After ten years, I’m sick of my web site’s look. During my early web development days I would change the design almost yearly. My original LEGO site went through many refreshes until I abandoned it for Flickr. My blog, now, feels old and neglected. Not only that, I’m not happy with the format or flow of content either.
I’m slowing working through updating my site. Recently, I decided to update my icons. I’ve been using favorite icons for years—favicon.ico for those that care. But, it was old and boring. Time to update.
I often search around the web looking to see what kind of ZX81 community still thrives. I truly expected to find a community in decline, but a surprising number of nostalgia sites are still out there. I found some dedicated to hardware, some to emulating, and others to software. Some are reference sites offering up tips and how to do things. Others simply have reviews of software from a different era. All of them interesting in their own way.
I recently upgraded to Chrome 8 and ran into a minor problem. The text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; CSS option now causes hyphenate.js to display the hyphens in some words all the time. This, obviously, isn’t the desired effect I was going for. Because of this I turned off the optimizeLegibility option. I haven’t found any bugs or mention of this on the various sites yet. I did some more testing and found that there is subtle kerning going on, but little in the form of ligatures and other font improvements. So, for now, I’ll leave this option in my tool box to come back to at a later date.
I decided to play around a bit and try a different font for my site. My original goal was to use something with better kerning and ligatures, but most browsers don’t seem ready for that yet. I settled on using Trebuchet MS as my new site font. It has a bit more character than Verdana and better reflects the style I was looking for. It is a generally web safe font supported by most platforms.
Well, as of today my GeoCities site of the last 12 years is no more. I’m a bit saddened as it has been a place of comfort, seeing me through different ISP’s and such. It is because of GeoCities that I use Yahoo! mail, even if Yahoo! then turned around and removed the best features of GeoCities. I still feel that GeoCities was killed many years ago by Yahoo! and that it was only kept around due to its legacy. I’m not surprised by its shuttering in these times of Web 2.0 and the emergence of the Social Internet site.
Needless to say, one of the many reasons I started Reid’s For Fun was because of Yahoo!’s neutering of GeoCities: removal of ftp and a paltry 4.2MB hourly limit. It was, however, my friend in the hey day of Internet growth and I am saddened at its (un)timely demise.
So, I actually liked IE7, but ended up going to FireFox because I really liked some of its features and plug-ins. However, I’ve always enjoyed the look and feel of IE7, so when IE8 Beta was announced, I wanted to give it a try to see if IE8 was going to win me back. I have to say, it won’t with this beta. I have to say, I hope beta 2 is better because IE8 isn’t winning me over.
I’ve been hearing a lot about the Web 2.0, but not sure how much I’ve been participating. I signed up for a Digg account, but didn’t really get into it. I’m still not sure what is considered Web 2.0. If you check out Wiki's definition of Web 2.0, I’ve already been part of the whole Web 2.0 deal by blogging and using and creating RSS feeds. In many ways, my use of 360voice and its API probably qualify as well. After thinking about, maybe I do a lot more with Web 2.0 than I thought.