Archive for October, 2004

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Comment Styling

Sunday, October 31st, 2004

I’ve just spent some time to apply some better styles to the comments in my blogs. If you take a look at a previous post with some comments or leave some here, you will see the following changes:

  • Added background colours and hover styles to the comments.
  • Added rounded corners for Gecko based browsers or any UA that support’s CSS3’s ‘border-radius‘ property.
  • Added Additional highlight for comments from myself.

The additional highlight for comments from me was a little bit of a challenge to work out how to do. I realised that all comments from contain me contain a link to my blogger profile. So, I was able to use that as a hook for the styles:

.comment-author a[href="http://www.blogger.com/profile/3043458"] {
    background: #BECFFB;
    margin: -1em 0 .5em -1em;
    padding: 1em 1em .5em;
    -moz-border-radius: 10px;
    border-radius: 10px;
}

As a result, it only works for browsers that support the attribute selector (at least Firefox and Opera¬), and I could only apply the additional style to the one element. So, it’s quite a small addition, but it’s enough to highlight my comments with a darker blue box around my name.

Are these styles visually appealing? Can you suggest any improvements? What do you think of the way I highlighted my comments? Let me know what you think, and I’ll fix up the styles based on your comments, if necessary.

Posted in Style | 2 Comments »

World’s Greatest CMS

Saturday, October 30th, 2004

Work is beginning on the world’s best ever, open-source CMS! Charl van Niekerk has had the idea for a while to write an open source, general purpose CMS that not only produces valid content by default, but ensures that all content written is valid. Some of the basic validation requirements for the system should include:

  • Well formed, including properly encoded entities and proper nesting and closing of elements.
  • Valid according to DOCTYPE.
  • Valid character encodings. No windows-1252 characters in the range 0×80 to 0×9F for documents declared as ISO-8859-1, UTF-8 or any other character encoding – they are control characters. The default, and highly recommended character encoding should be UTF-8.

Basically, the system should not allow invalid content under any circumstances, including from reader comments. It should use a real validator, not a linter which are quite often misleading or totally incorrect.

These are just a few of the basic requirements that I would like to see. Anne van Kesteren has written a much more complete list of requirements for the perfect weblog system which we will be referencing a lot, but some of it may be overkill.

So, this project is just getting started and, AFAIK, will be run through Source Forge. If you have any questions, ideas about system requirements or want to get involved, you can contact either myself or Charl van Niekerk. It’s his project, I’m just helping out, but we want as many people who are willing and able to get involved. So let’s make this happen, and let’s build the best CMS ever!

Posted in Projects, Server-Side | Comments Off

DNS Issues

Friday, October 29th, 2004

Over the past 14 hours, since about 2004-10-29T00:00+10:00, this site was experiencing severe technical difficulties. Some of you may have noticed that the Atom feeds were reported as invalid by your feed reader, or received a 307 Temporary Redirect to a page explaining some technical difficulties; or, depending on when you visited, noticed that none of the pages were styled and contained errors about include directives. If any of you that took a look at the source, you would have noticed a disastrous frameset document I discussed earlier, that is used forward requests. However, all it does is use a single frame to mask the real URI from the location bar.

The problem was in fact that the domain name servers had been reset to those of my previous domain registrar, and hence was reaching the wrong web host A WHOIS indicated that the name servers were set to:

Name Server: ns3.bottledomains.net.au 
Name Server IP: 209.126.193.12 
Name Server: ns4.bottledomains.net.au 
Name Server IP: 69.10.134.206

After I contacted my current host, iiNet, this morning, within a few hours they promptly re-delegated the name servers to the correct ones, and restored my site for full working order. However, it’s an issue that should never have occurred. I was asked by iiNet to contact Bottle Domains to ensure this doesn’t happen again, as they believed it must have been them that reclaimed the servers. However the response from Bottle Domains indicated that it would not have been them as they do not control the domain. So, basically, I don’t have a clue what caused it, nor any guarantee that it won’t happen again. I just hope it doesn’t.

Posted in Server-Side | Comments Off

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