Woohooo!! Tonight this blog made it past 5k spam comments ;) and other than a few manual deletes nearly all were caught by Akismet (thank you guys).

There were probably more than that though, however with backup in the form of WPIDS and Bad Behavior I’ve been nearly spam free. Still, Akismet is by far the most effective. Don’t run your blog without it! ;)

A slight update to this blog… I’ve added my Google Reader shared items to the sidebar underneath the latest gallery photos. I was thinking about doing something like this for a while but I couldn’t decide what to use. Del.icio.us was the favorite for a long time but in the end it’s the ease of use that sealed the deal for Google Reader. Sure, it’s only limited to items in the feeds I’m subscribed to (unlike Del.icio.us) but it will probably do just fine.

You can subscribe if you wish.

So I installed the first beta release of Internet Explorer 8 today just to check how things work and I’m affraid they don’t. Let me just say from the start that this isn’t anything remotely similar to a comprehensive review. I only wanted to check if my sites need any work before this thing goes into final release.

Most sites I’ve checked work just fine but as Murphy would have it… the most complicated one of my own doesn’t. I have no idea what goes wrong but that’s actually not the worst part of it. At first glance the site appears quite normal, no weird positioning, broken lines or silly stuff like that. I should be so lucky…nope. Instead of visible errors I have to deal with invisible ones. That in itself wouldn’t be much of a problem if the invisible part would be anything other than the navigation links. Yup, entire site navigation vanished into thin air and I have no idea why. Maybe it has something to do with floats and clearing, maybe it’s something else entirely. But I sure hope it’s only a rendering bug and not really my fault. It works fine in everything else from IE6 to FF3.

It also crashed (as in – this program has to close, send error report) when viewing this site (FERI @ Uni. MB), it has margin/padding problems with Hotmail and I had to hard reset my computer when I started to write this post in WordPress. That’s the short version of the problems I had untill now.

I’ll ignore the errors for now (since it is a beta version) but I sure hope I won’t end up worrying about yet another problematic browser that requires special attention. Other than that it looks ok ;)

OK, I borrowed the title from Andy Budd but what else can you claim about this neat browser history timline by Eric Meyer?
Make sure you use your mouse to discover how hover effects work, then check out the source code. It’s a thing of beauty on its own. BTW don’t bother if you’re browsing with IE6.

Here’s how he did it

…and I guess I should go back to reading Bulletproof Web Design and Transcending CSS…

The what and why of bad layout conventions on the web as viewed and commented by Andy Rutledge

When newspapers and other print publications took their products to the Web, they were armed with what they thought was relevant design expertise. But this theretofore expertise turned to hubris when they failed to accurately recognize the constraints of this new medium. Their design and layout experience caused them to hold precious their deep columnar silo approach to sectional information presentation….

…When news main page sections are laid out in vertical columns of varying heights placed side-by-side it requires that a reader practice one of 2 irritating methods of content consumption: 1) scroll downward to scan a column’s or section’s content and then go back up to do the same with another column or section, or 2) scan horizontally across adjacent columns of differing contexts, then scroll down and repeat the process, etc…