So, I've spent the last couple of hours diddling around with Wikitravel's layout, trying to move the table of contents for pages out to a new right-hand column of the page. Turns out that HTML and CSS are really hard. Who knew? I've never really gotten into the whole CSS thing and I mostly use it by rote (or by copy and edit, more often). I find the various three column layouts totally inscrutable, and the whole thing smacks of magic to me. Most of what I want to do could be executed with HTML tables but I'm sophisticated enough to know that in the Web design world that's the equivalent to painting the walls of your hospital room with your own feces.
My suspicion is that around 2001 when the Web jobs started slowing down, Web designers invented this whole no-tables thing in order to have a whole new set of employment. I mean, by that point, anyone who had something to say and $50 to spend had either put up a Website themselves or paid someone to do it. So Web designers had to raise the bar, and insisting on table-less XHTML+CSS was the way to do it.
That could be the frustration speaking, by the way.
Anyhow, after this brief moment up for air it's back to the drawing board for me. Right-floating table of contents, here I come, ready or not!
tags: html css layout wikitravel design web
Wikipedia Zen Garden
Speaking of CSS, why haven't the multitude of people who create layouts for the beautiful CSS Zen Garden submitted skins or stylesheets for MediaWiki?
Far be it from me to question Gwicke's yeomanly work on the workmanlike and more-than-adequate MonoBook skin for MediaWiki (the default skin), but maybe it's time to see some more innovation on this user-generated, immensely popular site. Aren't there at least some designers out there who want to make a name for themselves as the creator of the Wikipedia look and feel?
tags: mediawiki css design monobook html gwicke
Mobile e-mail
So, I think I mentioned that I got a Trēo 650 from Telus in exchange for a moderately long contract. I've been pretty happy with the device -- it's a Palm PDA plus a phone. Which is more than I really need, but it's kind of nice to have something to mess around with.
One thing I haven't made work yet (until tonight) was the email. When I signed up, the Telus sales rep told me I'd be able to get a POP3 account through Telus. Sadly, that turned out not to be the case; their Web site says they're "temporarily" unable to give out email addresses, but talking to customer service reps I found out that it's been months since they've supported email accounts, and that they'll probably cancel the program. Dang.
The service is too expensive to download my entire regular inbox, so I wanted another setup. I set up plus-addressing on both my regular box (Postfix + Procmail) and on Gmail. Neither worked; the phone couldn't find the "evan+mobile" folder I'd created on my regular box, and Gmail doesn't allow access to folders on its service. I was about to give up, but realized that I had a ton of free email accounts from my Godaddy.com registrations. So I used one up as a mobile email address, and it worked fine for the phone's middlingly-configurable system. Not really all that bad.
So now I have email incoming and outgoing on my cell phone. Nifty.
tags: mobile treo telus gmail email pda plus addressing godaddy
Wiki spam
I got my first Wiki spam yesterday on this site. Exciting, indeed. Big bummer is finding out that edit history was broken, so I couldn't rollback changes. Doh! It's fixed now, though, and rollbacks are done.