Anyone want to help me reign in my XHTML/CSS? I am a big standards guy but my site is currently hurtin’ for certain. A few of my pages still validate, but most don’t. Bad form indeed. So anyone who wants some easy money getting me set back right, drop me an email.

The time has come to dump Internet Explorer. I know, I know — you may have heard the same thing before from those that think it’s cool to hate Microsoft; but I’m not one of those guys. I’m actually an MCSE and I happen to like quite a few of Microsoft’s products.

Rather than lump me into the Microsoft-basher category, consider for a moment why you use the browser you use, and humor me by entertaining the notion, if even for a second, that switching to another might be worth your while…

Link: Why You Should Dump Internet Explorer

I’ve been using TextWrangler for a while now — a free uber-text editor that’s used heavily by web developers. It’s actually the free, mini-version of BBEdit — which is supposedly everything TextWrangler is and more.

I’ve been thinking that I might want to “step up” to BBedit and buy it to get the features I’m lacking with TextEdit, but then I looked at the stuff and it doesn’t seem all that compelling. It then came to me that if even one or two of the features are useful — ever — then it might be worth it. Why?

Because I love TextWrangler so much. That doesn’t seem to make sense, but I almost feel like it’s good karma to buy BBEdit because I like their free offering so much — especially since it does offer some extra features that could come in handy. I’m going to download the demo and play with it for a bit — just to make sure I’m not being too nutty.

What do you guys think; is it just abject stupidity to “reward” a company in this way?

Edit: Thanks for the input; I bought it. For anyone thinking of doing the same, there’s a $100 discount for anyone using TextWrangler. The details are a bit weird, but it’s a real discount. I got the product for $99 instead of $199. W00t.

Ok, so I’ve finished migrating my pseudo-static content from my WordPress database to actual directories. It can be reached via the navigation in the top right, or here:

• /study
• /writing
• /tools
• /contact
• /about

Check out the /tools page, by the way; notice that it validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict. Yes. Kneel before Zod. Oh, and my brand spankin’ new custom CSS stylesheet validates too. I made that thing by hand, completely CSS formatted — no tables or nuthin’.

Now for the most difficult part — making an entirely separate stylesheet just for my main page (this blog), aka “Operation Un-Gimp”. This stylesheet, like the one for my static content, is going to be tableless and all that good stuff, but it’s also going to have a left-floating sidebar in the primary content area, i.e. it’s going to look just like you see here, but with no tables whatsoever. I’m redoing the entire thing from scratch.

Wish me luck.

If you come to the site tomorrow and see nothing but a bunch of bright green Wingdings, you’ll know it didn’t go so well.

For anyone interested, here’s the initial few pages under the new custom, static layout I’ve designed from scratch (XHTML and CSS). So far I have /tools, /contact, and /about. If you’re into this kind of stuff let me know what you think.