Schonhose

After an almost perfect record for more than a year I managed to forget uploading a photo on my photoblog not once, but twice this month. I have been so busy with other things (making photos in Snowworld (an indoor snowboard centre), designing a few websites as a favor, writing some addons) I totally forgot uploading some new photos.

Anyway, I found some room on my desk and I placed a note to remind me to a) keep making photos and b) keep uploading them. Let’s see how long this note will last in the mess I call my desk.

Today one of the other members of the Pixelpost development team contacted me. He has added my photoblog to the “Featured Sites” section on Pixelpost. This was a very nice surprise. It is nice to see my site listed with some of the best Pixelpost sites on the web.

I have to admit, I could have added my site if I wanted to. But I choose not to do this as I feel the section has to be a realistic selection of amazing Photoblogs. It would have lost credibility if all members of the team added their own site and those of their friends.

Over the past year I’ve been compiling a list with several entries about things that either were unclear or annoyed me to death about my photoblog layout. Fixing bugs or adding features took some time but yesterday I finally uploaded the beta version of the layout.

In general it is still the same, it only has evolved into an even better template (thanks for that comment Jay). So what is new?

• Lights out feature: turns all elements to dark except the photo. Can be found in the section Photo details in the Sidebar when looking at a photo
• Tooltips all around. People were having trouble locating things. I hope tooltips popping up will help with this.
• In case the tooltips cannot be found, have a look at the help page (right upper left in the menu). It will explain everything.
• The ratingstuff has moved to a more prominent place. It is more visible now and I hope people will start to rate more this way.
• The archive page now displays navigational elements in the thumbnailview.
• Find out the other stuff…

Once in a while I’ll get some mail asking me where the download of the template is located. I’m truly sorry, but you cannot download the template. It is part of my identity and I put in so much hours that giving it away for free or for a small amount of money just doesn’t feel right.

Thanks for all the kind words through those emails, those are really appreciated.

Well, today it is wednesday and my last post was more than a week ago. So I decided to update you what has been going on over the past few days. First off, I was feeling a bit under the weather, so I basically tried to take it easy. I’ll probably take it easy until next sunday or so since it feels so good (and I’m still not 100%). Every once in while you need to rest and cleanup things in your head.

Well, I haven’t been completely away so here is a list of what I’ve done:

• A new addon, called “EntryPage” was released last weekend. It is basically a simple way to change the entrypage (the page your visitors see when they visit the site) of a Pixelpost installation. Read more about it and grab it here.
• Jay Williams, over at D3 Designs, made a really nice plugin for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. It allows you to directly export an image from the Lightroom program over to Pixelpost. It has been out for about a month now but I finally got around to test it. (Yes, I have been swamped, you guessed that right). If you use Pixelpost and Lightroom you should check it out.
• The new improved Googlemaps addon is getting real close to being final now. The code has been working for quite some time on my blog and I have added some nifty features to make my life much easier. How about providing the coordinates when you upload a picture instead of adding them after the upload? That really speeds up the process.
• A couple of guys at the Pixelpost Forum are building their own PayPal supported shop addon for Pixelpost. I’ve been thinking about a similar addon for a few months now. I pretty much finished the whole back-end system on paper so I can start writing some code when I’m up to it. The main focus is on security and flexibility. The main concern right now is how I would handle foreign orders for prints. I’m not even sure if anyone wants to buy a print of my pictures but I consider it a learning possibility nevertheless.
• Dmitri Popov over at Linux.com has written a real nice review about Pixelpost.
• The last item is a shameless plug for two websites I visit daily. If you got the time, check out Matt Kloskowski’s Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips website for some killer tips on Lightroom as well as nice presets and other stuff. The other site is Scott Kelby’s Adobe Photoshop Insider website. This week it is Lighting Gear Week, so all posts are about lightning in general with examples of possible gear. Really interesting stuff.

Well that wraps it up for now, back to taking it easy.

Well, to answer the question directly: I won’t anymore. I refuse to support that sorry excuse for a internet browser. That browser is more then 6 years old, which is ages in internet time. Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7 over a year ago and when I design webpages I focus on the more recent browsers.

I pride myself in writing correct and clean HTML with nice CSS which looks good in all major browsers. So I test in Safari, FireFox, IE7 and Opera. If it looks good in IE6, I consider it a bonus. If it doesn’t, too bad.

Three reasons why I don’t support IE6 anymore:

• IE6 was released in 2001. Sure, there have been updates but the core code remains old.
• It has major issues with correct semantic HTML and CSS. Check the blogosphere, you will find numerous sites just dealing with hacks for IE6. I just refuse to spend evenings making pages suitable for one browser.
• IE7 is out for a year now and has been part of the regular updating scheme of Windows. Since October 5, 2007 there is no ‘genuine software’ checking anymore, so everybody can benefit from the new IE7. It is not perfect, but way better than IE6. With that said: grab your copy of Internet Explorer 7.

So, there you have it. I’ve said it, I made my point.

While I won’t support it, I’ll still have a look at it just to see how it looks. Recently I came across a site which provides an installer which installs multiple versions of IE on your system for testing. It is always fun to see what the page looks like in IE2.

Head on down to the “TredoSoft: Install multiple versions of IE on your PC” article and read all about it. A must for all you webdesigners out there still pursuing the impossible.

Update: Roy provided me with this beautiful smiley: . Thanks Roy!