Site Updates

I’ve made some changes to this web site that I’ve wanted to do for quite a while. The one thing that was keeping me from doing it was the fact that most people were still using Internet Explorer 6 which didn’t allow me to easily do the things I wanted to do. Now that enough people are using IE 7 or Firefox I can finally make those changes.

Here is a list of the changes I’ve made and how they will affect those that are still using IE 6

  • I am now using semitransparent PNG images
    Yay!!! (I’m such a nerd) I can finally use the best feature of my all time favorite image format.
    IE 6 users should see a dark gray instead of the proper transparency.
    I say should because IE 6 should use the background color specified in the image file, however that requires me to actually set a background color in the images, and I can’t be sure if all versions of IE & Windows will do that or not. So if I haven’t set a background color or IE isn’t using the set background color you’ll see either a light gray (in older versions of Windows) or light blue (in Windows XP) background on the images .
    However for now I won’t be changing most of the main graphics on my page over to PNG simply because I want to come up with a new design for them, and I don’t want to just use PNG versions of the images that I’m currently using.
    What the heck are PNG images?
  • My Navigation Bar stays at the top of the screen instead of scrolling with the rest of the page
    In IE 6 the navigation bar will scroll with the rest of the page. Also the background image for the navigation bar has some space between it and the edge of the page, I’m just to lazy to try and fix that for IE 6 since it works fine in newer browsers.
  • Small Code Cleanup
    In IE 6 one way to get tables to center is to wrap them in a div and set it so content in the div is aligned to center. The proper way to center a table using CSS is just to set it’s margins to Auto, but that doesn’t work in IE 6.
    I’ve removed the centering div’s when all they were centering was a table, since this always felt a little hacky to me and it serves to clean up my code just a little.
    IE 6 users will just see some things aligned to the left that were meant to be centered.
  • Fixed Photo Gallery Thumbnail Images
    Due to an oversight on my part the thumbnail images on my photos page didn’t have the proper transparency in IE 6. I have now fixed that and they should look the way I intended in IE 6.
    This is one thing I wanted to work right in IE 6. Problem was I didn’t check to see if it worked right, so they haven’t looked right in IE 6 for at least a couple months.

For those of you still using Internet Explorer 6
If you can, I highly recommend updating to the latest version of either Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox