« | June 2006

If there's anything anyone involved with web design hates, I'm sure like me, it's incompatible browser nuances (to put it mildly). Where one browser zigs, often another zags, leaving your cleverly crafted pages possibly looking like something out of a Picasso collection. Great for modern art, not so great for web usability.

I'm no markup expert, in fact I just get by — these pages are built with a bunch of CSS, but still required a bit of table duct-tape to hold together. I guess I just didn't have the melon for the rest of the CSS to get to the table-free stage. Without CSS this design would only be possible using massive amounts of fixed graphics and other really ugly kludges, but unfortunately, styling is also where some browsers lose their points. Incidentally, this site currently validates as XHTML 1.1 Strict and gets close enough to CSS validation for my liking (using W3C validators).

In primary development I did all the preview work using Camino (my default browser) and Safari, which is far and away the most popular browser for Mac OS. For this reason it's also the most important platform for us and all new styles get tested right away in it (usually producing expected results). Some slight tweaking was necessary to get everything looking the same between the Mozilla-based browsers (like Camino and Firefox) and Safari, but all in all it was painless enough to have been forgotten already. Once things began shaping up in the layout department, IE6 in Windows was given a go. That browser still commands a significant market share and I'd like visitors to be able to see the site whether they're on their own computers or surfing from an internet café on the other side of the world.

Let the problems begin. IE6 doesn't support transparency (alpha channel) in 32bit PNG images, but searching found a nice IE-specific work-around for PNG image loading. Unfortunately it's not suitable for background images, which make up 90+% of the graphics use on this site. So the images had to be flattened and carefully trimmed/puzzled together omitting transparency in most cases. The few places where this would have compromised the design goals, a linked img was reluctantly used.

But what about the style? Yeah, I'm getting there. No fixed positioning of items means a really horrible mess was made of the page because of the little sticky corner label (top left). More research and problem worked around. But what's this? Why do the fonts look off? On the Mac you'll see most text rendered using Lucida Grande and some text using Trebuchet MS, but Windows systems lack Lucida by default, so Trebuchet gets used a lot more. But that's not the problem. The text's x-height (the height of the body of lowercase letters like the x) are rendered smaller in proportion to the CAPS height in comparison to the same font on the Mac. If that weren't enough, you should see what happens when you use an even size (like 12 or 14 pixels) in IE6 — font height remains relatively the same but letter spacing changes!

These differences in IE6 made it mandatory to specify some alternate styles to patch up some of its rendering deficiencies. Luckily the IE developers knew they were creating something not generally compatible and implemented some more IE-specific parsing allowing a special comment block that only IE sees. In here we load the PNG work-around and a small substitute stylesheet, without using any Javascript or providing any content that may affect other browsers.

IE5 for Mac OS you ask? Fuggedaboudit says I. The issues with the pages are known, but it will take someone who actually knows something about CSS to work around them (rather than someone faking it like me). I've more recently also tested the site with Firefox, Opera, OmniWeb, Shiira and iCab (which for some reason insists on having a top margin which shifts the page content down, breaking the background illusion).

I <heart> Web browsers.

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Ah, the sound of a beautiful Latin placeholder, darling of the typographic world & not just a smooth lyric in Bran Van 3000's "More Shopping."

We're a couple of weeks past our ipsum days, but it all still seems so private. So temporary and fleeting. Though with Google and other archivers around there's always some sense of permanence, if not for design work, then at least for the text that fills the pages. In our case, Google has decided to take a snapshot of a temporary nonsensical experiment with the Joomla CMS on our front page. Unfortunately this "unpublished" site doesn't even rank in the top three results for "Twisted Melon," despite having the most accurate and long-lived domain name. :)

We've just started down the road to changing those results by pushing all the current content live onto the root (front page) of the site. We'll be making a lot of edits and changes over the weeks, including the move to CMS and integrated cart I previously mentioned. Full forum integration will also fill things out. But for now, our simple click-to-buy link works, we've got a small database set up to keep everything tidy and some large amounts of bandwidth to burn.

So come on, help us spread the news. It's not like there's anything on TV tonight anyway. Just some lorem ipsum placeholder shows and reruns waiting around for the fall.

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As anyone who’s ever been “self-employed” knows, you rarely if ever work for yourself. That would better be described as “unemployed.”

Twisted Melon was officially founded in January 2006 – that’s the date on the articles of incorporation, you know? I’ve been kicking around with the domain since early 2000 and just recently decided to leave the corporate world and do my own thing. Though I’m the President and CTO (who needs a CEO anyway?) I still have a boss.  In fact I have many - more than ever before. That’s because first and foremost I work for you. I also work for my employees, and let me say, the lot of you keep me extremely busy and always on my toes. It’s true, there’s no one looking over my shoulder to see if I punch in on time or keeping tabs on what time I shut the office down, but there are always plenty of people expecting something from you, looking for solutions, looking for advice and sometimes making demands. And that’s the way I like it.

