Hell has a special place for Internet Explorer.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008 · 23:29 · 0 comments

I've spent the past few days coding what I hope will become the default theme for Pez. If not, it can always be downloaded later. As a web developer, I remember the, "easy," days (right after Netscape failed) when you only had to design/code for one browser. Then the Firefox builds started gaining traction, and it was common to have two browsers opened. It was also common to have one browser render the HTML differently than the other.

Fast forward to now, where it's pretty common to have four browser windows open, and they all have their own interpretation of the code. Today I had Firefox 3 Beta 4, Flock 1.1, Internet Explorer 7 (can't install IE8 Beta 1 because I'm running Vista SP1 Beta), and Safari 3 going. In the beginning of the, "HTML format fixes," FF3b4 and Safari rendered the page the same way, Flock had it's own version, and IE 7 was way off. The stuff I was doing was probably too advanced for it.

After some tweaking, the Firefox based browsers were in sync, Safari placed the profile picture a little too high, and IE thought the profile photo should be at the bottom of the page, and the header should ignore all margins and padding.

Well, after 10 more minutes of tweaking, the profile page looks the same in every browser except for IE7, where the header is the only thing still jacked because it's anti-margin/padding!

Do you have to be an Atheist about it? My God, man!

Stuff like this makes me want to put on a superhero suit, and install Firefox on people's computer while they sleep.

Or maybe I should just help push for better web standards?

Dropping support for IE all together sounds like my cup of tea, but you can't out the market leader. Doing so makes you look like a pretentious a-hole. People don't like that.

Labels: Firefox, Flock, Internet Explorer, Pez, Safari, web development

Pez. Let's talk about it.

Sunday, March 09, 2008 · 00:44 · 0 comments

Since Lee has been dropping all sorts of mentions about Pez on his personal blog (it's getting bigger in his tag cloud). I think it's about time I go into detail about it, and stop dropping hints like I did in my last post.

So, what is Pez? Well, we all know it's a candy that come in those cool dispensers shaped like your favorite talk show host (or cartoon character) that I used to collect when I was younger, and my ex-girlfriend's mom use to buy me a lot of because she thought it was cute (Glad I didn't tell her I liked Star Wars).

The Pez I'm talking about it an open-source project that is being developed by Lee Kelleher and myself. Pez , "provides a simple homepage profile for people who use many external websites and want to aggregate them all in one place."

How Pez works:

The wordy version for people who like to read.
Pez takes the RSS feeds from the different services that you use (like Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, last.fm, and some sort of blog) and puts them into a nice profile page on your own dot com to give your visitors a snapshot of what you're doing online. It acts as a lazy homepage and identity site. You don't have to update it because it updates itself.

You can either use the full blown installation of Pez (in a sub directory of yours, and using a theme), or you can add bits and parts of it to your site. Example of using bits and parts? The main page to bogd looks really bland right now. Once we get more added to Pez, it will display my recent blog posts. My about page (which is running Personal Zeitgeist) will include my photos from flickr, and data streams from other sites.

Graphical representation for people who like pictures of wizards.



We're aiming to make Pez a lightweight and easy install.

Giving credit where credit is due. (We believe in good coding karma)
Pez is an open-source project based on Personal Zeitgeist by Matthew Hockenberry from Creative Synthesis, which is built on SimplePie. It's the foundation we're using to build Pez.


Changes we've made (so far)
As of this writing, Pez is currently in its sixth revision. You can see it running here. As you can see, all we have to do is add some blue, and it will be a friendfeed. ;)
- Added module for your last.fm feed. (Plan to add other modules for other things like events.)
- Added links to other profiles you may have online.
- Rearranged the code into subfolders to make it neater.
- Updated to the new version of SimplePie.
- Created an admin. page.
- Started to include support for Gravatar.
- jQuery (You can read about Lee's adventure with it here.)

We have a road map posted at the Google Code page, so you can see where we're going with this. A lot of progress has been made in the two weeks (as of this writing) we've been working on this.

It's great to be working with Lee again. Last time we got together, we were like rock stars who got free swag, and lots of e-mail from people. Lee ended up in the L.A. Daily News. The man is on fire. While most people are reading about how to get things done, Lee is just doing it. He's a new father, a business owner, and he's making the back-end magic for Pez happen. I'm the front-end dude. I'm making the graphics and working on the themes.

How Pez will handle themes.
We're taking the css Zen Garden approach, where you just swap out the CSS file to change your theme. No need to update the index file. Once we get a theme down that we like, you CSS junkies can make as many themes as you want, and we'll add them to a directory. (When we set that up)

This is all I have for now. I must get back to coding.

Labels: Pez

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