Geoff Holden

As you or may not notice as you’re reading this, I’ve made a few minor updates to the style of this site. I wanted to give the site a little more style, pizzazz, panache, and might I even dare to suggest cachet? (Oh, it’s got cachet, baby! It’s got cachet up the yin-yang!)

Now, as a warning, if you happen to be using IE the page might look slightly worse than before–the round corners will be far less smooth than they should be. The solution to this is proper PNG transparency support (look to any other current brower, or wait for IE 7)

The first of the updates was the banner image up top. It looks much like it did when there was no image, but it has some background texture now (an image of a hard drive, from stock.xchng).

The other update was a slight gradient in all the other blue boxes. Barely noticible in a short post, but in a longer one you can see how it darkens as you move down the page. This gradient is why I had to change how I did my corners, they used to be 100% opaque images with both the blue and grey. Now, because I don’t know which shade of blue will be at the bottom of a post, they only contain the grey and the rest is transparent. In sensible browsers the PNG alpha transparency works great, but in IE I had to fall back to the binary transparency of a GIF. And before somebody trys to inform me of the AlphaImageLoader workaround to getting transparency to work in IE, I’ve already tried it. It fails when you have to use background-position, but was otherwise working OK.