stefano Demiliani apparently liked my tip on seeing rel="nofollow". I guess I need to keep posting useful stuff if I want to become an active member of the blogosphere...

Labels: meta

I recently sent in a question to Blogger support about my Delete Comment icons not showing up, because they'd replaced the code that put in an image tag from the template with a span filled with a non-breaking space. As usual, after I ask for help, I figured it out myself. It turns out you have to put <$BlogMetaData$> into your template so that you can get some style sheets that set the icons on the Delete Comment, E-mail Post, and Edit Post spans.

Speaking of which: that's right, there's a new feature for you, the reader. Now there's a handy button to let you send an e-mail to someone about one of my posts. There's also a nice feature for me: a way to click on an icon on a post, and take me straight to editing it in Blogger. The new e-mail feature was announced today, which led me to disover the rest of all of this.

The down-side to use the BlogMetaData tag is that it includes a tag for something to do with the Blogger API, that I don't quite undestand. Unfortunately, the current implementation of auto-discovery for Firefox brings up that feed along with my actual site feed, which could confuse user's of Firefox coming to this Blog (or others like it) in the future. However, it appears that Bloglines auto-discovery handles it properly, only showing my actual site feed. I guess it's time to go work on getting a bug filed against Firefox's auto-discovery to get it fixed, then.

Labels: blogger, meta

After a bit of looking and playing for another method, I decided to give up and use my first CSS-hack for IE. Ugh. Basically, IE doesn't support position: fixed, so instead of falling back to position: absolute, it falls back to position:static, placing my navigation bar at the bottom of the page, as that's where it falls in the source.

IE also doesn't understand the child selector: >. So, I changed the style on the navigation section to use position:absolute, then I add another style rule that IE doesn't understand to add position:fixed back:

body > #navigation_section { position: fixed;}

It's unfortunate to have to resort to such hacks, but it gets the job done. And now my site looks decent in IE, and exactly how I like it in Firefox. Opera still has an issue, but it's clearly a bug: if you zoom-out and zoom back in, the page will display correctly. If anybody wants to check out how my site looks in Safari or Konqueror, I'd appreciate it (I haven't got my Linux box hooked up, and won't for a while).

Labels: meta

Lot's of little changes involved in the redesign. The primary goal was a color change: the red on blue of the "Wheat" design (look for the alternate style-sheet of that name to see it, though some template changes on the Blog have also occurred). Unfortunately, the blue for links I liked so much was a bit hard to see on white. However, I think that bolding all links takes care of that nicely, with the added bonus of making links stand out more. I really like that minor change. A lot of the other color changes are just to add variety.

The other major change was moving the navigation section to the right. This gets it out of the way, so that you can view the content.

Unfortunately, I just got around to checking out how it looked in other browsers. Crap. The navigation section is at the bottom in IE, and it overlaps the content section in Opera. Man. I spent so much time on this already, and now I have to bugfix. I guess that'll have to wait until tomorrow. Until then, check out the page in a Mozilla-based browser, such as Firefox to see how it's supposed to look.

Labels: meta

Google's indexing of this site at it's new location has been interesting. For a while, only the main page was indexed. Now it seems like only the next level deeper is indexed (you can see the indexed files by searching for '*' in the Google search bar on the side of the page). Since that gets this blog page indexed, I'm pretty happy. Hopefully in a couple of weeks Google will index the blog archives and my actual writings.

Speaking of Google, as an active Blogger user, I got into the Gmail beta. I don't really have a need for another web-based e-mail address, but it does have some nice features. Most of the focus of news reports on Gmail have been the 1 GB of storage for free. But the neat stuff is searchable mail, mentioned frequently in the privacy-complaint news pieces on Gmail :), and categorizable mail (you can label pieces of mail for easier finding, as well as 'star' important e-mails). To me, though, the really cool feature is the fact that it attempts to display your e-mails grouped as conversations, rather than just a series of individual e-mails. I find that feature very neat, and hope to see it in traditional e-mail clients for my standard e-mail account.

Beyond that, now that I'm really doing web application programming at work, I find the interface to be pretty interesting. I'm sure that will get tweaked as time goes by, so I look forward to checking up on it every once in while. If you want to help me play with it, you can e-mail stephen.duncan@gmail.com. (I guess that putting it up here will check it's spam filtering capabilities...)

Labels: meta, web

So, I gave all my posts real titles (titles in the Atom feed had been the first 20 characters of a post). Not sure if that's what did it, but Blog Lines now recognizes my blog just fine. The RSS portlet panel extension has bugs that someone has posted fixes for. The My Yahoo RSS portlet never claimed to support Atom feeds anyhow.

The strange thing is that the feed still doesn't validate. So I'll check on that. Maybe look for another site that attempts to validate an Atom feed. But I guess my problems are mostly resolved, for now.

Labels: blogger, meta

So, first I discover that Blogger supports Atom feeds (rather than RSS). Cool. Most readers support it, or so they say. However, I'm having trouble with various readers I want to use. SharpReader works fine, but I'm not always on Windows, and I don't really want another program. The Mozilla extension I mentioned earlier, however, only partially works. The My Yahoo RSS portlet doesn't seem to recognize it all. Nor does Bloglines, which I'd like to use for more extensive feed tracking.

As I'm trying to check into this problem, I found an Atom validator. My site doesn't validate. But the error message isn't very useful.

So, I'm a bit lost. I've got two hypotheses at the moment: the server's not sending the right MIME-type (I'll check with Ryan later), or the fact that my blog entries don't have titles is a problem. That one I'll check on now, I guess...

Labels: blogger, meta

Ok, so the Archive is done now too. I've deleted some old posts (just stupid ones with results from random internet quizzes: too much table hell to fix). You'd be surprised how much trouble ampersands in URL's can be when trying to validate your blog entries. All done now.

With all the trouble I've gone through to get this Blogger template working, I think I'll at least stick with it until Moveable Type releases their 3.0 version.

Until then, please send me feedback about the site via e-mail. I intend to do some work on the CSS for the blog, as well as work on some better alternate stylesheets in the future. Remember to use a more advanced browser (i.e. not IE) to get the intended view and full features of my site. :)

Labels: blogger, meta

Well, if you've visited before, you'll notice that my Blog is now integrated with the rest of my website. It's also valid XHTML (well, at least as valid as the rest of the site; Some disagree). Obviously, if I switch to a system allowing comments, maintaining validity will be harder...

The Archive still has to be done (it's using the old template, and I have to go over old posts to classify links, and to make sure no bad html is in them. But, for now, it's off to bed...

Labels: blogger, meta

AltaVista: Image Search results for: war on drugs

(Yes, I'm having fun going through the logs for my webpage)

I am the number one image search for War on Drugs on AtlaVista. Pretty damn sweet.

Labels: meta, politics

Recherche Google: airsick

Somebody find a copy of the Charlie Canola story on my site after going through 9 other pages of matches for "airsick"

How sad is that?

Labels: meta

And, with a template change, my blog even works again. Yay!

Labels: meta

Oh hey. I have a Blog. Whaddyaknow. Maybe I just update once in a while. Eh, oh well.

Labels: meta

Testing this out. Yes Ryan and Jason, I'm just being a sheep following in your leads . . .

Labels: blogger, meta