how now brownpau
Glaceau has a good branding strategy going with their packaging: each variety of “vitamin water” has a witty description under its single-word name. Right now I’m drinking “Revive,” which tells me, among other things:
active ingredients – see contents on label.
inactive ingredients – see contents on your couch.
Unlike Gatorade or V8, Vitamin Water has 0mg sodium. The catch is, the bottle doesn’t tell you how much caffeine is in there. Apparently, there’s a lot. No wonder it’s so good.
I’ve updated Miserere and Rail a bit. Miserere’s sped-up sound should now sync with the Latin text, and both pieces now have preload counters: a simple implementation of FlashMX’s getBytesLoaded() and getBytesTotal() functions.
I’ve been watching Moblogging.org for possible mobile solutions for my blog, since the Bloggerbot has been down for months now. My prepaid service with T-Mobile doesn’t seem to be able to handle SMS-to-email, so my only available data options are straight SMS, or AIM, neither of which present any immediately apparent solutions. Until such time that I can get a better cellphone subscription which gives me a wider selection of data services, the “Mobrownpau” will remain an elusive dream.
Various webloggers have lately been making use of sidebar blogs as an alternative venue to peripherally collect links without interrupting the thematic flow of the main weblog. The links-only format harkens back to the original structure of the blog as web content filter, only in miniature format. Along those lines, I accepted an invitation from Jesper to co-author “Mini,” a remote collaborative sidebar blog, included via PHP and formatted via CSS near the bottom of my sidebar.
Seeing as I have only partial control over Mini, there’s a chance that questionable or inappropriate links might appear. Should you see any content ill-behooved to a Christian blogger’s sidebar, kindly contact me, and I’ll see about applying some preg_replace() filters. Or big black boxes.
Latin phrases for all occasions.
Quoniam nunc, vacca bruna?
Welcome to Layout 01. I admit I was strongly influenced by Clarissa’s design, combined with some of the boxy old look and feel. The new sidebar navigator (code adapted from the Z-Man’s vertical navbar) presents a more usable navigational scheme than the old horizontal “one-word sentences.”
Some of the changes implemented:
New Code: I’ve rewritten the code for the weblog and the common template from scratch, using more object-oriented code and consolidating functions and content into fewer files. Hopefully this should make for a faster and easier-to-update website.
Rehashed Layouts: I had originally intended to just add minor revisions to the old CSS, but I found that the old layouts no longer seemed as refined, and many of them had display problems in Mac browsers. So, I opted for a creative reload: I’m rebuilding each layout from the ground up, using over a year’s accumulated knowledge of CSS tricks. This isn’t an absolute redesign; each layout maintains some sort of thematic connection with its corresponding original. Where possible, the old graphics were used, or variations thereof. I’m starting with just one layout, and will add more and more over the next few months till we get back to the fifty-two. Obviously this is going to take a while.
Skin Chooser: Originally suggested by Jesper, it’s over there in the sidebar. As I add new layouts in the next few days, the purpose of that dropdown will become clear. (If it isn’t clear to you already.)
Renumbered Blog Entries: It has been a pet peeve of mine for some time that my old Blogger entries were first imported into Movable Type in ascending order, numbered from entry_id 1 at the time of import and going up in reverse, so that my very first post was numbered 390. Having donated enough to merit email support, I asked the MT people if there was some magic MySQL query which could renumber the entries, comments, and trackback pings sequentially, across all the different tables in which blog data was stored. Ben responded that I could just do an MT export, empty my db, then reimport the entries. It took a while on dialup, but it worked. Of course it means some permalinks changed. Sorry. (I defy you, Jakob!)
Changed Directory Structure: Some directories got moved or renamed, but I’ve tried to catch the important changes with .htaccess rewrites. (And I only lately realized that weblogging convention is to refer to archives in the plural.) Most everything outside of blog-related content is where it was before.
Still a work in progress, but then, when is it ever not? Lots more coming soon.
Looks like that’s it for IE/Mac. I can’t say I’m sad to see it go; while the compliance cabal once considered it the browser of choice in a standards-parched world, recent years have seen far more worthy contenders to the throne.
Update: Tantek, Jimmy Grewal, and Craig Saila say goodbye. And Zeldman, of course.
Update: It just occurred to me that IE5/Mac wasn’t so much of a big deal to me because I got started on compliant CSS-based design a bit later in the game then most others, when browsers like Opera and Mozilla were already on the scene. Reading Tantek’s linked responses, however, really drives home just how important a step IE5/Mac was back then — at a time when I was still a budding designer, doing my nested HTML tables in PageMill and Dreamweaver 3 for a mostly-Netscape 3/4 audience. Who would have thought back then that we’d see days like these?