Being Amber Rhea

Spring cleaning Gmail

Detritus from my “Stuff to Post” label (with my notes to self, where included):

January 4, 2006

• http://davemerrill.livejournal.com/310920.html
  Maybe reference in post about ATL intown neighbhorhoods, addressing homeless problem, etc… (also idea of “yuppies”?)

February 21, 2006

• AJC women-to-woman porn thing
• UGA Beer class
• For the CSS blog – CSS3 selectors – http://www.evolt.org/article/CSS3_The_new_Frontier/17/60319/ and http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200601/css_3_selectors_explained/

February 26, 2006

• The Top 10 Clues That You Are an Amateur Blogger
  Hmmmm…

March 16, 2006

• Objectification (expand on this in detail)
• Newspaper usage of gay and transgender
• C Loaf transdude story
• Nikki’s rant about contraceptives and “men’s rights” BS
• Gender and blogging – also the implicitly sexist remark on the referring blog about blogging tools being “tricky” – http://a.bunchof.us/2006/03/14/gender-and-blogging/

August 29, 2006

• Interesting comment to blog about

November 27, 2006

• Interesting:
  

  Is it a white liberal American thing this fallacious idea that there are always two equal sides to an argument and that the answer or the truth must lie somewhere in between, thus everybody must have their say in every forum? It certainly seems to be a popular belief on those blogs that give a platform to anti-feminists to air their views.

  YES and I should probably write an essay about it. “Free speech” and “the right to hold an opinion” have been entirely misunderstood in this country, I think. And of course, there are never ONLY two sides, and the ‘truth’ is NOT necessarily in between.

  The right to free speech is NOT the right to speak everywhere, all the time, and the “right to an opinion” does not mean opinions cannot be debated or examined – or ignored.

  Some people seem to be really insecure about their opinions, and yet want them protected: as though they were like body parts they were dissatisfied with, but do not want to be teased about. Of course, one shouldn’t be mean to people about such things, or about experiences they’ve had … but that is a very far cry from deciding or not to engage someone’s opinion, or to disagree with it, or not to give it weight.

  People do NOT understand this, it seems, and I think it is some sort of ideological effect – and control mechanism – “free speech” gets twisted around to mean censorship of free thinking, if I am being clear.

  (Comment by profacero at http://womensspace.wordpress.com/2006/11/24/trolls-and-anti-feminists/)

  [Ed. note: From Heart's blog, aaahhhh!!!]

August 2, 2007

• http://saraspeaking.wordpress.com/2007/07/07/what-kind-of-friend-are-you/
  

  Since the gist of the thread is about whether a statement has to intend to be sexist in order to actually be sexist, we have the following quote:

  Assuming that there were no hard feelings intended from the offender how do you make the offender aware of what he has just said? Who wins when it’s largely a difference of opinion?

  “who wins?” That’s your problem right there. This isn’t about winning or losing. This is about you having said something that offends/hurts someone else, and whether you’re going to continue offending/hurting them by arguing about the offense, or whether you’re going to apologise and attempt to make amends. In short, whether you’re going to be hostile or friendly.

  Frankly, I don’t think you’re a very good friend at all if you’re going to take the former route. Denise has a good analogy:

  Say you’re sitting at a table with several friends. You stretch, and unintentionally hit the person next to you in the face, hard. Is the correct response to berate the person who has been hurt for leaning forward, or is it to apologize and keep greater awareness of your surroundings? Nic’s response has been telling the person who has been hit to stop being so sensistive and continuing on in ignorance. Intent is a part of what matters. Your friend would likely find the anger at being struck easier to let go of once he or she knew it was an accident. BUT that the injury was unintended does not make the injury go away. A failure to apologize and an insisitence that you are in the right when you injure people because you’re not paying attention makes you look like a jackass.

  Exactly. Not meaning to do something doesn’t undo the fact that it has been done. I didn’t mean to overdraft my bank account, but that sure as hell doesn’t change the fact that I’m a couple hundred dollars in the hole. I didn’t mean to hurt my friend’s feelings, but that doesn’t change the fact that she is, in fact, hurt. And I can either argue — oh, oops, I mean “have a difference of opinion” with her as to the state of her feelings and the justification thereof. Or I can be a friend, apologise, and kiss and make up.

Some of these links might not work anymore. I haven’t checked. Now I can clear out that label, though!

Possible theme weirdness

Note, I’ll be messing with my theme today, so you might notice some funkiness on the site. I tried to use a plug-in called Preview Theme, where you can specify a theme in the query string and it’ll show it to you if you’re logged in at a certain user level, but it didn’t work. So I’ll just mess with the live site. Fortunately I didn’t have to change any HTML, only CSS (because I rule).

