Welcome to 2008!

It's too bad that I didn't finish my layout, tweaks, and additions until this morning. It would have been nice to have this post on 01.01.2008! I hope everyone welcoming the new year in style and with good cheer! First thing's first; as I'm sure you have noticed, the blog design has been updated! This took me a good day of interspersed work to complete. These were the things I accomplished:

• First and foremost: new banner and background!
• Updated CSS template to go with the updated graphics.
• Fixed an issue where line spacing would revert to no spacing after an image or list; This was a pain in the butt for readability since everything was scrunched together. I had been meaning to get it fixed, but never got around to it.
• All pictures now have opacity applied to it with mouse-over effect. Simple, but sleek.
• Incorporated Lokesh Dhakar's LightBox javascript so that images will appear in a popup preloader. I had always wanted to do this. Sometimes in previous posts I would make an image link appear in a new window, but I got lazy sometimes and it would simply load on the same page.

The first bullet point caused me a lot of distress. Wait, scratch that. It should not have caused me any stress. Rather: INTERNET FRICKIN EXPLORER caused me stress. The banner, as you can see (if you're using FireFox or IE7) is nice and transparent - 80% transparency. At first, I remembered that IE6 and prior had issues with alpha transparency (or opacity) of .PNGs. However, I needed the background to be completely transparent. A .gif would not do since it would be horrid trying to make the banner background (non-text) transparent. PNG it would have to be. So I set about setting the opacity of the image.

Great! Firefox worked! FAIL, Internet Explorer still rendered pure black.

So then, I made some modifications to the CSS and HTML. Great! Firefox worked! FAIL, I.E. had jaggies out the butt! Well, I'll give it just a teensy bit of credit; IE at least made the logo transparent. ...At the cost of the thing looking ugly as balls.

After much searching, I simply gave up. If you're still on IE6 or below, make the right choice and update your web browser to Firefox. If you insist on being a IE fan, I guess IE7 will have to do.
Don't get me started on the CSS Block and Float models... Still, despite how long it took, at least Internet Explorer is headed in the right direction.

That last bullet point took me the longest to do. Not because it was hard, but because I was dumb. I had done everything properly, but the image would not load in the LightBox. It would show the loading.gif image but image would never load. I tried all sorts of things. In the end it turned out that the automatically generated url path of the image when uploading to PicasaWeb by Blogger was a little off. Basically, all I had to do was change the image path from "../../s160-h/... .jpg" to "../../s160/... .jpg". Stupid '-h'. So basically, nothing was wrong with the lines of code. It was just a misdirected link.

So, with this new year, I have two Blogger-resolutions.

1. Post at least once a week. (This is more reasonable than my previous goal of 2 or 3 a week).
2. Keep up good formatting practices. Prior to this, I was too lazy and just left bad looking paragraph formatting as the browser tried to render it. Now, I'm going to try and make sure everything looks neat.

Onward to the main event!

So I found out that Picasa can integrate with Blogger now. So here it is, a guided-tour album of my entire holiday break. If you wish to see pictures of me, you'll have to message me in person. No way are those going public. Please don't turn off the comments since they provide valuable information into the album. Enjoy the full screen! (But don't click the 'X'!) Oh, and if it doesn't look like a slideshow, refresh the page. Sometimes the album and not the slideshow loads.