Peter Morville (he of the Polar Bear book) outlines a syllabus for a college-level course in Information Architecture. I don’t know if the course is definitely running, or if it’s just a proposal, but the content sure looks interesting. Unsurprisingly, he uses the Polar Bear book for a lot of the course reading material, but he points to a vast amount of other useful stuff along the way. looks like I’ve got my reading list for the weekend sorted out…
(Via Webword.com)
Joburg World Summit
A weblog of news and updates direct from the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg: DailySummit.net, run by the British Council.
See also the official site of the summit.
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…
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:
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!
No new design yet
Note: after putting up my wee article yesterday on how I’ve redesigned this site, the new design isn’t actually up and running yet. It’ll pop up in the next couple of days, though.