Design

One of the easiest ways to change a well written theme in a Web content management system is by tweaking the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS). To be honest, I'm horrible at theme development. I prefer to focus my time on function, administration, and content of the information system. However, any bit of information that helps you tweak those themes you downloaded for that CMS is good news, right? After enough tweaks, you can may just have a theme with a style you can call your very own.

While most bloggers are using the new year to look ahead, I am not quite ready to make promises to the year of 2007. In fact, I am more inclined to looking at the past thanks to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

I'd like to challenge anyone who has designed a web page to find the oldest site in the archive that they authored and post the Wayback Machine link in the comment section of this post. There are no prizes being awarded in this "contest" but I promise you can have some space for bragging rights. Feel free to include any history on the page that you feel is necessary to tell your story.

The archive contains archived web pages from 1996 to the near present. The oldest web pages I could find that I authored was from 1997 for the National Weather Service's forecast office in Sioux Falls, SD.

The above site actually originated in March 1996, but this 1997 image is the earliest I could find in the archive. Not very impressive is it? However, you have to remember that I was authoring with HTML 1.x and worried that Netscape's introduction of the blink element was pushing the envelope further than I wanted to go.

While browsing some of my favorite sites looking for quirks in Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) that I needed to be aware of for Web design, I came across one of the most helpful design tools I've seen in a long time. Caleb Gilbert recommended at Drupal.org a site called Browsershots. His recommendation was prompted on the need for non-IE7 users such as Mac users to actually see what their sites would look like in IE7. This is a design tool not only useful for those designing themes for Drupal, but about any other content management system or Web page you may get your hands on.

Lorelle VanFossen makes some great observations in his post with regards to which browser, Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2, work with Wordpress. Internet Explorer 7 was just released for Windows XP last week. If everything sticks to schedule, Firefox 2 will likely be out sometime this week.

Ms. VanFossen's article doesn't say it, but IE7 has been noticed to work better with AJAX type sites than IE6. Of course the original question though is how does IE7 compare with Firefox when running Wordpress?

PunBB 1.2.14 has been released. According to the original announcement at PunBB.org the new point version it not only fixes some bugs, but also provides some minor enhancements:

I have been sitting on this story for some time. Daniel Glazman has been writing a number of posts recently on a brand new project he's just starting. Daniel Glazman was involved in the development of the Netscape and Mozilla Composer (now called SeaMonkey) as well as the author of the Nvu Web authoring system. All these composers contain a WYSIWYG HTML editor and in many ways can be the considered the open source versions of Microsoft's Frontpage and Adobe's Dreamweaver.

As you can tell from the screenshot below, I am using a release candidate of Mozilla's Firefox 2 while viewing and editing content in my Drupal site. If you look closely at the image or click on the image to enlarge it, you will also see that I don't always focus my browsing on Drupal. Take a look at the tabs and you'll see me taking a look at a number of other open source projects (such as Joomla and e107). I have been known to have 20 tabs open referencing just as many different portals, forums, and blog applications as I can find. What can I say, I'm obsessed with Web content management systems (CMS).

Just saw a post from Joe Audette that mojoPortal.com has a new look. A Jasmin Savard created the new theme (skin). We agree with Audette, the old theme was showing its age and we wish mojoPortal the best of luck on its new look.

mojoPortal is one of the few non-PHP CMS that we keep on our radar scope. mojoPortal is written in C# and runs under ASP.NET on Windows or under mono on Linux or Mac.

We all have seen our share of articles on how to make your site friendly to search engines, but this article is probably one of the best I've seen online. The article is written by Ross Dunn and is titled, "Is Your Website Search Engine Friendly? Your Personal Checklist":

The following is checklist designed to help you gauge the search engine friendliness of your website and, if you are in the midst of planning a website this checklist will help you avoid the common pitfalls of unfriendly designs. Complete Story

A sleepless night for Earl Miles late last week provided the Drupal community a replacement to his Dashboard module. Earl Miles announced a successor to Dashboard at his site, Angry Donuts. The new module is the Panels module and I expect we'll be seeing it used a lot by Drupal's users, especially newcomers of Drupal and those less inclined to dig into the PHP code.

Dashboard the previous module, allowed Drupal developers an easy way to implement "simple" two-column layouts of content (called nodes in Drupal) that are not sidebars. While you can put blocks about anywhere in Drupal, the core doesn't offer an easy way to put content outside the "main body". While dashboard overcame the "single column" for content obstacle, it required knowledge of PHP to implement.