Month: August 2002

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Old site, new site, red site, blue site

Okaaaaayyyy…. We should be rolling with the new design now! The front page is up, and all the indicidual entries are being archived off to their individual places. We have a (still pretty basic) search, and even comments are working!

Still to to, though:

  • Add the category archives
  • Convert the monthly archives
  • Tweak the permalinks to be proper slashforward links
  • Update the sidebar. (Lots of sub-tasks here…)
  • And then, maybe, I can go back and clean up some of the HTML in the old content.

I think I need to go to bed now, though…

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Mozilla and style sheets: follow-up

Once I’d found the CSS MIME type problem, I found a few more documents relating to it. As an alternative to editing the httpd.conf file, they suggest adding a .htaccess file to my web site, with a directive to change the MIME type for CSS files, i.e.:


AddType text/css css

But this doesn’t seem to work. I think the server admin is only allowing certain directives to be overridden in .htaccess files, and “AddType” is not one of them. Oh, well. Maybe a quick email to EZPublishing‘s tech support will sort things out.

Further references:

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Mozilla and style sheets

Oh, bum. While I was doing the site redesign, I was running the code off of my local machine. Then I tried the bits out on the Sunpig web server, and everything looked OK. But only because I hadn’t tried it out in Mozilla.

I used Mozilla to look at the new designs this evening, and lo! No CSS styles were being applied. At first I thought the stylesheet was broken somehow, and than Mozilla was therefore ignoring it completely. Nope. Then I tried every combination of attributes on the <link> tag to see if that was making a difference. Nuh-uh.

Google to the rescue. I found this page (on brain-stream.com), which highlights the real issue: my web server is serving up CSS documents (.css) with a MIME type of “text/plain”. And Mozilla doesn’t like that. Damn.

And the solution that is outlined won’t work for me, because I don’t own the server, and therefore don’t have access to the Apache httpd.conf file.

On the positive side, it showed quite satisfactorily that even without the stylesheet, the Sunpig site is still eminently readable. So the design decisions I made paid off. Yay!

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Design Decisions, part 1

Okay, so I decided to redo my little section of the web. (Click here for a look at the old and new designs side-by-side.) I wanted to take advantage of some of the things that Movable Type allows you to do, such as comments, and sorting entries into categories. But I made the foolish mistake of also deciding to change the visual design of these pages, too. As Mark Bernstein writes in his article, “10 Tips on writing the living web”, ” Don’t rush to replace a good design: you will grow bored with it long before your readers do.”

Can…of…worms.

Continue reading “Design Decisions, part 1”

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Force fields!

An article in The Register describes a new invention for protecting tanks and other armoured vehicles. It uses electrically charged plating to vaporise anti-tank missiles before they can penetrate the rest of the armour.

“It sounds bizarre, but the paper reports that in a recent demonstration an armoured personnel carrier protected by the system withstood repeated attacks by rocket grenades that would normally have destroyed it many times over.”

As I read the article, Star Trek sprung to mind. Not the new-fangled force fields, but the special kind of hull plating they seem to have in Enterprise. When they seem about to enter battle, Captain Archer often requests that they “polarise the hull plating”.

And with scientists already having teleported beams of light, can warp drive really be that far behind?