Just a quickie: easyweb — site and all mail accounts — will be off the air from late in the day on Monday 17th September until a week or so into October.

This is because it all runs on a server at home, and we're moving house, with some time in a caravan in between.

We'll be back up once we have ADSL in the new place.

Update

Back, obviously. Took a bit longer than expected — no thanks to BT and their useless Moving House process that doesn't work if you have an inter-regnum between houses.

New ADSL providers are WebTapestry, who are fab, affordable, and approachable. We're getting 8 Meg despite being in a tiny village miles from anywhere. But it's in Scotland, so it has a BB-enabled exchange, which we're ~50m from. But the move has done something odd to the site's ability to fetch RSS feeds. I suspect it's DNS related as very little else has changed, but I'm still in problem analysis mode.

Ahhhhhhh I'm back, with a working server once more.

What had happened is that my old Motherboard had gone 'phut', so needed replacing. Could have been much worse - could have been the hard drive, with associated data loss.

Here's the culprit:

Still, not so easy to replace at short notice when I'm mostly in Newcastle at the moment, and the time I have at home has other priorities. And once the Mobo was replaced, I discovered that it took a different kind of RAM to the old (now discontinued) one, so that was another trip to PC World for the sake of speed.

So now I have a nice EPIA M motherboard (and new stick of RAM) in my home server, and I'm back on the air. A huge thanks to Kevin at indigospring for diagnosing the problem. He also fixed my previously dead iPod which had resisted all the solutions Apple had provided, other than splash out on a new one. Cheers Kevin!

My new site design is joining the cool kids by using LiveSearch. But I wanted to go one step cooler - with a few wee HTML extensions, Safari replaces the boring square search box with a curvy one that anti-aliases beautifully into the background.

Without Field Focus

With Field Focus

Here's how you do it: you add non-standard attributes to the input field:

But how to enable this for other browsers, without messing up the Safari rendering..? Read on to find out how.

I liked the general style of thisthe previous design (assume past tense from here - Ed: 24 Feb 06) - it's clean and curvy, and a big step forward from what went before. I'm not entirely convinced about the layout though. It doesn't quite fit on my laptop screen (maybe because you've forgotten how the box model works - Ed), and it doesn't quite feel solid and rational enough.

So I'm rebuilding the layout from scratch, and I'm using a very smart development technique for when you're using a fixed vertical grid - Khoi Vinh’s idea of using an image of the grid as a background image while you're developing.

So now I'm most of the way there with the updated layout - I still wanted to use Golden Sections as the basis, so it's an irregular grid that's more like a log-log scale. I've not yet applied the presentation styling, but have a look and see how it's going.

The esteemed Mr Handelaar recently opined that Websites should join the list of Laws and Sausages as things you shouldn't see being made.

Can't argue with that, and I'm exposing the guts a bit here more than I'd like. But you'll have to live with that, eh?

So, the site is here. This theme's a bit pret a porter, and it'll develop once I've lived in it a bit, and when I get time to work on it. I've moved from the initial Bonsai theme to one of my own design. It's all fixed width, based on Golden Sections.

The old content's still over in Zope, and as it's not in a standard RDBMS, extracting it and porting it will be a bit of a manual labour. But I'll be bringing it back as and when I get time, and it'll be at the same old URLs thanks to Drupal's Path module.

Regular visitors will notice the changed design. I never was really happy with the old one - some of the elements were nice, but the layout always seemed clunky.

So I've rebuilt it from scratch, which only took a couple of hours, I was surprised to discover.