I was trying to decide how to spell a word I coined while talking about the preposterometer, and I decided to turn to you, the viewing audience, to get your thoughts on the matter. That required that I finally get polls working.
In fact, there are two polls going on right now, one about spelling and one about how the polls themselves should operate. The widget instructions indicated that I’d be able to show both at once, but the setting just doesn’t seem to be there. Instead, you get one or the other randomly.
While I had the hood up I made the sidebar headers stronger, to help people sort through the long list of stuff over there. It’s definitely more useful, but somehow it doesn’t seem right to me yet. Also, I set up so I can highlight parts of the sidebar with new stuff going on (the current color will not be my final choice, I think). Let me know what you think about any of the changes!
Was hoping to get the poll about spelling; got the other one instead. Went ahead and answered. I wonder if I go away and come back shortly, will the poll software detect that I’ve already answered one and give me the other? I might test that later.
Meanwhile, I don’t find the bigger headings to be jarring or anything, and I don’t see any color highlighting any part of the sidebar. But then, my Internet connection has been flaky the last couple of days, so not all may be loading correctly.
The coloring behind the section headings in the sidebar is now an image, so it might be slow to load. The poll section should be pink, and if the thing that turns it pink didn’t load, the entire page would be a complete mess. So if it’s not pink, something’s not right for your browser.
I don’t think the poll thingie is smart enough to load the poll you haven’t answered yet, but if you reload the page you’ll eventually get the other one.
By saying ‘something’s not right for your browser’ I mean, ‘let me know which browser isn’t working and I’ll take a shot at fixing it.’
It’s working on the desktop at the lake, but on my laptop it’s not working. The laptop is running whatever the very latest version of Firefox is — just downloaded about a week ago — on Windows Vista. Neither the current version nor the previous version has allowed the duck or Shatner to show up, either.
The desktop just spent several hours downloading the latest version of Flashplayer, which allows the header to show up, but it’s not getting the duck or Shatner. It is getting the highlighting in the sidebar, however.
Sorry, that last comment was me, not Pat …
At this computer (lake) we have Mozilla Firefox 3.0.10 (2009).
I can see a pink background for the poll section.
The computer here may still be a bit behind on downloads; Carol Anne discovered an obscure setting had been changed that made the computer reluctant to accept downloads.
Just installed the very latest version of Firefox up north.
Still no sign of Shatner or the duck, although if that’s a function of Flashplayer, I wouldn’t expect that of a Firefox update.
The duck is a combination of Flash, Javascript (each browser has its own implementation) and fancy HTML. It does not require the latest Flash player.
If your bookmark such that when your are looking at the page you see http://jerssoftwarehut.com/muddled/ rather than http://muddledramblings.com you will likely trigger security protections and not see the duck. (The browser will see something loaded from a different domain and block it.)
There is an error console in firefox, under the Tools menu. If you want to get to the bottom of the duck conundrum you could clear the log and then load the page. Wait two and a half minutes and see what errors show up.
Back in Albuquerque. I’m linked to the second address. The blue background for the headings is now working, but there’s still no pink background for the poll. Still no duck either. Will check the error console thing.
Boy, was that an eye-opener. I got 96 warnings as the page loaded, mostly “Empty string passed to get ElementById().” — which came in groups of 5, 13, 19, and 40 repetitions. There were also 4 repetitions in a row of “Expected color but found ‘#’. Error in parsing value for property ‘color’. Declaration dropped.”; these messages referenced lines 94, 98, 102, and 106.
In addition, there were three references to “Expected end of value for property but found’,’. Error in parsing value for property ‘margin’. Declaration dropped. Line: 474” and three references to “Unknown property ‘border-radius’. Declaration dropped. Line: 956”.
There were also errors in parsing values for properties “height” (line 18), “filter” (lines 86, 11, three instances without line references), “font-size” (line 93).
While none of the warnings you listed have anything to do with the duck, it is interesting that you got so many of them. Most of those are from code inserted by the Google widget, which should only load once. In the interest of science, try clearing the list and loading the page again.
The Google widget was failing to substitute its default colors when no color was specified by me, so I specified specific colors and managed to get rid of some of the warnings. There are still warnings about ‘filter’, which is an explorer-only style option (that was actually a pretty good idea) that is not supported by other browsers.
There is another warning for border-radius, which is part of CSS3, and not supported by many browsers. Instead, there are also browser-specific rounded rectangle implementations. if you look very closely at the borders around the pictures, you will see them rounded (except on Internet Explorer). The combination of IE’s filter (which would allow shadows behind things besides text) and the non-IE border-radius option would make my page a lot easier to implement (and then everyone would have a page that looked like mine).
Oh, and I turned off the pink background behind the polls, as it’s not that new anymore.
Only 9 warnings now: 5 about “filter”, one about “height”, one about “border-radius”, and two about empty string passed.
BTW, when Wi-Fi is down at work and I actually have to use a computer that’s plugged into the wall and that uses IE, I do get rounded corners. It’s a very recent version of IE, and maybe it gets things that older versions don’t get.
The blog episodes will have rounded corners for any browser – they are done with graphics and CSS. The only place the border-radius is used is the frames around pictures with captions.