i summon one kim

Joulupäivän aamuna maa löytyi valkoisena, vaikka edellisenä aamuna oli pelottavasti satanut vettä ja räntää. Iltapäivällä sade lakkasi ja kävin vanhempieni kanssa ulkona lumitöissä ja kävelyllä kylän ympäri. Nappailin kävellessä kuvia Vääpelikylästä — lumi korostaa kivasti esimerkiksi naapurin pihassa olevan karhutoteemin piirteitä.

I’ve been taking it easy today just practically invisibly improving the code on this website. The hAtom microformat was brought up recently on one of the WordPress mailing lists, so I thought I’d see about adding support for it here. It was actually rather straightforward: I didn’t even have to rename any of my CSS classes.

The only remaining issue (which is not really an issue at all) is that the post author is not showing up in the the microformat parser I’ve been using to test. According to the hAtom spec the default should come from the XHTML author, which according to my undestanding is specified using the <meta name="author"> tag. I’ve specifically added such a tag, as I don’t display the author in each post, since I feel it would be silly to repeat my name throughout the page.

Since the recommended author data format was hCard I added general support for it on all my pages, too.

As a side effect of all these changes I’ve also fixed a couple of the spots that used to render irritatingly poorly with the Lynx web browser. CSS with its display property was highly useful in keeping up appearances on the other browsers. “Extra” elements added for Lynx can easily be hidden with display: none;. As another example, while <p> is quite useful in adding some extra spacing in Lynx, it is often desirable to undo the effect on other browsers using display: inline;.

The recent Microsot Internet Explorer (IE) problem was bothering me, because it meant the pages were not usable with IE. I wouldn’t mind a cosmetic problem as much (even though they tend to get to me, too) but links not working and pictures not being visible is just too annoying.

I was playing with the CSS, experimenting with the “floating dt” that I had avoided in the last workaround due to it “disappearing” on IE. When I made the dd element floating as well, I saw that IE was rendering the contents below and outside the white box (#envelope) that holds the main content on each page. In the past this has been a giveaway for IE miscalculating the size of the containing element, and sure enough — the “fix” was an added width: 100% property for the misbehaving container.

The “invisible images” were restored to visibility with the same fix on the appropriate container. I’m glad it didn’t need another couple of hours of CSS tweaking in the dark.

It’s nice to have the site working again, but I’d rather not spend my free time on something stupid like inventing workarounds for a buggy browser. (Not that I expect Microsoft to pick up any hints from here.)

Enjoy!

My brother just told me that this site is broken (again) in Microsoft Internet Explorer: the links in the “asides” entries are not clickable and pictures in posts are not visible (but the layout still has their space reserved). This is especially frustrating since there haven’t been any changes to the site code (XHTML or CSS) since September 11th, and everything definitely worked then in both Firefox and IE. Of course, there have been a number of “IE updates” since through Windows Update…

I’d like to fix this right away, but I’m far too busy with other things at the moment. I did try a couple of CSS changes, but didn’t land on the solution yet.

In the mean time: Get Firefox already. :-)

I have officially moved in into my new home as of today. It feels different to be living in a place you own: I can make changes as I see fit, and it makes more sense to improve the place than when renting. Now it is just a matter of priorities — there are a number of changes in my mind already, but I really need to focus on what needs to be done immediately, what should wait, and what has a long delay and thus should be started already.

While this definitely feels like home in the sense that it is my place it is still lacking something from the feel of home due to not yet having a proper bed or a washing machine or rugs or window shades or…

However, incredibly I do have the whole place cleaned up already and everything unpacked, on a very large part due to the generous help of Laura. How could I even consider slacking when she was volunteering her time to get everything ready? Thank you so much, Laura!