I posted something like this over at pressd yesterday and, frankly, I’m astounded.
Why are you people still trying to support software that is almost 10 years old?
By supporting it, you are slowing down the migration to something better, safer and more stable. Whether its IE7 on XP/Vista or getting those last Win2K folks to migrate to Firefox, you are, in effect, encouraging people to not update.
I’m not sure when IE6 goes EOL, but it can’t happen soon enough.
As I’ve mentioned, I have pretty much already stopped supporting it. This is primarily because I don’t have anywhere to run it.
If you are stuck on IE6 (still?) for any reason, especially if it’s at your work place, it’s really time to start bugging the system admins to upgrade. Really. And, if you are stuck on Win2K, then it’s seriously time to start thinking about moving up to XP. If that’s not possible, then someone at your organization needs to research Firefox for your everyday browsing.
I know those .net guys need components in IE6 for their stuff to work, but that doesn’t mean you have to be stuck with it for browsing.
Ok ok ok already. I know I am the only person on the planet to not have an iPhone or iPod touch now. That might be a big part of my annoyance.
You see, just about everything I read anymore has the word iPhone in it. Post after post after post after mother f’ing post is about the iPhone. Testing a new app in the iPhone or just doing something that is tagged uploaded/posted/tested/lovingly created on my iPhone.
It’s annoying. I know y’all have a brand new shiny toy to play with, so I’ll try to be understanding. But honest to robot ninjas gang if it keeps up much longer it’s going to be a whole lot easier to go through my feeds every morning, and my iPod will be practically devoid of podcasts.
It’s a cool device to be sure. I’ll give you that. Just hurry up and get used to it already won’t you? I’m honestly tired of hearing about it.
It would appear that some iPhone developers are a little upset.
It seems several different companies have renamed their iPhone games to begin with either a space, a quotation mark, or some other symbol so that they appear first in the list of 197 games on the iPhone portal to the App Store.
Really? It’s good thing they don’t advertise in the yellow pages.
I’ve actually worked with people like this. Had a domain name that started off with 3 A’s because he thought it would help him get to the top. Idiot.
And, this is no different than the way iTunes handled podcasts when it first started. Before there were categories or any organization, you would pull up a list that was complete rubbish at the top with all of the silly names starting with all manner of punctuation, the letter A and spaces. Most of those shows are gone now, as you can imagine.
But, really, make good software. Promote it on your web site. Link to it on your website. Encourage your customers to spread the word. Something.
Just don’t get all pissy because someone is thinking they are being clever because they are faking out the system. Sheesh. Pull your skirt up already Alice.
Besides that, I just checked the app store and I didn’t see any of that silliness. Maybe the good folks at the apple store decided they didn’t want your panties to get in a bunch so they fixed it for you.
Recently I have annoying learned of one of the newest SEO tricks out there.
Not dating your blog posts.
Do you have any idea how annoying that is?
I do a fair amount of research using the Goog. Much of the time my search will lead me to a blog or 5, usually covered with ads and not showing the date of the post.
I need the date. I want to know if the information I’m finding is still relevant or still applies to a certain application that I’m researching. I don’t want to have to look at the comments for the date, I want to see it at the top or bottom of the post.
Using excerpts on archve pages? Ok, I can see that. Changing the layout to make sure the content is at the top when you look at the source? That makes total sense to me too. Even making sure the title is relevant to the site. All make perfect sense.
But not dating your posts? Can anyone tell me a good reason why you would want to do that? How does excluding the date increase your page rank? Increase traffic?
Like I have recently mentioned, I think a blog is useless unless you can easily get to the content. Part of that is having the ability to check if it’s relevant or not by looking at the post date.
Hiding it, to me, seems a lot like blocking your phone number when you call out. I’m sure there is a good reason, but I will never be able to wrap my head around it. If you can give me a good explanation for that too feel free, ’cause I’ve never understood it.
I got tired of looking up roman numerals.
I still hate IE
New project I’m working on is coming along nicely. Layout, content display and navigation all working pretty much exactly as the customer wants it too. Sweet.
Because it’s how I roll, all of the dev has been happening in FireFox 3 on the Mac. And everything is exactly where it is supposed to be. Just like Safari. Just like Camino. Then, I fired up windows.
Firefox. Check. Looks exactly (or, as close to exact as you can get for crappy Windows font rendering) like it should. Crossing my fingers, toes and eyes (for good measure), I fire up IE 7.
Epic Fail.
First of all, a p in the header is acting like it’s not even anywhere near the div that it’s contained within. Some of the spacing is a bit wonky too. Oh, and my very favorite part? the horizontal scroll bar that I can not get rid of at the bottom of the page, even when I strip everything out of out the layout and shrink the overall width (body and content containing div) to 50%.
I’m sure I’ll be able to chase this particular ‘bug’ down, but it’s going to take me some time. Time I can’t bill the customer. Time I have to spend trying stuff, signing up for forums that I will never visit again, time that I will never get back.
It would appear I’m not the only one having this problem. A quick check of msn.com in Firefox 3 on the Mac vs. IE 7 shows that they can’t even get the entire page contents to fit within the browser window. See for yourself.
Firefox 3 on the Mac
Not too shabby. I mean, it is msn.com for craps sake. Now, for IE7. Try not to laugh too hard.
Internet Explorer v7 in Windows
For curiosity sake, I ran all of my sites through IE 7 (something I do at least quarterly to make sure nothing is broken) and you know what? They all look exactly the same (again, within reason, see above) as they do in Firefox/Safari/every other browser on the planet.
Not to toot my own horn here, but there is a reason I stay away from complicated layouts. This is reason #1. Sure my sites are fairly boring looking and don’t have any cool tech behind them (other than Wordpress, which is teh awesome), but dammit if they don’t work every time, in every browser. Well, except the iPhone, but it’s a width/wrapping issue that affects less than 1% of 1% of my total viewers, so I’m not worried.
Back to the research. Of course, if anyone has an idea for a fix, I’m all ears. So you know, I have tried the overflow:auto, overflow-x:auto, overflow:hidden and overflow-x:hidden and well as getting rid of all italics. Next will be to have the raw page, without CSS, and I will add each CSS element until it breaks.
I’ll comment with the fix.
Older Articles »
