In Traction

Although there has been quite some debate about the newly introduced X-UA-Compatible meta tag in Internet Explorer 8, I noticed it is only necessary for backwards compatibility (at least in the developer beta). If a website does not look good on IE8, designers can add a special meta tag to indicate which version of IE it will be rendered in:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />

In my opinion, that’s a lot less harmful than having to add a meta tag to actually get the new standards compliant behavior. Consequently, IE8 renders my homepage correctly, which is great news. I made the decision not to adjust my design to be conform with IE’s rendering a while ago. The future is looking bright as the problem will solve itself after a while.

Here’s a screenshot of IE8 beta 1 correctly rendering my homepage

Most features that didn’t work before but do now are CSS related: content generation (for separating the breadcrumbs), unordered lists styled as tables, correctly positioning hovering submenu’s, etc.

Update: Apparently the IE developers changed their mind which is why standards-compliant websites now work out of the box in IE8.

I had some problems lately with my domain (jozilla.be). The guys who I registered it with didn’t answer any mails, nor did they answer any phone calls. I was lucky once to speak to someone from support, who told me everything would be taken care off if I deposited another 4 Euro’s to get the domain out of quarantaine. Of course, this didn’t solve anything. My domain is still in quarantaine.

I wish I knew who the CEO of this company (and others) was before I registered my domain with them. It seems he has quite a disputable reputation. The people of the be.comp.internet newsgroup didn’t have a high esteem of him either.

Since you are reading this, I guess you found my new and permanent domain (jozilla.net), which I registered with Site5 for no more than 7 Euro’s.

I’m glad everything is working again. As always, the staff of Site5 was very helpful to resolve any problems I had during the migration.

In the future I will be looking into integrating my blog more into my main homepage. I might also move away from Typo since its instability is quite annoying. Apparantly the original creator of Typo has moved on as well. Mephisto seems promising. If the infrastructure is in place I hope to blog more often, and publish more material about my current research.

Edit: A few days ago, my .be domain was reactivated after all. A little too late however, since I already registered jozilla.net by then.

I updated my FOAF profile today with most of the metadata that is applicable to me. I also added my geographic position (longitude and latitude), which was already listed on my blog and homepage.

If you annotate your website with geographic information, it is possible to view sites near you through the GeoURL initiative. You can for example take a look at websites near this blog (within a range of 30 km).

If you are curious about FOAF and want to create your own profile, it might be good to read Tim Berners-Lee’s advice.

The last couple of days I have been working on a new, fresh design for my homepage. It was quite hard, since I’m far from a good designer. I have to experiment a lot before I end up with something that I really like, while Luk for example can come up with something astounding within minutes. Then again my designs are standards compliant and designed with CSS positioning instead of table layouts

Almost all content has been migrated to jozilla.be. There are still a few files to be uploaded. In the next couple of days I will setup a redirect at my old homepage.

I’m glad I finally have a nice blog again. There’s some news concerning Uiml.net and Cassowary.net that has been in the queue for a while now.

Stay tuned!

This all started when I wanted to create a new blog.

Typo seemed impressive. However, it required Ruby on Rails, which wasn’t supported on Lumumba. I figured it would be cool to redesign my homepage with Rails as well, so that I could dynamically add content, and more tightly integrate my blog with the main website. The old homepage used a custom-made PHP templating system, which was only sufficient for small changes to the content.

Maybe getting a dedicated host would be the best thing to do. So I went through the list of web hosts supporting Rails. I came across sneaker.nl, a Dutch blog using Typo. We exchanged a few mails, and apparantly he was using DreamHost. After a couple of hours of comparing hosting plans, the choice was narrowed down to TextDrive, Planet Argon and DreamHost. DreamHost is really cheap for the web space and bandwidth it offers, but TextDrive and Planet Argon seemed more customizable, which I found very important. Unfortunately they are a bit expensive for my liking.

And then I stumbled upon Site5, which seemed to combine both enormous bandwidth and disk space with great support and reliability. I found a guide comparing Site5, DreamHost and TextDrive and a whole bunch of of Site5 reviews, of which the majority was positive.

Registering .be domains is free until January 31st, so I registered jozilla.be, and ordered a shared hosting plan at Site5.

And this blog post is the result My homepage still requires some migration work though.

I didn’t regret signing up at Site5. Their community forums are very helpful. Yesterday, I sent an email to support and received an answer within 7 minutes!