Other than that, my day looks like this:

(Jenny sent me this e-card.)

Browser stats

Breakdown of my blog visitors by browser, according to StatCounter:

So I don’t feel too terrible about feeding IE a stripped-down version, due to One True Layout problems.

Pardon our dust

If things look weird around here during the next few days, particularly in the comments section, don’t worry your pretty little heads about it. I noticed that when comment threads get past a certain length, things start to look fucked up – specifically, the page doesn’t expand as far as it’s supposed to, and you end up with text on top of text. This baffles me because I’m usually basically the same code as I did on the old blog; but nevertheless, there is fucked-upedness, and I will address it as I get time.

One day, I imagine I’ll set up a dev server for this kind of UI testing – but that day is not today. So just deal until all is well.

You learn something new every day

Here’s something I learned today.

Outlook Web Access does not like CSS background images – even though Outlook and Outlook Express do. (Unfortunately, OWA isn’t listed in Campaign Monitor’s Guide to CSS Support in Email). Furthermore, if you use the shorthand background notation and happen to have a background image in there, OWA won’t display any of your background properties. So, this…

background: #6461b6 url("images/sky.jpg") no-repeat top left;

…means that in OWA, your background color won’t be applied – which can be a problem if you’ve also specified white text.

On the other hand, if you do this…

background-color: #6461b6;
background-image: url("images/sky.jpg");
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-position: top left;

…your background color will be there in OWA. But the image just ain’t going to show up no matter what, so get over it, buddy.

Anchor link weirdness

Yes, I know there is a problem with anchor links (e.g., when you click on the recent comments in the sidebar). You end up seeing only that comment, and not the post or any of the other comments. This is a side effect of using the otherwise kickass One True Layout. I must say I was a bit surprised to see this problem show up; I had thought it was an issue only with named anchors (e.g., <a name="whatever">), but apparently it’s also an issue with referring to IDs. And now that I think about it, that makes sense; why would it be an issue with named anchors but not IDs?

Anyway, it’s frustrating; I’ll let you know when I find a fix. I am not going to ditch the One True Layout, that’s for sure!

Update: I have a temporary solution to this problem. It involves reverting to named anchors instead of IDs on divs, and giving each anchor position: absolute (If you’re really curious, you can view the source). I’ll need to put in some hacks for IE, but then there’s a lot I need to do for IE, hence the current no-stylesheet version. And I also don’t know yet how this behaves in Safari or Opera.

New look

I’m playing around with a new design for my blog. It’s not finalized yet, but take a look and let me know what you think. (I wouldn’t recommend viewing it with IE, since I haven’t had a chance to do that myself yet.) I just feel like it’s time for a change. And, even more appealing to my geekiness, the new design utlizes equal height columns of the One True Layout!

It’s naked time

What happened to the design?

To know more about why styles are disabled on this web site, visit the Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information.

AEA wrap-up

As promised, I was blogging away at An Event Apart today. You can read the thrilling play-by-play at CSS Insider.

I also posted my photos to the AEA Atlanta Flickr pool – my first time using Flickr for anything other than writing clever comments about other people’s photos. Honestly, I think their UI leaves something to be desired, but can thousands of nerds be wrong? Eh, I’ll just stick with Gallery and let everyone else enjoy the Flickr hotness.

Finally, on the CSS Insider post, you’ll notice the following teaser:

Earlier I did a short interview with Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman, and Jason Santa Maria. It will be available for download in a few weeks via my forthcoming podcast site (link to come).

So there you have it, the anti-climactic pseudo-public annoucement of the project Rusty and I have been working on for the past ~3 months. Sorry there wasn’t more pomp and circumstance surrounding it… but I could put some DHTML confetti on my blog if you really want me to.

Mysterious disappearing forms in Safari

I’m used to dealing with incorrect CSS rendering, lackluster AJAX support, memory leaks, and all the rest of it in IE. But the other day I came across something new and baffling – and it’s not an IE problem, so it was a huge Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot* moment.

The problem: In Safari (2.0.3), nothing within the <form> … </form> tags was showing up. But if I removed the opening <form> tag, the inputs, labels, etc. showed up as expected!

After much head-scratching, fruitless Googling, and futzing with HTML and CSS, I found the fix: the form was inside a div, and when I applied display: block to the containing div, all the form elements showed up correctly!

I guess that’ll be one more for the Quirksmode list of Safari bugs!

Update: This happens only if the containing div has the clearfix class applied.

* h/t Rusty