Super Ginormous

Month: December 2005

  • CSS Letter-Spacing Glitch in IE

    I’ve used the CSS attribute letter-spacing to control the amount of space in the titles on my site. They work fine in Firefox, utilizing the following CSS:

    h1 { letter-spacing: -.08em }

    IE6 doesn’t seem to like negative em values. IE6 actually adds spacing between the characters in this instance. To fix this, I used the * html hack filter to pass an alternate value over to IE6. Not a pretty way of doing it, but it works. Here’s the code I used:

    h1 { letter-spacing: -.08em }

    * html h1 { letter-spacing: -3px; }

    By using a negative pixel value instead of a negative em value, IE6 displays the content properly.

    Update … so why this approach? It’s scalable in modern browsers. By using em values, we can scale the letter-spacing based on the size of the fonts, as specified by the user’s settings. Pixel values don’t scale. That’s why we utilize the * html hack to pass the letter-spacing value we want it to have.

  • Apple Adds to the TV Show Lineup on ITMS

    Break out the champagne, folks. Apple has finally added some new TV show offerings to the iTunes Music Store (ITMS) from NBC, USA, SciFi and Disney. You can now get episodes of The Office, Monk, Battlestar Galactica, The Tonight Show, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Law & Order, and more. They’ve also added older shows, like Knight Rider, Adam 12, Dragnet, etc. I’m not keen on most, if not all, that’s been added, with the exception of maybe “Surface”… (but I’m not really all that into that show, so I don’t see myself downloading episodes). This is definitely a step in the right direction, but I don’t think I’ll be truly happy with the product offerings until I can get “My Name is Earl” and “Stargate” episodes off of the ITMS.

    Hat tip: The Unofficial Apple Weblog

  • IconBuffet Revamp Launched

    Screenshot of new IconBuffet siteThe folks over at Firewheel Design just unveiled the new IconBuffet website. You can read more about it over on their blog, Sparkplug.

    One of the cool new features of IconBuffet is the Free Delivery feature… where you can get free icons every month. The catch is, you might get Download A, and I get Download B, and a coworker gets Download C. We can send invites to our friends and allow them to snag our downloads. If you feel like sharing, my account email address is chris@powerserve.net ;)

    The icons Firewheel has available are really sweet. I’ve bought several sets from them in the past for use on design projects, and they deliver a high quality product. I especially like that they now offer some vector versions of the icons…

  • Blogger: 001 Broken Pipe

    I’ve got my fingers crossed right now, but I think I finally figured out what was going wrong with Blogger and it’s ability to publish my blog. It was choking on the MeasureMap script I had to incorporate into my template. I figured this out first by copying the modified template I had setup, and choosing one of the pre-built templates Blogger provides. My site published without a hitch. I then took a look at the MeasureMap code and saw that it was wrapped in its own <Blogger>...</Blogger> tags. I think this was the issue… I removed those… and incorporated the script elements designated within the <ItemPage>...</ItemPage> tags with stuff I already had to have on the ItemPage and tried to publish. Presto! I can publish again. It’s rather odd that this was an issue… but I figure that Blogger was having problems rendering out the pages because of the way my code was setup.

    It looks like, for the time being anyway, I will remain using Blogger… but I am still looking for a viable alternative that utilizes ColdFusion, ASP or .Net and won’t affect what I have on the site too much…