1 I'm one of those engineers, and when I run into this kind of thing I just consider the source, grin, and move on.

2

I'm sure a lot of this is driven by adolescent (or not so adolescent) yearnings for the existence of real aliens and time travelers, etc.. Haruhi-ism lite I guess. Lots of desires for weirdness but thankfully none of the omnipotence to bring it about. I just didn't think to put all that in the original rant.

 

1

Well, um, it's unique. And distinctive. I guess.

Back when I was working on user interfaces (which we troglodytes at the time referred to as "man-machine interfaces") we tried to avoid red tones. Humans tend to find green and blue relaxing, and red or orange tends to make us nervous

2

D'oh. Damned with faint praise.

Good to know. I want to soften up the red a little more towards brown once Pixy gets the color selector working. I figured a Sedona/Southwest theme would be pretty easy to put together.

What I haven't found is a good color for the blog title that can stand out against all the different colors in the banner image rotation. The dark green show up most of the time, but it's still an ugly choice.

3 Hi Will.

I've done a bit of testing, and yeah, the colour selector is pretty broken in IE, at least IE7.  I'm going to see if I can fix that, but if you want a quick workaround, you can use Firefox.

4

I don't think it works in IE 6 at home either, but I haven't done much work with it from home. I'll try it later tonight and let you know.

Thanks

5

Having the background be the same color as the header is probably not a good idea. The header should probably be more intensely colored.

Pixy, why does the header drop a shadow onto a white background, even when the rest of the site's background color is not white? It looks strange.

6

If you mean the menu bars in the banner image, you're right. The menu bars do need to be a different color, but they're part of the banner image I can't get the banner image editor to work.

Pixy, the banner image editor keeps telling me I need to specifiy a font (which I do) and if I have a subtext (which I think I do from the old style), to specify a font for it (which I can't).

I think the white under the shadow is a transparency error with the background color.

7 As of IE7, Microsoft has fixed alpha rendering of PNG files, which means they can have variable and partial transparency. The dropshadow could be implemented as a PNG file with a variable alpha channel, but it wouldn't display properly in IE6.

8

I think that's what Pixy has the banner creator doing. At home on IE 6, the various bits of text in the menu bars are scrambled because they are partially-transparent images. But in both cases, it looks like the transparent dropshadow is rendered over a white background, without regard for the color of the real background.

I'm still not discounting the possibility that the PIBKAC (heh). I may not have got the background color set up correctly when I first configured these images. Several key properties seem to reset every time you go in to make a minor adjustment, and I may not have got the background color set again. Until some of the weirdness in the editor is hammered out, I'm just going to leave it this way.

9 The banner image is a jpg - no transparency.  When you create the banner image, you can specify the page colour so that it blends in.

Will, you won't have a sub-text if you're editing a banner; that only applies to other image types.  So...  odd.  Which font did you select?  Did it show a sample?

10 I picked Arial out of the "other fonts" pulldown and no preview came up. The odd thing is that it has worked before.

11 Samples aren't coming up for the other two font libraries either.

12 Hmm.  What browser are you using right now?  Looks like a Javascript compatibility issue.

13 Sorry for the late response. I was using IE7 at work. Now I'm at home on IE6 and it's still doing the same thing.

14 Okay, thanks.  I don't see any of those issues in Firefox, so it looks like I'm going to have to do some Javascript debugging in IE.

Ick.