Why oh Why IE7

Why does IE7 do this
WHLR Menu in IE7
when all the other browsers do this
Firefox Gran Paradiso (20081027 nightly)
WHLR Menu Firefox Gran Paradiso (Firefox nightly)
Firefox 3.0.2 (Linux)
WHLR Menu in Firefox 3 (Linux)
Opera 9.61 (Linux)
WHLR Menu in Opera (Linux).png
Google Chrome 0.2.149.30
WHLR Menu in Google Chrome
This turns out to be a problem with IE that goes all the way back to IE6 and apparently doesn’t seem to have been corrected with IE7. Just Google “css z-index ie” and you’ll find a bunch of stuff on it. I’m already using a z-index: 1; CSS property to get the menu to display on top of everything else. Still no joy with IE.
Blargh.

Web designing

I’m terrible at web design. I make a pretty good webmaster though, but when it comes to design, I suck. As a result, most of what I come up with tends to be fairly simple, uncomplicated and non-flashy. It also fits with my tendency to prefer simple and low-bandwidth (a hold-over from my modem days I suppose).
Now that my role as webmaster for CSCLRC is official, my first duty was to clean up the horrid HTML generated by FrontPage. The site itself was fine, but the HTML behind it was characteristically messy FrontPage stuff. A little bit of new CSS and a lot of copy/pasting later, I pushed out a new much cleaned up variant of the site largely using the same graphics.
This week, after playing with Inkscape and Gimp, I rolled out a cleaner brighter looking (to me anyway) CSCLRC site. I’m quite pleased with what I’ve made, although there’s still a little tweaking here and there that needs to be done.

Doesn’t Blogger do RSS?

There are a bunch of interesting blogs in TBB that I’d like to add to my FeedReader list, but a good chunk of them are hosted on Blogspot/Blogger and have no links to RSS feeds though. I know I’ve seen Blogger blogs with RSS feeds, so I’m sure the feature’s there. Turn it on people! Let me aggregate you!
Hmm, that sounded wierd didn’t it…
Update: Oh, apparently RSS feeds is a Pro feature. Too bad.

A twist on maps

Well, this is an interesting twist on GoogleMaps. ASCII Maps gives you GoogleMaps in ASCII characters. See your favourite places rendered in text!

Google Maps in ASCII characters. Pure silliness for your enjoyment