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Also see: [User Friendly]

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1. Myspace, which has empowered people everywhere to bring back the Geocities days of tiled backgrounds and animated GIFs. And sparkle text… so much sparkle text.
2. The Internet Marketer, their presence on Twitter, and their continued vague solicitations to “Market your internet”.
3. The pixel pusher client, because that one art class you took in college does not qualify you to “make the design better” by shifting everything 2 pixels to the left.
4. The family friend that gives you the “honor” of doing a free website for them. (Just wait, it will be the iTunes and Facebook killer – all in one).
5. Internet Explorer and everything it stands for.
6. Web 2.0 graphics, in all their high gloss, beveled, gradient covered, badge-y glory.
7. The use of meaningless stock photography, because a person and three of their coworkers are never that excited about what’s happening on a computer monitor. Stop pointing at it.
8. Tables used to layout an entire website with no tabular data. CSS was invented for a reason, quit using a candle when you have a lightbulb
9. “Dime a dozen” companies that “optimize SEO, innovate solutions, accessibility your HTML, scalability your Photoshop, and buzzword your buzzword. Oh yeah…unsurpassed quality too.”
10. Comic Sans.

For the full text of the declaration, and to sign it please visit Build Internet.

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I sat down to pound out this post real quick in celebration of yet another victory by me against the spammers of the world. On aforementioned Web site I added a guestbook. I know they used to be all the rage in the days of Angelfire, but with WordPress and Blogger with their fancy instantaneous comments, no one really uses guestbooks anymore. That is only a problem because when I started that Web site I was still a rather novice PHP programmer, and even younger still in experience with MySQL. Logically I did the next best thing to programming it from scratch, I found a basic script through Google. Sadly enough this script came with no security measures short of the ones that prevent SQL injections.

Over the course of three unchecked months we accumulated several pages of spam. All of it either penny stocks, Viagra or increasingly disturbing porn sites. My first attempts involved CAPTCHAs. I’ve always hated CAPTCHAs, and when I couldn’t program a successful one I hate them even more. I dropped that idea like a hot iron, and decided to attempt the honey-pot method. BINGO! It cleared out all spam I’ve had to worry about, and I get a convenient email every time an attempt is made.

Not long after my initial victory, I ran into something worse than a spam bot, a spam humanoid. The honey-pot method is virtually useless against human spammers. After a few weeks of collecting and deleting spam from real live people, I noticed the one common link among them. They all used the same e-mail service. For the sake of protecting my coding I won’t say which one. Tonight I’ve successfully implemented a means to block anyone using that Web address for email. Sadly though that blocks out a lot of traffic from a large country. Oh well, they shouldn’t let spammers run rampant.

Have any of you out there got any good spam stories?

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1. Internet Explorer should me likened to the spawn of Satan. Unlike the rest of Beelzebub’s seemingly intelligent sin practitioners,  it has Down Syndrome. I have a theory that Microsoft let a group of twelve three-year-old children write the Internet Explorer source code.
2. I hold great disdain for Internet Explorer and its tyrannical strangle hold over most household internet browser usage. If you’re viewing this now from Internet Explorer,  I beg of you to go out and download any of the other free browsers out there. This list includes but is not limited to Mozilla Firefox and Opera. They’re both superior to Internet Explorer.
3. Throughout the rest of this post Internet Explorer will be referred to as IE followed with a number to indicate which version I am working with (e.g. IE5.5, IE6, IE7).

I sat down at my desk challenged with the task of making the Web site’s navigation bar work. On numerous pages the words and buttons didn’t line up or it was taking up more than one line on the page. Both of these unfortunate events were unacceptable. After browsing through the code behind the existing navigation bar and not being able to follow the previous author. I decided to create my own navigation bar to throw in, and to top it all off it was going to be completely CSS based. This was all jolly-good except I failed to understand that IE was coming in to thwart my day. The plan started out simple enough. I created a basic unordered list, then started applying the styles through my CSS, and it all started to flow together beautifully. I finally reached a point where I realized it would be a good time to give it a test run.

I opened up my browsers IE7 and Firefox 3.0. I loaded up the page and behold my link bar. I hovered over each button in IE, and everything worked flawlessly. I was so excited, because more often than not if it works in IE it will work in FF. I quickly clicked over to FF and then, what the hell? Nothing worked. The buttons just stared at me tauntingly. This was a crystal clear message. If it works in IE, but not FF it’s often because of faulty coding. I scoured my code, but found nothing. I then moved off to CodingForums.com for some real insight. They quickly helped me see my mistake and things were rolling smoothly again! Embarrasingly enough I was closing my list items too soon.

Now everything was working well, except the bar was vertically stacked instead of horizontally. I argued with my CSS for several minutes before I finally found a configuration that worked. It was extremely frustrating, because none of the techniques I was pulling out of the Google-sphere were working for me. Once i finally whipped the list into submission and had it flowing horizontally; I rested.

The next day I checked and noticed that everything was working everywhere, except IE6. There was no pop-down action what so ever. It was back to the forums. I found this neat little IE work-around which uses .htc files to force IE to accept the :hover pseudo-class. If that sounds like gibberish to you, that’s okay. It is gibberish that means nothing to real people. Just know that it means IE is a pain in my ass. I incorporated the .htc into my code and then it was once again working beautifully.

It was time for the final lap, the finish line was within sight and I would be sprinting by within in seconds. Suddenly somewhere YHWH decided to yell, “FAIL!” Eveything fell apart. I had loaded the RecSports homepage in FF3, IE6, and IE7. I focused on FF3 first. The menu was pushing everything down when it opened, and covered the words with errant background colors. I got rid of the background color, and added up some z-index (more gibberish). Success was mine! Everything was smashing in FF.

On to IE. IE7 actually offered me no issues except some positioning issues due to the z-indexing. Once I worked out the positions and sizing problems everything was flowing smooth. It was at this point that I was willing to award IE some point because of its drastic improvements between IE6 and IE7.

I pulled up IE6 and thar she blows. Everything was positioned perfectly! I excitedly scrolled over the links and saw the appropriate color changes, but then there were no drop downs. My brain went in to panicked mode. What had I changed that made it not work? I twiddled with the code making no progress. I finally decided to just view the menu by itself again. Lo and behold, the drop downs worked. I was perplexed to say the least.

I ran back to CodingForums to ask why in the world it worked in IE6 in some instances, but not all. No one has responded, except a great coder who has been a great help in all of this. They’ve suggested that I add in some JavaScript to counter-act IE6′s assholery (As a sidenote Firefox accepted the word assholery without question. What the heck?) This is where I am now, trying to incorporate the Javascript cleanly. It will work smoothly when I’m done.

The lesson you all should take away from this is, ABANDON INTERNET EXPLORER. Run for the hills and adopt any other Web browser out there! I use Firefox, but that’s because it’s fairly light and simple. Plus it let me have neat add-ins. There’s a link to the right that takes you to the Firefox download page. If you’re interested that is. One last proving point I have to offer is the fact that IE8 has been abandoned by Microsoft in support of Mozilla’s open source browser Firefox. This means that Firefox will come standard with Windows machines, and we won’t have to worry about IE workarounds ever again!

Next time: Grammar, Grammar and more Grammar!

ChetG

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