If for some reason the site looks weird, please clear your browser cache. I did a heavy rewrite of the layout and now I’m using a table-less, css, div-based (or whatever is the buzzword) design.
After clearing the cache and if I did everything right, you should see no major difference. That means everything went well.
I’m tinkering some applications in my work and they require a similar process, so as usual I try to apply the experience gained and use it here. This should make easier for spiders and similar machines to index my site, by being presented a more semantic layout.
I took the time to support as back as Internet Explorer 6. Considering the magnitude of the markup change, I kind of take pride that the site looks good even on it. Hack free. As soon as I’m done with other tasks, I might look at Internet Explorer 5 and older, if feasible, but don’t expect it soon. Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera all look nice on Windows. Yeah, it’s a pleasure to work with those browsers but I just can’t neglet the majority of visitors that browse with IE. Hopefully they’ll migrate to IE8 and I won’t have to look back at IE6 again. I have no access to a Mac system anymore so I’ll have to think positive and trust it looks ok on it.
And if you use Chrome, Safari or Firefox 3.5 you can enjoy nice drop-shadows.
I’m still not done with this process, probably 95% of the site that uses the main layout has been reviewed and cleaned up. There are some tables I won’t be able to get rid off on a reasonable amount of time as the ones in the Illustrations section. That markup is Ă‚Â generated by the gallery software it is based on, Coppermine. On a side note, it’s a turn off that that project seems kind of stale but I’ll keep using it for now hoping they release some big update that lures me to use it more often. WordPress, the software I use for the news front page and this blog, has seen many major upgrades in the same time period, and that kind of motivated me to do some research on its tool-set and related technologies available.
On the horizon there are the mobile browsers, the console browsers. There are so many customizations I’d have to make to support them, but rest assure they’re in my road-map/wish-list.
Now evaluating forum software.