Site Redesign

May 27th, 2004 • General

Before I get to my site redesign, I’d like to congratulate Dave Shea from Mezzoblue on the new site design, my redesign simply fades in comparison. I’m one of the admirers of Dave’s work, and as usual, the site is clean, readable, and oh yeah, finally liquid!.

I also noticed that a lot of people are reworking their sites, Douglas Bowman from Stopdesign decided to drop the old design and Start over, which is mostly good, sometimes designers need a break from seeing the same design over and over again.

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MoveableType 3.0, evil?!

May 19th, 2004 • 13 comments MoveableType

OK, Mark Pilgrim has moved from MT to WordPress, I can see the reason why, MoveableType is getting evil, some people even think it’s the “Microsoft” of blogging!

The new pricing scheme of MoveableType isn’t really what’s upsetting most of us, it isn’t really the issue, every user is willing to pay for software he or she uses and likes. It isn’t that SixApart got greedy, or did all MT users think that SixApart are simply donating for the best of the community? They have their bills, they need to pay them, a make-a-donation button simply isn’t enough.

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MoveableType 3.0, a disappointment?

May 14th, 2004 • MoveableType

Yesterday, MoveableType 3.0 was released, and along with the updated lines of code, there was a new storm just waiting for MT fans, some call it commitment, some call it profit, others call it a new pricing scheme!

To me, this is sheer disappointment, I liked MT, I’m not a very loyal user, but still I like it, I can recognize good software when I see it. It isn’t just some things that make MT so special, it’s the whole package, it’s well documented, perl modules are structured, it’s extensible enough, it’s almost everything I could need to manage a single blog with a single author.

I’m not disappointed because I’ll have to pay, I mean I still fall into the free category, so the pricing wouldn’t affect me very much, except I hate to see a company I respect destroy it’s reputation like that, they need to understand, the casual bloggers are not where the money is, it’s the corporate ones, it’s the support, it’s everything that’s not a blogger who wants to do a favor for his friends.

SixApart should revise the pricing, this is not how you do business, go learn some marketing, but don’t kick away loyal MoveableTypers, they’re the key to making business, it’s not the money that matters, it’s the reputation.

MT and mod_perl

May 11th, 2004 • MoveableType

I’m pretty happy with mod_perl’s current performance, and like I noted previously, I’m very willing to migrate MoveableType to a mod_perl environment, except I never thought it would be that difficult! Yes, MoveableType isn’t designed to work with mod_perl 2.0 (or 1.99, the alpha 2.0). The server I’ll migrating too runs pretty much the most recent packages, that is Apache 2.0.49, mod_perl 1.99_12, Perl 5.8.3, not the latest CVS, but pretty much recent.

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CSS Misused?

May 1st, 2004 • 1 comment General

It doesn’t matter to me whether it’s a bug or a feature, but when using tabs, Mozilla doesn’t fetch images referenced in a CSS file until you switch to an unvisited tab. I like that, it works just fine for websites that use background-image for decoration, I open a page in a background tab, and I don’t need to worry whether or not the images are downloaded, the content is still readable.

But what do I do if an image is the content? I was browsing Intersmash, and middle-clicked some links (to open in background tabs) I didn’t even think that I wouldn’t see at least something when I open those tabs, but when I did, I still had to wait for the main image to load only because it’s a background-image for a layer.

I’m all the way behind CSS, but it’s really frustrating to see such an abuse. It might not be something big, it might not even be the fault of the author, but still, why does XHTML 1.1 still supports the img tag if the “right” thing is to use CSS? XHTML 2.0, although the deprecated img, still has an object element that does pretty much the same thing, or at least it should. A background-image is for background images, period. It’s not for main content, it doesn’t matter if the browser downloads it or not, in most cases it should be of secondary importance.