I spent another chunk of today (probably inappropriately) doing more tuning on the blog. This was inspired by a few articles I was reading on Google AdSense tuning, as well as some other tweaks I wanted to do with the page layout.
This turned into a fairly major series of fixes, including finally replacing the top banner with an appropriate background graphic. Doing so uncovered a problem with the 'date' tabs that I have over each days postings, so that image needed to be re-rendered.
Please do take a chance to visit it and let me know what you think.
I use The Gimp for all my graphic editing, and while it has a somewhat arcane interface, it's undeniably a powerful tool. I re-rendered the tab (6 ways from sunday actually, but that's another story), and posted it.
The problem is that the graphic used for the tabs is a PNG file, a vastly superior file format to GIF and JPG, but one not well supported by IE. Why not? This is still a mystery - it's not like Microsoft hasn't been informed of the problem since IE 5.5, but I digress.
Apparently, there is no fix for a transparent background on a PNG file, particularly when embedded in a stylesheet. I've decided that most of the readers coming to PG probably are using something more capable than IE, and if they're not, the page does render, there's just an odd shadow near the tab itself.
For a demonstration of the PNG fault in IE, here is a set of pages that walk through the problem with transparency support in IE.
I'm still waiting for a realistic reason people are still using IE over Firefox.
You can get a modified version of Gimp called GIMPShop. It more closely mirrors the layout of Photoshop in its menus and toolbars. It is available for mac/linux at
http://plasticbugs.com/index.php?p=241
and for windows at http://blog.yumdap.net/archives/20-GIMPshop-for-Windows.html