In case you haven’t noticed yet, Stu’s got a nice forum set up. While he’s fiddling with MT and his new forum, I’m trying hard to figure out how to install a Wiki on my site.

Some of you may be asking yourselves, “What the heck is a Wiki?” Well, a wiki is a site where anyone can edit any page at any time. Now before you start asking all the obvious questions, let me direct your attention to a few pages that might help you understand what I’m talking about.

Check out WhyWikiWorks and WikiGettingStartedFaq.

One very successful wiki is the Wikipedia, a free, open encyclopedia. They have over 160,000 entries and it reads just like any other good encyclopedia. I would probably trust it to provide information for my next research paper, even though it’s been written and revised entirely by ordinary web-surfers!

Anyway, there are a ton of WikiEngines out there, but I think I found the one I want to use. It’s called WikkiTikkiTavi. It uses PHP and MySQL, and (supposedly) every page validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict. You can also specify where it should look for the stylesheet, which means I can customize the layout of the page to my heart’s content.

Unfortunately, installing ‘Tavi requires shell access, which I don’t have. Actually, I’ve read through the installation directions about five times, and I think I’ve found ways around almost all of the command line stuff. I probably won’t install it for a couple of days (because I know it will be a big project), but I think I’ve got a rough plan for how I’m going to do it. Wish me luck!

I found a great page that highlights the raw power of CSS. It’s called the CSS Zen Garden. At first glance, the site may seem a little pointless. It only has one page, and the few links that exist on the page all seem to point to other sites. I was tempted to leave the page a few seconds after I landed on it…

But then I noticed the menu down the side listing a bunch of stylesheets and their respective authors. Clicking on any style refreshes and applies the chosen stylesheet to the page. You can’t really understand what I’m talking about unless you have a look for yourself, but in most instances, the stylesheet radically alters the layout of the page.

Anyone who knows CSS and has graphic design experience is encouraged to submit a CSS file, but no one is allowed to alter the original HTML file. Viewing the source of this site really gave me a sense for how to code an HTML file for maximum flexibility and how powerful CSS can be in terms of layout and style.

Does anybody remember when Yahoo had free POP email? Wasn’t that cool? I loved that. No other free email company offered POP. I remember (before I owned Qangaroo.com or JoeyDay.com) when I used to have upwards of twelve free email accounts through various portals. I was forwarding them all to Yahoo so I could use Outlook Express. Those were the days. I even had Yahoo set as my home page. I loved reading my Reuters news and getting my weather information, and I thought the Yahoo search engine was the best. I also had two Yahoo Geocities accounts.

Then Yahoo started charging $3/year for POP access. They also threatened to start charging for other services. That’s when I pulled out. I had my POP email through Qangaroo.com and didn’t care to pay anything to Yahoo to use theirs. I cancelled all of my Yahoo and Geocities accounts — except one.

The one account I kept, qangaroo, was the one I used for Instant Messaging. I’ve since even cancelled that account, opting for a more personally identifiable one: joeynday. Since about six months ago I’ve been using a great IM program called Trillian. It lets me log into all four of the major IM programs and it saves me from having four buddy lists cluttering up my desktop. This week, Yahoo announced (somewhat enigmatically) that they’ve taken steps to block Trillian and other third party programs from accessing the Yahoo IM network.

Here’s a ZDNet article on the subject: Yahoo freezes out Trillian

Trillian has released a patch already that fixes the problem, but no one knows just how long that will last. If Yahoo’s really trying to keep third parties out I’m sure they will come up with something permanent. If that happens I’ll simply say goodbye to Yahoo for good. I really only talk to one person over Yahoo, and she recently started using MSN Messenger, so losing Yahoo won’t be too big of a deal for me.

In a related story, Microsoft has also threatened to block third party IM services from their network. They’ve set up a contract offer for third party companies to stay connected to their network. October 15 is the slated deadline for companies to sign the deal. It will be interesting to see if Trillian will fork over the cash to keep MSN. I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t.

Again, the story from ZDNet: Microsoft forces IM upgrades

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not upset about this in the least. All the IM programs are sponsored by ads across the bottom of their buddy list window. MSN, Yahoo, and AOL are no doubt losing a bit of revenue from people who switch to programs like Trillian. I don’t have any problems with those companies blocking my access to their network, but if they think that’s going to get me to use their IM program, they are mistaken. I hate to side with Microsoft, but Yahoo would probably make more money by doing what Microsoft is doing: trying to strike a contract deal with Trillian. That way, existing Trillian users don’t get ticked off and Yahoo still gets their revenue.

I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been using Mozilla Firebird for the past month, or because I’ve been redesigning my site to be standards compliant, or if it’s some of the things I’ve read lately on SitePoint and A List Apart. It’s probably a combination of all three. At any rate, I don’t like Internet Explorer anymore — not one bit.

For starters, I just read about (and immediately fell in love with) the PNG graphic file format, which IE doesn’t support. PNG boasts a very slick little feature called alpha transparency. You might be saying, but wait, can’t you get transparency in a GIF? Sure, but you have to settle for binary transparency. What that means is that a pixel is either 100% transparent or 100% not. Alpha transparency means a pixel can be 50% transparent — or any other percentage you care to make it. This would allow whatever is behind the pixel to show through slightly. You don’t have to be a whiz web-designer to understand that you could create some cool effects with such a technology. What’s even better is that PNG has better compression, which means PNG’s are smaller than both JPG’s and GIF’s, making them perfect for web design.

PNG has been around since 1995, and every other browser in the world supports it. Actually, Internet Explorer does have partial support for PNG. It will load the image, but can’t handle the alpha transparency. You can see this effect with my new Joey Day logo in the top left corner of the page. If you are using IE, you’ll see a whitish colored box around the logo. In any other browser you’ll see the image seamlessly integrated with the background — shadowing, anti-aliasing, and all. IE was supposed to support PNG as of version 4.0, when Microsoft promised full support in a pre-release spec sheet. Now here we are four years after IE 4.0 came out and eight years after PNG was invented, and they still aren’t supporting it correctly.

Second, IE has crummy pixel rendering methods. It renders everything one pixel off from normal (normal being the way every other browser in the world renders things). This doesn’t make any difference if you aren’t worried about exact positioning of elements, and for the most part I’m not. However, I recently added a search box along the navigation bar, and I can’t quite seem to get it to look right in IE. I’ve got it positioned exactly 3 pixels from the top of the div in which it has been placed. In all other browsers this means it should be centered, and indeed, it looks great in Mozilla, Netscape, and Opera. However, IE is rendering it four pixels down. I’ll probably end up making the navigation bar a few pixels taller to give the box a little breathing room. I do like how it looks right now in Firebird, though. 🙁

Third, here’s a juicy tidbit: Microsoft just lost a lawsuit against a company called Eolas. Apparently, the owner of Eolas invented and holds several patents for plug-in architecture. What this means is that future versions of IE may not support quicktime movies, real one audio, acrobat reader, and even flash. Windows Media Player wouldn’t be affected because it could be built into IE and thus not be considered a plug-in. Depending on the complete outcome of the lawsuit, Microsoft may even be forced to send a patch through Windows Update that would cause current versions of IE to stop supporting plug-ins.

Here are a few articles about the lawsuit:

1. How a patent suit by a technological David brought a Goliath judgment
2. IE patent endgame detailed
3. The patent fight that could disrupt the Internet

Actually, the scary thing is that this isn’t just an IE problem. Eolas will be targeting other browser manufacturers next. Netscape will probably be their first target. Smaller browsers like Mozilla and Opera may be immune for at least a little while, but eventually all browsers may have to pay royalties to Eolas for the use of plug-in technology. Yikes. :S

[Updated Feb. 9, 2004: Mozilla Firebird is now called Mozilla Firefox. I highly recommend you give it a try. Though it is still a preview release, it is already heads and shoulders above any other browser I’ve used.]

It’s official. The blog formerly known as The Forum has been combined with the journal formerly known as JoeyDay.com. What this means is that anyone who previously had power to post on The Forum can now post on my main blog (whatever I decide to call it).

I will probably continue posting journal type stuff here, but not as often, as I’ll probably concentrate more on news/blog type stuff. I will refer to this as a blog from now on, even though it will contain some journal content. I don’t anticipate that anyone will have problems with that.

I’m pretty excited about this new layout. I’ve been coding the site using Dreamweaver MX 2004 (what a slick program!) and I’m writing it completely in valid XHTML. Some pages are Strict and others are Transitional (because of some JavaScript stuff I can’t figure out) but I haven’t used a single table yet. The site sure looks crappy in anything other than the latest browsers, but that’s okay. I’m not making any money off this, so I couldn’t care less how it looks for people using old browsers. If you are using Netscape 4.7 (or some similarly ancient browser), please join the rest of us in the 21st century! I recommend Mozilla Firebird (latest version is 0.6.1), but Internet Explorer 6.0 isn’t too bad of a browser.

Anyway, if anyone is interested in learning XHTML, I can show you some great tutorials. It really isn’t as hard as you think it would be to learn. Taking full advantage of cascading style sheets makes rebuilding a layout so much easier. It’s really incredible.