laziness

[egypturnash]

So lazy, so tired. I woke up at about 1 in the afternoon and went back to sleep; I didn't get out of bed until fourish.

I fooled around with updating my website from Gallery 1.4.4 to 1.5, but didn't really feel up to merging my customizations back in. Especially when it didn't want to let me call the random image block from outside of it any more. Good thing I did my test update on my own local staging area, rather than the real website.

I also checked out the current beta of Gallery 2. It still requires a real database backend so I probably won't switch to it when it's done. There's also exactly zero documentation on how to make a layout template for it. Really, my gallery is in a "not broke, don't fix it" state.

I added rollover image titles to my site. They're pretty in Safari and Firefox and I have no clue how they look in IE. I really ought to work out some way to test in IE, although my statistics place it at number two - Mozilla's 43% of my hits, and IE's 35%, which makes me happy. I'm not sure how much this is skewed by my browser choices and the fact that I flip through it looking for a particular sketch now and then. The titles appear on the thumbnail pages, popping up to the right of the row of the thumbnail you're about to click on. I think they should work on IE, but there's a possibility they'll appear somewhere weird, or not at all.

"Not at all" is most likely, given that IE only supports the :hover pseudo-class on links, and I turn the thing on by using the :hover of a <li>. And if that's the case, I'm fine; it's not crucial, just a nice touch.

Comments

[mattlazycat.livejournal.com]

I don't know how your PHP knowledge is, but if you fancy writing your own gallery to fit into your templates, there's a class library on lazycat.org to handle stuff like albums and images, thumbnails and image uploads. That'll give you more freedom than modifying Gallery :)
Actually, ugh, it uses a database too. Never mind!

Dean Edwards' IE7 (http://dean.edwards.name/ie7) is a javascript stylesheet that (among other froopy things) gives :hover support to everything on IE. It also does box model fixes, abbr-tag support, etc etc. Quite swanky :)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

That offer definitely falls into the "not broke, don't fix" category! I already spent a couple weeks hacking the hell out of Gallery's code to suit my markup requirements; I don't want to do it again!

(Every time I look at the betas of Gallery 2, the phrase "second-system effect" comes to mind. Gallery 1 is ugly and hackish in places, but Gallery 2 is trying to be Every Solution Possible and turning into something very unwieldy...)

I thought of looking up stuff like that IE-fixing script, but decided to, instead, provide one more little reason for people to drop IE. "I can't look at Peggy's weird little web-art things in IE! That's it. Firefox, here I come."

[mattlazycat.livejournal.com]

If it's any consolation, the IE7 fixy-scripty thing makes IE raaather slow (as you'd expect if you bolted on a CSS parser written entirely in javascript :D
Then again, you'd probably just end up with people buying new computers rather than switch their browser. The reason I suggested it is that your site probably degrades gracefully on IE, so visitors won't know what they're missing, and they'll have no incentive to switch to Firefox. If you see what I mean. You'll need your own fruity "Netscape Enhanced" button, just like in the old days :)

Anyway, I'm off to go look up "second system effect" on the jargon file. :)

Second system effect

[mattlazycat.livejournal.com]

Oh right, feeping creaturism. :)

[postrodent.livejournal.com]

Is it going to endanger our relationship if I tell you that I do my image galleries as hand-coded tables? :) I am so 1996.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

No, it won't. When I was revising my website I started out by experimenting with hand-coded stuff too, but decided it was just too much work to update.

Besides, I can give you a spank for every <td> you use, with extra swats if you have your tags a little off-balance!

[mattlazycat.livejournal.com]

That's nothing one of my old sites used a 70k image map with no 'alt text' for navigation! :D

The new Lazycat.org's entirely hand-coded. I did start out with some content management in mind - I saw that Wordpress had a one-click install on my server-host's control panel, and that it could manage non-blog pages too, but then I worked out that all that farting around with templates and stuff would waste more time than it might save.

As for tables, if you want stuff in a grid format quickly and you have even the barest pinch of pragmatism about you, then a simple table with some CSS-ed DIVs inside can save you a lot of heartache without really pissing off anyone other than non-disabled zealots. It's how one of my colleagues does columnar HTML+CSS layouts to a deadline. :)

One last point - when it comes to image galleries, I'm guessing that blind people aren't exactly going to be drawn in by the content. It's one of the few things I suspect you needn't worry about making accessible to screenreaders. ;) (Unless any of them supports the longdesc attribute and you fancy writing 1000 words for each picture!)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've discovered the joy of pissing off No Tables Ever zealots. I tried doing vertical centering via CSS and it was uglier than the equivalent tableology.

[mattlazycat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, put quite simply, CSS2 doesn't do vertical centering, and I don't think CSS3 does either. And I'm sure the answer is that we're not supposed to design with that in mind :P