Author: Robert

Robert Belknap has been writing online sporadically since 2001. See the colophon for more details.

IE PNG Petition

Not that it really bothers me too much as a user, (since my primary browser has proper PNG support) but as a designer, my life would be made that much easier if MSIE supported the PNG image format correctly. So, without further adieu, I present to you the Proper PNG Support in Internet Explorer for Windows online petition.

I’m not sure if anyone remembers, but a while ago, I posted this image in an entry:

That is an example of why PNG alpha transparency is cool, and why no one really uses them yet. If your browser supports the format properly, you will see a penny sitting on the background color of the page (no matter which theme you happen to be using) without the anti-aliased “fringe” so common to transparent GIF images. If your browser doesn’t (*cough* IE) you see the penny sitting in a light-grey box.

There are work-arounds for getting PNG images to display properly in IE, but the methods I’ve seen thus far seem kludgy to me.

When did that happen?

http://g-blog.net/rankings.php

Zhan, I probably wouldn’t have noticed for a few more days if you hadn’t mentioned it.

I guess that’s what I get for hiding off-line for a couple of weeks. Grats, Zhaneel. 🙂 I’m actually a little surprised you didn’t take over the number 2 spot sooner. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why I’ve had so many hits since Gossip added the tracking system.

There are a couple of entries I’ve been kicking around in my head. They’re a little different from my normal ramblings, or the “link” blogs (an entry where I just post a few links I found that I want to remember) I normaly post. A little more personal, and probably a more interesting read. I’m still not entirely sure I want to post them, and I don’t know why that is. I think I might try out the new privacy feature. I’ll post one or two, make the appropriate edits, and then open them up (or re-post them) to the public.

I’m back (sorta)

I haven’t been here since the 25th. Not even to lurk. I got hit with a pretty nasty cold during my vacation, and for some reason I just decided that I needed to spend some time not-online. I didn’t even do any of the work on PHP projects (not to mention GLUE themes) that I promised myself I would over the holiday. I’m sure that there is a whole bunch of stuff to catch up on, but I still don’t quite feel up to it.

Anyway – I’m not dead, I’m just not online much right now…

-Hool

Best. Spoilers. Tag. Ever.

Damn Gossip,

I think that is the most elegant Spoilers markup I’ve ever seen. Are you going to add it to the clickable markup? (The links that are between the Title text input and the Main Entry text area.)

[Spoilers] Most places just set the font color to match the background color. Then you have to highilight the area to read the spoilers text. I like this solution much better. [/Spoilers]

3 Hours to Go

Soon I’ll be counting down the minutes until my vacation. The only reason I haven’t left already is that I’m waiting on a delivery from an outside design agency. I don’t really want to have to come in on Monday if I don’t have to – of course if I do, that’s 8 hours less PTO I have to burn…

Tick Tock.

Everything Old is New Again

Yesterday during our lunch-break, a few of my coworkers and I hit the local Toys R Us. (To do some X-Mas shopping – yeah, that’s it…) Anyway, I was poking around over in the videogame area when I came across an interesting kiosk. It had a GBA with a new peripheral installed: the Nintendo e-Reader.

Basically, you buy this reader, and you can use it to scan cards that have “Dot Code” printed along the side. Depending on the complexity of the Dot Code needed, an entire game, (or some text, or a picture or something,) can be encoded on anywhere from 1-5 cards. The technology reminds me of the punch-cards that used to be used to program computers.

I just thought it was interesting. (Even if there is a Pokemon tie-in…)