I added the cookie-enable broadband/dialup switch. It's over at the bottom of the right sidebar. Give it a shot, see what you think. I've been fixing some other bugs here & there as well -- thanks to Kriston for help finding some of 'em.

UPDATE: Commenting wasn't working when you previewed. Thanks for pointing this out, Jeff!

Alright, here it is. A few things to note about it, if you're interested in this kind of stuff:

• It's designed to look good at resolutions of 1024x768 and higher, and probably won't even be very legible below 800x600.


• It's designed to be highly modifiable. You won't be stuck with the winter wonderland picture forever. All that it takes to completely redo the site's look is to drop a few nicely textured graphics into a prepared photoshop project with all the necessary masks ready to go. The faint gray line background, dashed borders, and transparency effects are the only aesthetic aspects of the site that will always be there.


• I mentioned transparency; that brings us to browser support. I spend a third of my life trying to convince Microsoft products to do what they're designed for. I'm not going to do it here, too. So this site was designed for Firefox. You should go get it if you don't have it -- there's a button in the sidebar. I have taken a stab at supporting IE via an alternate stylesheet that gets dropped in when IE is detected. But IE doesn't support the PNG graphics format properly, so things will necessarily look worse. I'm curious to hear reports of how things look in other browsers like Safari -- I don't have a Mac, so I couldn't test for it. Sorry. I'll whip up alternate stylesheets for Safari, Opera, etc, if necessary. Just let me know if they don't work.


• Speaking of alternate stylesheets, this site is now a bitch to load. Like, 250+k for the homepage. Yikes. That's because of the nice winter background (originally shot by Catherine) and because of the huge image that lets the sidebar background flow smoothly from one box to another. IE doesn't handle it very well -- it chokes on all those images and tiled backgrounds, and scrolls a bit more shakily than would be ideal. But then you should be using Firefox anyway, right? Right. Hopefully the page size won't be too painful for users -- most readers are on broadband, I suspect, and even those who aren't will be able to read text prior to the background graphics downloading. And those graphics should stay cached by most sane browsers for a good long time, preventing repeat downloads. However, if you really can't take it, I have designed a "Lite" mode. Right now you can get to it by appending "?lite=1" to the URL -- like so: http://www.zunta.org/blog/?lite=1. I'll be adding an option in the sidebar soon that sticks your preference in a cookie so you don't have to bother with the querystring nonsense. For now, just put up with the load times and know that this feature is coming.

I think that's it. I've got a few more things planned, but I'll likely get distracted by another project before I get to them. For now, please let me know what you think -- especially if you think "this breaks my computer".

UPDATE: Some things I'm considering changing already: the font, the line spacing, and the opacity of the transparent white box in which this text is appearing (it needs to be less translucent, I think). Thoughts?

Sigh. So nobody likes my handwriting -- it was option two, a few posts down. People say it evokes Avril Lavigne, or 8-bit "extreme" videogames, or lame youth outreach programs. That's okay. I can take it. No one ever said being a middle-class white guy was going to be easy (although I thought it was kind of implied).

But I've pressed on and come up with a new logo, one that nobody voted on, because let's face it, you can't put a decision as important as this one in the hands of the proletariat. Also Catherine didn't really like the other logo that much, anyway.

This morning I'm at a client office and experienced some excitement with my laptop power supply. Its cord's intermittent short began resisting all my best wiggling attempts, then burned a hole through itself. Whoops! One razor blade and a few feet of electrical tape later all is well, but I'd probably better get down to doing some actual work to make up for the lost time. Also, I need to try to figure out why this company stocks razor blades emblazoned with a promotional logo for one of their clients. Just what exactly are they getting up to at the Gleacher Executive Conference Center?

All of this is my roundabout way of saying that the redesign (which was responsible for the lack of posting yesterday) is almost complete. A few more bells & whistles need to be finished for IE compatibility, and then I've got to move it over from the development site -- but it should be up sometime this afternoon, just in time for everyone to bitch about how ugly it is before heading home for the day. Oh, and the comment system might break while I'm futzing around with things.

i thought this was kind of neat: European text messagers raise millions for Asian tsunami victims

Italian mobile phone users have donated more than 11 million euros (15 million dollars) for the victims of the Asian tsunamis through a text messaging arrangement that seemed to set a trend, it was reported.

The Rome daily Corriere della Sera said Italians could contribute one euro to tsunami disaster relief every time they sent a text message, thanks to an agreement between the country's four mobile phone companies and its main television channels.

text messaging in italy is absolutely insane - in fact, i think people there use it more than actually just phoning another person. i thought it was the greatest thing ever, and i really wonder why it hasn't seemed to ever catch on in the U.S. i mean, italians use text messages to discover cheating spouses; berlusconi sent 50 million text messages to urge people to vote for him; even the pope uses them to send his followers a daily spiritual message. one italian prankster even sent a text message to his wife from a plane claiming that there were terrorists on board. hysterical!