Archive for February, 2008|Monthly archive page
ecto 3
Finally, a new version of ecto, well a beta at least. I’m currently typing this on the new beta 3 of ecto. Some of the new features? 3rd party add-ons which should allow for highly customized posting. A new Leopard UI that really follows the Apple human interface guidelines, or at least attempts to (the older versions didn’t at all).
There are already some cool tools out for it as well, that I’ve been wanting for a while in my blogging experience. One example is the ease with which you can add flickr.com content to posts. I suppose I could setup something that would allow me to add pictures from my own gallery to the posts, which I will work on, I just don’t feel like coding right now and this works. I would really like drag and drop image addition to my blog posts but that never seems to work for me with ecto (I believe it’s the Drupal implementation of the xml-rpc, basically the method by which ecto posts the stories to Drupal). I’m not sure Drupal uses a fully complaint version of the xml-rpc, but who knows.
Anyway, here’s the first post with ecto 3. More to come!
Why I hate Internet Explorer…
…wow, let me count the ways! I could actually go on and on all day about IE and why I hate it. The lack of features is enough to really turn me off the product, but when I was admiring the new theme for the site today, using Safari 3 of course, I noticed how really nice the site looks. The theme itself validates XHTML 1.0 Strict, although my site doesn’t because of some poor programming in a few of the modules I use (I hope to rectify this soon). So it should look basically the same on all browsers, but of course it doesn’t. Why does it look good in Safari? I’m no web expert but it would have to do with the rendering engine that Safari uses (based on KDE’s Konquerer I believe). I know my site looks fine on Safari, Firefox, and the large number of Linux browsers (like Konquerer) but really looks like crap on IE. One thing I’ve noticed is that IE apparently doesn’t do any font anti-aliasing. The edges of the font’s in the page title and whatnot are all choppy on IE and again perfectly smooth in Safari. It’s really annoying as I’m trying to make the site viewable on mobile devices (and not Opera Mini, just the Blackberry Browser) and rather than using multiple logo images I really wanted to stick with CSS and a nice rendered font on the top, and that’s what I’m going to do, IE be damned. So I guess if you’re using IE and you don’t like the way my site looks (or for the poor web developers out there who have to code sites umpteen different ways just so they look good in IE and other COMPLIANT browsers) switch to Firefox, maybe when IE looses market share to the point that it should (it’s a piece of crap people), they’ll re-code and make it a quick, standards compliant browser instead of the slow featureless behemoth it is now. </rant> (End rant for non geeks!)
