A White Box

It's been quite a while since I published anything around this site. And while it seems that I am ditching it, the fact is the exact opposite. As you have probably guessed, I've been quite busy, not just at work - which I must say, is always ultra crazy during the holiday season - but I am also working on a new design for this site for the 2009. The design was supposed to be up by the new year's eve, but as usual, I was delayed and distracted. I'm done with the design itself and the static markup/css for the home page, so I'd say that I am about 75% done with it.

Another major thing I was doing is learning Ruby. A very powerful, object-oriented and the sexiest programming language I've came across. By the time I half-finished trying ruby online, I was completely sold. Thanks to ...

In a previous post, I wrote a quick review about the Vewzi Site Search service (formally Viewzi for Publishers). Thanks to Chris, I had it running on my site for about two months now, and if you haven't tried it yet, go right ahead an search for something in this site.

In contrast to the dull search results page, VSS gives your site searchers something that is simply beautiful, rich and even entraining. And today, the good folks at Viewzi officially announced the public availability of that nifty service and you can have it on your own blog right now. All you have to do is to register for a free viewzi account (or login if you already have one), head to your profile and click the 'Get Viewzi Site Search' tab. You will get a chance to download the plugin, get your VSS identification number and learn how...

Thanks to everyone who tried out Dark Autumn and provided feedback and bug reports, I finally got around to fix the issues and release the tested versions. I say versions because I am actually releasing two versions of Dark Autumn. Because of rapid development that goes on in the Habari land, some changes were made to SVN HEAD (a.k.a. Habari 0.6-alpha) that caused the 0.5 themes not to work with it. Today, I am releasing Dark Autumn 1.0 which is compatible with Habari 0.5, and Dark Autumn 1.1 which is compatible with Habari 0.6-alpha.

Browser Compatibility

Dark Autumn 1.0 and 1.1 has been tested on Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Safari 3 and Google Chrome. It was also briefly tested on IE7 and it seemed to be working. IE7 support is still considered experimental though. Dark Autumn was never tested on IE6 and will never be. Here's why.

If you think you can't do much about your dull search results page, think again. Thanks to the good folks at Viewzi, that page will no longer be as unusable as it often is.

When Chris started working on it on his blog a while back, I made sure that I am on the list to be of the first who try Viewzi for Publishers on my own blog. He's also been kind enough to help me troubleshoot a couple of issues I had with the VFP Habari plugin yesterday. So, as of today, this site's search is powered by Viewzi awesomeness.

Seeing is believing, they say. Go ahead and try it out. Search for something on this site, browse the results and get back here to continue reading this post :)

I've had it. I really have. While hacking Dark Autumn's CSS to support Internet Explorer 6, I couldn't stop wondering why I was doing it. I am not working on a client's design that bizarrely required IE6 support. Nor am I attempting to make my work comply with something that remotely supports any standard other than Microsoft's ever-changing one. I am just making a free Habari theme that I humbly donate to the public. So why should I bother spending my time begging for that history of a browser to properly display my --allegedly-- standard-complaint CSS? Wouldn't it be better if I spend that time working on another theme that I can too donate to the public?

I am not going to repeat what the many designers and bloggers who abandoned supporting IE6 had to say. Unless you've been under a rock or you don't really follow what goes on...