Twitter archive

I just discovered that under your Twitter account settings, Twitter now lets you download a complete archive of your tweets. Scroll down to where it says “Your Twitter archive” and click the button. They’ll send  you an email with a link where you can download all your tweets packaged up nicely in a .zip file containing everything you need to view your tweets in a browser and in a CSV file to import into a spreadsheet or database of your choice.

You can check out my Twitter archive over here (up to 20-Feb-2013).

Blocked: .cn

Blocking all the .cn IP address blocks appears to have been pretty effective. Still seeing a lot of traffic, but all they get is a 403 error.

Bandwidth used is back to normal levels, around 70 MB/day instead of 1.5 GB/day.
Despite with having 3000+ Deny from directives in the .htaccess file, blog performance actually seems to be better. The problem with chronic 500 Internal Server Errors has gotten a lot better since I put the block in. Not having to handle all those bot requests seems to have really helped.

Pizza in Charleston Trip on Gowalla

Explore some of the local pizza joints with my Pizza in Charleston trip on Gowalla.

Thanks to Chrys for the idea.

Why oh Why IE7 Part 2

Now what gives?

Drop down menus appear fine when you hover the mouse over the top level of the menu.

WHLR Menu top level

But when you try to mouse over the rest of the menu (provided you get over some invisible gap that makes IE think you’ve moused off the menu), this happens

WHLR Menu Over

Naturally it only happens in IE7. Perfectly fine in Firefox, Opera and Google Chrome. Blargh and blargh again.

A solution

After a week of mucking about trying different things to fix the problem I was having with the CSS menus dropping down underneath the content section, I found a remarkably simple solution that I didn’t expect to work, but did, at least for IE 7.

MovableType’s built-in templates tend to suffer a little bit from div-itis IMO, but they work pretty well and once you figure things out, makes styling pretty easy.

The basic structure for the menu and content looks something like this:

<div id="main-navigaton">
<div id="main-navigation-inner">(insert nav stuff here)</div>
</div>
<div id="content">
<div id="content-inner">
<div id="alpha">
<div id="alpha-inner">(insert content here)</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>

By putting

#main-navigation-inner { z-index: 1; }

in my CSS file, I was able to get the drop down menu to pop up to the top. Works in IE7, but since I don’t have a computer with IE6 on it, I don’t know if it works with IE6 yet.