I’d like to congratulate LowEndMac on moving into the era of modern web page code, using XHTML and CSS. I guess my old criticism about their website (in reference to them judging the state of web browsers in OS 9) will have to fade into the background, but considering that they recognized that iCab was deficient (putting it kindly):
On the down side, pages may not work as well in older browsers once we fully implement our CSS design. And iCab really shows its noncompliance. But with 98-99% of our visitors using modern browsers, we figured it was time to make the switch.
It does validate my claim that iCab is indeed not a modern browser, but I’ll stick that feather in my cap and call it a day.
I took a couple hours, learned PHP’s objects and redesigned Tag Central so that all the information for the sources could be stored in a big array object. Now it’s trivial for me to add a new source, so I can start adding all those sources that everyone submitted. I may started restricting the number of results per source to a smaller number (such as I have done with BlogMarks) to avoid unsightly white space and making the page utterly huge.
I made the formatting for describing new sources very easy, so I’ll be adding a new submission form for people to submit source information (so I don’t have to look it up myself).
I’m only a few steps short of using database to track all this data which will make managing the site even easier for me.
Peter Parkes reskinned Tag Central using PithHelmet and a custom CSS file. I think it looks simply Sensual as he put it.
I like it so much in fact that I’m going to ask if it would be possible to make it the default and perhaps (if he’s interested) come up with some more skins (which was my plan for my blog here, but I never got around to it). I think some great things are ahead!
Spam is getting less annoying for me, mostly because of its comedic value. I’m not sure if it’s intentional or not. Here’s the latest supposedly from PayPal (har har har).
You’re Billing Information!
No, I’m not! The last time I pretended to be billing information, I got my hand stuck in someone’s mail slot.
When Safari 1.3 came out, several plugins broke and were quickly fixed again. That’s cool, but both the PithHelmet and AcidSearch plugin updates were a bit rushed (and with good reason because they were high in demand).
For AcidSearch the bug was mostly harmless. When a channel was dragged around in the configuration window, it got turned into a folder. Oops. The author quickly issued an update.
However, PithHelmet had a more serious problem. Attempting to set the display of a page element to none after probing the dimensions of that object caused Safari to crash. Mike Solomon has a much better writeup for those technically inclined. Basically what this meant for an end user was that Safari crashed… a lot. It bit me with one site in particular. He issued an update which no longer crashes Safari, but unfortunately doesn’t collapse a lot of blocked elements either (which was one of my main beefs with how OmniWeb handles ad-blocking). It doesn’t happen all the time though, so it’s not going to force me into using Camino or Firefox (for now), but it’s a silly bug that hopefully will get fixed.
