Felocity

If you are reading this, there is a good chance I'm in Boston. This site was set to switch over on May 1 as part of the May 1 Reboot and the CSS Reboot I obviously can't reply to comments right away, but I'll make it a priority on Monday. For now though, here are some site "features".

• Mac IE 5 might be dying (I hope) and the comments are messing up slightly. This is due to Mac IE 5 liking to render floats at 100%. Unfortunately, I'm stuck on a workaround for this.
• Comments use the (in)valid _height for min-height CSS hack. couldn't find anything more elegant, and Dave Shea's technique wasn't working with 3 images that all needed the min-height shift.
• sIFR is now in use, but there is a FOUC occuring on those headlines. I need to reapproximate them and find something that is size-wise close, but that will come with time.
• The extras page isn't there yet because I'm still trying to save it from the old old site.

I think that's just about it. I hope.…

I love mail, I really do! This is my second web site done head to toe in XHTML/CSS, and I thank everyone for their feedback, both positive and negative. If you would like to comment directly on an entry, feel free! The comments are left open for about 3 weeks and then closed automatically by Textpattern. Of course, that's not to say the discussion is dead by far; I've found myself referencing previous articles with new insight based on many of the emails I receive.

Even though I get several emails a day, I make a point to respond to every single one of them that arrives via this form. Feel free to ask questions of the site, design, technology used, or just stop in and say hi.…

p. Gaia Online Avatar Dashboard Widget is a small Tiger desktop widget for customizing your avatar quickly. The current design is simply a hook into the Yahoo Mini Browser developed by Gaia, but provides the same customization functionality. Read the associated journal entry …

• User Interface designed for touch screen monitors
• Networked system to allow multiple kiosks
• Simple reporting / tracking proceedures for administration
• Written in Microsoft Access

!/images/portfolio/asapsigninkiosk-thumb.png(Click to Enlarge)!:/images/portfolio/asapsigninkiosk-2.png The Academic Skills Achievement Program (ASAP) needed a replacement for their existing tracking system for student sign in reporting. The old system used a campus swipe card system known as C-BORD. Unfortunately, infrequent updates, network outages and card problems made the system ineffective for large amounts of user tracking. The solution needed to be portable from system to system, be intuitive for students while providing important reporting features for administrators, and use only the existing load set for the university computers at California State University, Monterey Bay.

Microsoft Access was chosen as the platform for development for its likeness to Visual Basic for form level control, and it's ability to link tables over Windows file sharing. The final package uses a client and a server architecture. The server is a set of tables and common administrative functions, while the client contains all the applications front end functionality. In order to accommodate a Kiosk style of data entry, the interface had to be modified for use with a touch screen.…

I ran into a snag while preparing for the May 1 reboot, involving sIFR (Mike Davidson's weblog post on sIFR) I was attempting to replace a H2 element in the following two columns. They were designed to display side by side using opposing floats. However, someone pointed out that in Firefox for Windows only (now there's a new browser oddity for you) the flash text would cling to the top of the container element, in this case, content. Here was the initial CSS being used:

bq. #content #recentEntries { float: left; display: block; width: 200px; }…