Boblet Learned things and Japan diary, by Oli Studholme

Discussion...

1. Comment by Rudolf  · 22 Nov, 2003 · 11:25 PM

What was Internet Explorer’s market penetration last time anyone tried to come up with an estimate? Something like 95%?

Your server stats will probably give you a lower percentage, but even so, it strikes me as somewhat wrongheaded to tell your readers how they should post while at the same time excluding most of them from engaging in the activity.

If you are indeed stuck with a choice between displaying either the form fields or the notes in Internet Explorer, wouldn’t you, in the grand spirit of Contingency Design, display the form fields rather than the notes until you’ve managed to sort out the problem? It’s not that the notes are essential, and the form fields would actually allow IE users to post…

I haven’t checked your code, so I can’t judge what possible advantage it has over the Movable Type code as it comes out of the box. What I do know, however, is that the core install code works in IE too, so why don’t you simply go back to it?

I also miss the date stamps on the main page.

And the comment preview still has all the extra underlines in Mozilla.

Plus: I’m all crabby, obnoxious and full of good advice again. Must be Saturday night. :-/

2. Comment by oli  · 23 Nov, 2003 · 4:45 PM

Thanks for the comment ;-)

Internet Explorer Market Share

By searching Google I found IE’s market share to be 95.3% (News.com, June 2002), and 95.4% (OneStat, July 2003). However as Browser News says (and as you note) The best stats for a site are the stats gathered for that particular site: and even these are skewed by caching and faulty browser-detection.

So what are my site stats? I don’t know — you probably know the great pains I’m going through trying to find out ;-) My ‘provided’ stats list only the top 15 agents, and last month this was from a total of 318. From that top 15 I have these results:

• IE 5/6 — 16.05%
• Safari — 23.46%
• Gecko — 2.77%
• and Bots — 25.74

While I’m sure some of those other user agents are IE, this is already 68.02%. So it looks like Google, Alta Vista’s Scooter image search bot, and I are the site’s biggest users ;-) Also it is still possible for IE users to submit comments — when posting they’ll get an error via the default MT page, giving a chance to add the extra information and post successfully. Ugly I agree, but temporary.

Replacing the float-based formatting with an absolutely positioned one is on the top of my to-do list. You can check out Jeremy Hedley on forms for why I replaced the default code if you’re interested.

Date Stamps

You prefer date stamps but hate time stamps? These are very peculiar preferences ;-) I originally removed the date headers because the content is more important than a reverse chronological listing for me. Also I don’t post often enough for them to be very relevant. I’ve just realised I’d removed the date from the meta information on the index page (maybe that’s what you mean). It’s been re-added, sans time. Thanks for the prompt.

Comment Preview

Haven’t touched it yet. I note there’s no default language declaration. Thanks for the heads up, I’ll add it to my list of things to do.

Saturday night

Aah so that explains my visit ;-) No problem! All constructive criticism greatly appreciated. As one of the three or four readers of the site, I value your input highly (25% of my audience? ;-) It isn’t finished, but hopefully it’ll be less not finished soon.

3. Comment by Grump-o-matic  · 23 Nov, 2003 · 11:08 PM

Unless I missed something, Jeremy’s post is about fiddling with the buttons that came with an earlier incarnation of Movable Type, not about the CSS used to create those two columns. Movable Type 2.63 has exactly the buttons and fields that appear on Boblet.net; it lacks the footnote but it has a float that doesn’t get chewed up in IE6.

Datestamps are useful: when I start reading a weblog post or a news article I like to know how old it is because that gives me a context, a frame of reference. What I find entirely gratuitous, however, is the hour-and-minute timestamp: I don’t care, and I’m too lazy to keep track of timezones. What particularly annoys me is timestamps linked to archive pages, a practice introduced by Greymatter and parroted by the basic Movable Type install; there’s no readily apparent connection between the two.

Also: For reasons that are entirely beyond me, the basic MT install treats datestamps as more important than post titles (more important in visual terms, that is, structural markup being a cause that’s entirely lost on the Movable Type default templates) — this may make sense for authors who update their weblogs in several short driblets per day, but in most cases it’s plain bad design: you have an hour and a minute at the end of a post and you have to check several paragraphs further up to find out which day the hour and the minute belong to.

4. Comment by Rudolf  · 25 Nov, 2003 · 8:05 PM

Alright, I’ve just isolated the comment form problem: the form is there but you can’t see it in Win/IE6 because it’s hidden behind two coats of paint. When I made the #body and #content id backgrounds transparent, I found the form sitting happily on the gray body background.

Want to take it from there?