If I wanted to keep my head down in a relatively cushy job with above average security, I would have stayed where I was. Expectations were easy to surpass without breaking much of a sweat.  Everyone’s expectations other than my own that is. Working for a company with a retail and consumer presence, one couldn’t help but want to make an impact on the customers that mattered the most.  Joe and Jane public. But you can only affect so much movement when you’re encumbered by the trappings of a large corporate entity.

For almost 10 years I was with ATI Technologies, a little graphics chip maker maybe some of you have heard of. It's difficult to remember everything I did there, but I do know that I started out as one of the first rather lowly Mac quality assurance engineers. Time passes and throughout, amongst a lot of jumping around, role shifting, confusion and a little hard-headedness, I had dabbled as a product marketing manager, public relations puppet, product/corporate evangelist, marketing communications manager, graphic artist, software designer, event planner, technical publications writer, trade show specialist, event technician, IT specialist, beta test coordinator/web guy and when I left, my official title was Project Coordinator (they had stopped using the Manager title in engineering at that time for mastery of non-human subjects). For some reason they didn’t offer the title “Jack of All Trades” on our business cards.

So now here we are in 2006. Some pennies saved along the way to make this move and almost as many spent to get this far. So what’s changed? I covered it a couple of paragraphs ago - I’m working for a new boss - a much more demanding one with a thousand personalities and an endless array of performance metrics and tastes. I’ve added a few more job functions to my list for this venture: interior designer, carpenter, electrician, builder and flooring installer. So I’m extremely thankful my talented brother handled all the painting requirements. But now I have the chance to settle in and focus on a much more specific job function. I’ll be getting back to the company’s software design, engineering, graphics, PR, marketing and network administration. Chances are if you write to us, I may just get the first few support emails too. :)  Until next time, boss.

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See, I’m taking a few moments out from doing small stuff like finishing up software and putting up this web site to get a feel for this whole blogging thing.

Only a handful of people even know the test address for the site you’re reading now – and I can’t really say exactly what’s changed since the day this is being written and the day you’re sitting there reading it [wonders to self: “Self? Is anyone reading this?”] We’re in a mad rush to get our first product, mira, out the door. We took a bit of time in the middle of a larger project to work on this little gem.  Of course there was that nagging little problem sticking its nose in the way: we didn’t have a company web site yet to host our own content!

So over the past few weeks I’ve managed to come up with a design, create all the original illustration and graphics and put my novice XHTML and CSS skills to the test cobbling it all together. Good thing I practiced on the Mira help book a little first.  Back to the rushing business… Even though I’m splitting myself 6 ways from Sunday, I just don’t have the patience, actually time, to figure out the wonderful Joomla content management system (CMS) to wire all this work together in a beautiful dynamically generated template-powered fashion. It’s all old-school manual labor and FTP transfers to get the goodness out to you. Just take a look at this blog page – I’m even adding these posts manually.  No fancy WordPress or Movable Type shenanigans here. But it’s all coming. If I value my sanity (really I do), it has to happen. A proper shopping cart isn’t just a frill after all.

It’s back to some hard work – pushing for the date of posting my first real “live” blog entry so I can stop queuing these things up.

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I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to that word. This is it, officially my first blog posting. Believe it or not, I’m not talking about this site, but in general and as a whole. I’ve never made a “blog” post before.

I’ve probably written enough over the years on the net to fill a couple of encyclopedia volumes.  Do people still know what those are or am I dating myself? I’ve been posting on the internet since 1990 but always with a specific audience, or rather recipient, intended for any given message.  There was email, there was a lot of usenet and of course countless forums (many of which are long forgotten). But I can’t say any have been of the self-indulgent nature that practically defines many modern weblogs. Electronic journals and diaries have been around long since before the web (despite what some wikipedia contributors claim). Even the archaic .plan file served as an early soap box for early netizens. But over the past three years “blogging” has really hit the mainstream. And even big business – some blog sites rival traditional news sites for traffic (some blog sites are the only news some people read!)

But the relatively new term is already expanding in definition simply by virtue of its use and perhaps misappropriation. In either case, I don’t think it’s going away. This little slice of ether sitting in the quiet corner of Twisted Melon should keep to a more traditional approach, that of a journal, rather than a media outlet. And I promise to try and keep away any mad Canadian rants.

As a parting thought, let me leave you with this.  I’ve never considered myself any type of journalist and don’t tend to hold my writing ability in extremely high regard. And I’ve already started more than a couple of sentences with “and” and “but.” But that’s the way I like it.