The rest of the time I just code around it.

@Dan Pettersson: Good idea, added an ugly conditional comment to take care of that.

Just a couple quick things before I head off to bed (been busy working on a custom WordPress theme all night)

1.) Cool. I’ll check it out in the morning (eh, afternoon, actually).

2.) The only “fixes” I usually use are a .htc file for :hover, :focus and :active in IE 5/6, and adding the occasional height: 1% or overflow: hidden; property/declaration pair to a style rule (no hacking needed). I hate transparent PNGs with a passion, but if I had to use them, there is a way to get IE 6 “in line” without having to use a hack (link: sitepoint.com).

3.) I use Opera myself, and I’ve tried a LOT of them.

4.) (slightly off-topic) I have a custom WordPress theme framework under construction that I’m hoping will save me a lot of time developing WordPress themes; the tab switcher is just one of the things that’ll be going into it. Of course anything that makes it easier on the designer/developer and the user is a win-win scenario in my book.

5.) I use the My Yahoo! service, so I only see the excerpts anyway. So I have to head here anyway if I want to continue reading.

1) About color: I’ve slightly tweaked (i was rather close already) the colors to adhere to the standards when it comes to contrast and brightness. I believe it’s easy to read.

2) I’m coding to the standards. But in this instance I won’t do extra coding to fix IE6, not with PNGs or otherwise. In my experience, and I’ve done quite a few difficult layouts, fixing IE6 bugs takes about half the total time. Not worth it.

3) I’m saying that any decent web developer show use a modern browser as their default browser. I’m not saying that everyone should stop supporting IE6, big difference.

4) I’ll think about the tab switcher, interesting idea.

5) I’m sorry you don’t like it, but then again, to read the site via RSS you don’t have to see it. It’s really not an easy thing to like, since it’s rather colorish and different. Yes, it’s amateurish, I’m a design amateur.

However, I can’t really stick with the idea of not making a pre ie7 compatible layout. We’re speaking so much of accessibility and what must be done, yet we still decide to make our websites inaccessible for pre ie7 users. Not very good, if you ask me..

I also have to object to this:

It seems to be hip inside the Googleplex to kick on people making money from other things than AdSense.

That’s actually not the case. Yes, Google said they would go after those who sold links, but it’s not because they’re trying to dominate the advertising market with AdSense. It’s because people were trying to abuse the PageRank system (as foolhardy as that is), nothing more. If you’re going to keep the ads (and this goes for the rest of you as well), just add rel=”nofollow” to the links if the advertiser will let you. Problem solved.

This also struck quite a nerve with me as well:

I won’t make it work in IE6 (on purpose). This is for my own satisfaction, and seriously, any decent web developer should already have something better. Stats say 60% Firefox, 16% IE7, and 14% IE6. Please upgrade people. I will test it in the latest version of Opera (4.2%) and Safari (4.5%). Why? Because I want more users with good browsers, and fewer with bad. And since this is a personal blog, I can choose. Yay!

Now, you said this is your personal site, and as such I will respect that as well as your decision, but the “any decent Web developer” part really set me off. Which is never a good idea. Any decent Web developer will code to the standards and against the four major rendering engines that are available, not to a particular browser or browser version (yes, this includes the Web developer’s favorite toy, Firefox). For those who need a reminder (or simply don’t know), the four major rendering engines are Trident (IE), Gecko (Camino, Firefox, Flock, Galeon, K-Meleon, Netscape, etc…), Presto (Opera), and WebKit/KHTML (Safari, OmniWeb - IIRC - and Konqueror respectively).

Now, as for the design itself (deep breath, Dan), it appears too amateurish for me. The purple just screams “mysticism and occult” to me for some reason (probably the shades you’re using, as well as that pink in there as well), the text as I said before is hard to read due to the lack of proper contrast between the copy and the background, and also feels a bit hypnotizing as well.

I’ve also noticed that your site reminds me a bit of Veerle Pieters and Molly Holschzlag’s Web sites as well, especially with the aspects of those sites being incorporated in your design (probably unintentionally). I actually like that, since it helps me (as someone who’s a regular reader of molly.com for instance) to associate your site with the pillars of the community, and helps recognize right away (before reading one line of text) what the site is going to be about. Kind of like how ProBlogger.net’s design is quickly becoming the “standard bearer” of professional blog designs (at least in my opinion anyway).

I do like the separation of comments from trackbacks, but would it be possible to use JavaScript to create a tab switcher that can display and “hide” the two depending on which is selected so that people who want to see who’s linking don’t have to scroll down to do so (especially for when there are a lot of comments on a particular blog entry, or a long comment, such as this one)?

(Another thing I would include is a “subscribe to comments” feature - I don’t read a lot of blogs, but of those I do, I prefer to follow the comments via email.)

Anyway, I have other opinions (that go along with “scrap this and start over”), but I’ll leave them for later if you like.

Nu till det jag skulle säga. De små blomklummelurerna som du har slängt upp på sidan är rätt trevliga, men skulle nog kunna bli ännu trevligare. Jag har några skyssta Illustrator penslar som har blomformer. De var gratis och open soucre och sånt, men jag minns inte var jag hittade dem. Säg till ifall du vill att jag ska maila dem till dig.

@Anders Ytterström: Thanks!

@Chris: The image is as far I’ve come design-wise. I have a static HTML file with all the content, so what I need to do is: 1) write the CSS, and 2) convert the static files to a wordpress theme. I’m hoping for about two weeks, but we’ll see.