I just finished a redesign of my blog and I’m pretty excited about it. I’d been using the previous theme for several years and felt it was time for something new. I’d also gotten a number of comments that the font was too small and hard to read on the previous theme. I decided to go with something the opposite of my previous dark theme and use a white background.
I found a great theme by Randa Clay that I ended up making a number of changes to — mostly with the width of the layout. I also redid my tags and categories and went through every post I’ve made and tagged it appropriately.
I added a favicon, rewrote my blog “pages”, and added my Twitter status to the sidebar. I’ll probably start blogging more often for a bit since I’m excited about it now.
I’d heard that some people had IMAP support start showing up in their Gmail accounts, so I’ve been checking mine frequently. A couple hours ago IMAP showed up for me, and I quickly changed my iPhone from POP to IMAP. It’s great. I’ve hated Gmail on iPhone ever since I got it and I’m glad that I’ll actually have a reliable counter of unread emails on my phone now.
I spent a half hour trying to figure out why my site was rendering perfectly in Firefox, but not at all in IE7. I went through the trouble of finding the Microsoft Script Debugger (did I mention Firefox comes with a Javascript/CSS Debugger?) to find that it wasn’t a JavaScript error. I resorted to the Google, which led me to my solution. I vaguely remember encountering this problem a few years ago as well, but apparently didn’t learn my lesson.
You can’t add tr’s to a table in IE. You have to add it to a tbody. ERGO, this does not work:
var table = document.createElement('table');
var tr = document.createElement('tr');
var td = document.createElement('td');
td.innerHTML = 'IE sucks';
tr.appendChild(td);
table.appendChild(tr);
You must do this instead:
var table = document.createElement('table');
var tbody = document.createElement('tbody');
var tr = document.createElement('tr');
var td = document.createElement('td');
td.innerHTML = 'IE sucks';
tr.appendChild(td);
tbody.appendChild(tr);
table.appendChild(tbody);
Indeed.
Facebook’s Sneak Preview Group has some screenshots of the upcoming redesign. I’ve always been a fan of Facebook’s design; I think it is done very well. It’s one of the main reasons I favor it greatly over MySpace. I was a bit skeptical of this change at first, but I think this new design looks pretty cool. It’s very web 2.0, or something like that.
In other news, Firefox 2.0.0.3 was released tonight. Help -> Check for Updates if you can’t wait!
In January, a broadcast email was sent out with a Course Management System survey regarding the use of Semester Book and Blackboard at LSU. This is an issue I feel strongly about, as I am constantly frustrated by both Semester Book and Blackboard. I completed the survey, and in the comments section I basically wrote an essay.
Early this week I was invited to be on the Learning Management System Sub-committee, a part of the Flagship Information Technology Strategy (FITS) that will decide which single CMS to use as part of FITS Recommendation 7.01.
We had a committee meeting today and I am quite satisfied with the requirements that have been set out for the new CMS. I was also pretty pleased to see that several of the systems being considered for evaluation are open source. Unfortunately, this won’t be a quick thing – we are to make our final recommendation by August 2007 and then it will take a year for it to be implemented for August 2008.
I’m looking forward to working on this project – it should be interesting to see how it all works out, especially in regard to the open source vs. proprietary debate, some of which took place this morning.