The Whitehawk

I was looking at the browser share chart for my blog’s visits today and I noticed that Firefox and Internet Explorer have almost exactly the same share. Which make the two of them combined look exactly like a Pacman Pie Chart. In case you’re wondering what a Pacman pie-chart is, here are the two charts, the browser share, and the Pacman chart side by side:

The left chart has Internet Explorer 6 & 7 in blue (the smaller share is IE7), and the yellow share is Firefox 2.0 and 1.5 (2.0 is the slightly smaller share).

Taking the comedy aside, it’s surprising how many people have already adopted Firefox 2.0 compared to the share of people that have adopted Internet Explorer 7, and they both came out at around the same time.

I guess it shows that most people that use Internet Explorer 6 don’t bother, or can’t, update their software as frequently the Firefox users. At least in the case of my blog visitors.

[tags]Pacman Chart, Pacman, Browser Share[/tags]

I recently submitted my blog for the 9rules network for the Anime, or Technology, or Personal, Communities. I must be out of my mind for doing this, but as friend of mine said: I have nothing to lose.

In case it happens to be Scrivs checking out this blog, I’d like to give a shout out to him and wish him, and the network, the best of luck. I don’t know if you readers are aware of this, but he was the person who gave me the first opportunity to start blogging professionally in ForeverGeek, a long time ago when he owned it.

If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be blogging today.

So thanks Scrivs, and best of luck with the “evaluation”

As of last month, the domain thewhitehawk.net no longer belongs to me. Turns out I was tricked or misinformed about how I should pay for the domain, and now I’m required to pay 80$ if I want to retrieve back the domain from my webhost, therefore, it’s unclear to me how longer they will allow me to use it.

It could be a month, a week, it could even be the whole year, but I honestly have no idea when. Their tech support, though always polite, helped me very little in the situation, and quite honestly, it felt like I was talking to an automated machine rather than a person who could really understand the situation.

Compared to the repair process I had to take with my Sony laptop, in which the lady that assisted me was really helpful and nice and took care of “me” from day one to the day of it’s return, I can only compare my webhost’s technical assistants to an:

A few days when I went to check out my statistics they felt like a slap in the face. During February my visits dropped to the visits I had during October. This means that I’ve probably lost some readers which is a shame really but also a good reminder that I need to blog more, and with more quality, if I even want to keep this site up.

Hopefully, this month I’ll be able to almost equal January’s visits, but more importantly, I must try to gain back some returning visitors since that number also dropped to almost none at all.

I installed the latest version of Wordpress today and… well, besides a few graphic glitches on the admin tool that were fixed I couldn’t find anything else, although I’m pretty sure that someone’s blogging about it and how great it is compared to the last version.

It’s a security release any way so I guess I shouldn’t be expecting anything else. But I’ll be sure to mention any nice new things I find out when I have more time to “play” with it.

The WYSIWYG editor still isn’t compatible with the google toolbar spellchecker, so I won’t be using it so soon.

Well, I’ve finished the biggest part of the transition from the old design to the new one. All that’s left now is to improve over the things left from the old design.

• Put some custom bullets on the links on the left
• Put the ForeverGeek Archive in an iframe (so the code will be transitional once again)
• Improve the Comments aspect (I promise it will be light)
• Other meaningless little things that I think I could improve

What did I learn with this redesign? Well, I learned that it’s not that hard to make something look the same on all browsers as long as you realize that each one has different default values for tags.

For example, Internet Explorer besides having a padding on the left of each “ul” it also has a margin, something that Opera and Firefox don’t. It isn’t hard to make code transitional, it isn’t hard at all actually. I don’t really mind the restrictions a lot, I occasionally forget to put an “alt” on an image or two but that’s it really. What is really hard is trying to adapt other person’s code to make it transitional. All you need to remember is to leave all the styling and alignment for the CSS file and that’s 80% of the work done already.

I also learned that I’m definitely not the best designer in the world, but I’m also not the worst. When I finished the index I went to other sites and compared it to theirs. Saw which mistakes their designs had and which ones mine had and after reducing mine to a minimum I have to say I’m very pleased with the result.

During the construction of this site, I asked some friends for opinions and comments and I’d like to take the opportunity now to thank all of them:

• David Peralty
• Philip Hawkins
• André Rodrigues
• Ana Neto
• and everyone else I forgot

Thank you all sincerely. After all the work in improving the design I hope I can also improve the quality of the content to make it worthwhile.

[tags]web design, design, redesign[/tags]

This doesn’t help in anything the usability of this site, but it’s something I was wanting to implement and have finally done. So here’s to my very first Technorati tagged article

*opens champagne*[tags]technorati[/tags]

I’m implementing the new design now. Expect a lot of bugs…

*update* – The design is usable for now, I will fix more things tomorrow *yawns*

Don’t worry everyone, I didn’t forget about the live redesign. For now only the index is online but I promise that as soon as I have the time to sit down I’ll continue working on the rest of it.

I already noticed a tiny problem with the menu but I’ll fix it before moving onto anything else. I’m really happy to say that the site is rendering 99% equally on all major browsers! Firefox, Opera, Safari, Internet Explorer! They’ve all been tested and they all passed with flying marks.

And even though it took me a lot of time the code is all transitional (html) with the exception of a few CSS hacks I had to use. Also, you’ll notice that the smileys have been updated to the phoenity ones! ;( :s

I promise that the smileys aren’t the only thing that I added to the site *rubs the back of his head*

Expect some changes tomorrow!

I am going to start updating the design. However, the blog part will be the last to get updated, or should I say, it’s going to be updated by bits and pieces. I’m going to get it functional at first and then style it as I find the need to.

So even though it might change, it will still be a work in progress.

I will first update the static pages (in other words, all the pages except for the blog) and then move on to wordpress theeming.

If you have any comments you’d like to add about the redesign feel free to.