About (List of tested browsers and platforms, development history, etc.)
Links! The Opera browser K-Meleon browser How to Create Wikipedia Ask Metafilter BBC News Etsy LEOG Forums Snopes BartPE TinyApps.org
[January 09, 2010] What? Pffft. Yes. I know. It's one of those infamously eternal messages posted across the face of the Internet: "Under construction." Well, technically I didn't put up the cheesy yellow and black construction tape. Anyway, I was surprised to receive a few messages from my e-mail form about one particular section of the site (QND-BartPE/Live CDs), so now I feel even more pressure to get at least a few pages up again. I'm moving into a house this month, however, so there's no actual ETA.
[January 16, 2009] Conversions Shopping the various CMSes out there and figuring out how to convert my CSS template to various CMS formats is a pain in the keister. But by golly, it will be done. I think.
[January 2009] About that 2008... Well, 2008 was awfully interesting, wasn't it? I do mean "awfully" in both the awe-filled and unpleasant senses. The problem is, I don't see 2009 managing to outrun all the problems that happened (or manifested, anyway) in 2008. Hopefully this will be a better year for most people, myself included, eh. I'm planning on reworking the rest of this site this year, at least.
After the usual gift-giving blitz at the end of last year, I've been curious how good warranties are for electronics lately. We got Sony noise-cancelling headphones (MDR-NC6). Sony's a decent company, right? In terms of quality, I mean, all things considered, Sony has enjoyed a long-standing reputation that's usually positive (despite some definite negatives). I certainly remember a decade or more back when branding meant something on electronics: maybe it was made in Japan, had a 10-year warranty, the build was a comfortably solid metal... Not anymore, certainly. These Sony headphones, besides being made in China out of passable plastic like everything else, have a 90-day warranty. A mere three months? Really? I was surprised because I was expecting at least the usual one year bit, but maybe that's not so usual anymore.
The truth of the matter is that for the vast majority of products available, consumers ignore warranty, and that's a shame. The warranty is symbolically the manufacturer's confidence in its own products, and more directly, a promise of expected performance. Because the average consumer is obsessed with the bottom dollar, manufacturers and vendors have figured out that they can cut many a corner before anyone notices: overall build quality, black-box innards, material formulations (did you know Pyrex is no longer "Pyrex"?), outsourcing everything from manufacturing plants to customer service, and the best invisible tag on the product--the warranty.
I don't intend to use the Sony headphones because I already have a set I really like, the KOSS Portapros. Oh, and KOSS still gives lifetime warranties on their stereophones. Now I'm looking at an OCZ mouse that comes with a six-year warranty. Yes, that does matter.
[June 2008] What? A thesis and another simultaneous large writing project makes for great distractions. :) No heavy site updating this summer, likely. And moving. :( I hate moving.
[March 2008] Reconstruction I've had a personal website since 1996, but it was mostly hosted on the (probably) now-defunct free hosters like FortuneCity, Xoom, and Crosswinds. Oh, those were the days.
You remember, right? Netscape 4 was hot, particularly Netscape Navigator 4.08. I still feel a sentimental twinge when thinking about having all the menus memorized so I could navigate it with the monitor turned off (don't ask). We still used Gopher. Javascripting was still new and so amazing that newbie webmasters like myself tried to stuff every possible trick into the site (which is an incredibly bad idea, mind you). HTML was (and is) extremely easy to learn, and tables were nested everywhere--EVERYWHERE--as positioning and design elements for entire websites.
The CSS specification was around, but it didn't seem to catch on very quickly. In fact, I only remember CSS2 coming out, not CSS1. And there was discussion around the World Wide Web about how difficult it was to convert from a table-based layout to a CSS one, especially when numerous CSS browser bugs thwarted many layout specifications. Tables were just easier, basic, and all browsers supported them just about the same (there was one particular Netscape bug and one IE bug related to cell spacing, I think, but I don't remember them now).
I admit it. Like many others, I found it difficult to change to CSS for styling and leaving those triple-nested HTML tables behind. Converting to XHTML was much, much easier. Over the years, more and more junk accumulated on my domain with disparate Javascript/CGI Perl/PHP scripting. But enough was enough--I really wanted to finally move oion.net to where it should be in terms of (hopefully) accessibility, usability, and plain ol' consistency, even though it's just a puny little speck in the vast universe of the World Wide Web (which, remember, isn't the same as the Internet, and actually came into existence in the early '90s).
That's not to say that my old designs weren't compatible, however; with every iteration of my site design, some sillier than others, I took pride in testing the layout and scripts in every major browser, although at the beginning it was just Netscape and Internet Explorer. In the past few years, I had added different versions of Firefox (first Phoenix, then Firebird), Opera, and K-meleon into the mix. Now I try to ask Mac-user friends to test in Safari and in different monitor sizes and screen resolutions. It's tough, but it should be done.
Here it is. Well, some of it, anyway. I will still be tweaking the design here and there, but I had finally settled on a CSS layout that I like, edited from a CSS template by snop/fullahead. I made the header graphics from a leaf photo on the Public Domain Photo Database. If there are any specific problems or suggestions, please contact me through the contact form with as much information about your browser/hardware/settings as possible.
