As you may or may not have noticed, I finally moved mindgarden to a new server with a new design and new blogging engine.
We’re now using habari instead of textpattern. I was always a big fan of textpattern but development wise there has been nothing going on with it for what feels like forever. So we switched to habari, trying something new. The admin backend is gorgeous and everything works really well so far. Apart from some htaccess trouble that I ran into when redirecting the old URLs to the new ones. But the habari guys in their IRC channel were incredibly helpful, so got that sorted as well. I might be reporting about that a bit more in another posting.
I’m personally quite happy about the design. The idea was to simplify the old design while preserving the general mindgarden look. It’s still a bit rough around the edges, but overall I think it works quite well. There are still a lot of details to be straightened out and no-one seems to find out that you can expand the header at the moment. But I’ve used a few new semantic HTML5 elements and quite a bit of CSS3 on top of it. CSS multi-columns for example and media queries so you get more text columns of text of you enlarge your browser window. I will be writing about that more in future posts as well.
I hope you like it.
I did my talk about Progressive Enhancement using CSS3 on Barcamp Brighton 4 this morning. It went down quite well I think and I’ve just uploaded it to slideshare:
I came across a weird CSS bug in Internet Explorer recently. I wasn’t able to find anything about it on positioniseverything.net or anywhere else so I thought I might as well write a few lines about it.
When using the :last-child selector which is not supported in Internet Explorer while grouping it with other selectors IE8 will ignore these.
So when doing something like
#testbox2 p, #testbox1 p:last-child {
font-weight: bold;
}
I would expect a paragraph in testbox2 to become bold. Which it does in IE7. But IE8 chooses to ignore that selector as well even though there shouldn’t be a problem with that.
If you try
#testbox2 p, #testbox1 p:nth-child(2) {
font-weight: bold;
}
IE6 and 7 as well start to ignore the testbox2 selector.
Update I’ve put together two quick test pages:
test page for IE8 bug when grouping selectors using :last-child
test page for IE8 bug when grouping selectors using :nth-child
After running pheedelity in Berlin for a couple of years where I did more organizing and project managing than real geek stuff and now that I’ve mentally settled in here in London I’m determined to do exciting geek stuff again.
Here’s my humble list of what I’d like to do in the not too distant future:
Maybe writing all this down will somehow magically conjure up the time to actually do all this while having a job, start doing geocaching again, finishing Star Wars Force Unleashed and Resistance 2 and watching seasons 4 and 5 of The Wire. Stay tuned…
Update: magnum has been updated to version 1.1
Inspired by Simon Collison’s talk at the @media this year at eConversions we finally created our own ultimate package.
The Magnum Website Starter Kit is our collection of files we use to quickly kick off frontent development for a new project. It comes with a basic html, css and javascript file, html5 doctype, jQuery and ARIA landmark roles.
It’s not meant to be what people call a CSS framework. You certainly won’t find anything about about grids in magnum. Magnum is supposed to contain what we would normally have to write anyway. Plus a basic structure of best practices everyone agrees upon. I think it is a good way of discussing how things should be done outside of actual projects and then have it in place once you need it.
Magnum is my first commit to github, you can go there, download and play with it and maybe even use it for your own projects. I’d be happy if this can make anyone’s life easier. Let me know what you think.
Donwload Magnum at github
Oh, and it’s called magnum because when I started writing the readme files, everyone was having ice cream. Guess which brand we had..
