I’ve spent the last three days working on a new design for hansr.net. Since I’ve decided to start blogging actively again and this time in English once more I felt it was a good idea to make a more streamlined and interesting design for the site.

I started of by installing newer versions of the background systems for the site. I upgraded the blogging system, WordPress from version 1.5.2 to 2.7 and the image gallery, Coppermine from version 1.3.3 to 1.4.19.

The design is based on a skeleton system fro WordPress made by Zhang Yichi and then working from there I created a unique representation that fitted the content I wanted to show by coding the affected parts by hand.

As usual most of the time spent working on the new design went to getting stuff to work with Internet Explorer. Seriously it’s just ridiculous…. Every time I work on anything having to do with web site design I have to spend a few hours getting things working nicely in Firefox, Safari and Opera but then comes that horrible getting shit to work in Internet Explorer period which basically sums up everything I did for the last two days… This picture is a good summation of modern web design:

To look at just the issues with IE as a whole I’d like to name the three stupidest issues that bugged me. First off, Internet Explorer 6.0 and older do not support transparency in PNG files. MY WHOLE DESIGN IS BUILT AROUND PNG TRANSPARENCY WORKING. This resulted in ugly looking site and I had to fix it with some stupid java scripts which fixed it but slowed loading down a lot.

The next issue was the fact that IE doesn’t really agree with ALL OTHER BROWSERS ON THE FACE OF THE EARTH about how big a pixel actually is. Every browser I tried agreed that 10 pixels are 10 pixels and should be displayed as 10 pixels but IE said that sometimes 10 pixels are 5 pixels and should be displayed as 15 pixels. What how do you arrive at that horrible conclusion…. this resulted in me having to make a specific CSS style sheet just for Internet Explorer…

The last issue that really pissed me off was the fact that IE doesn’t support a mix up of javascript and CSS styling of javascript output…. I was using it for my archives so they would be easily browseable. Again every browser except IE had no problem with this but because Internet Explorer hates me there was no way to get it working so I had to make a php script to check the user agent for IE and give people that use that horrible excuse of a browser another way of browsing the archives.

All in all I’m really happy about the redesign and there may be a few small kinks to work out but I think they should be fixed by tomorrow. So now I just need to get started venting about other issues than my hate of Internet Explorer and start blogging actively again.

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