Well here it is, the all new TwisterMc.com design for 2007. The last major design update was back in April 21st, 2005 and so it’s more than time for an update!

This design offers more color, more personality and better sidebar organization. I’ve been working on it for about the past two months and I’m very excited to show it off.

If you come across any issues, please let me now. It’s hard to catch all the bugs before going live. I do however know that there are quite a few ‘retro’ pages. I’m working at getting them all over time.

While re-designing my site I ran in to many issues related to Internet Explorer and CSS. To any web designer, this is nothing to new.

I designed in Firefox and checked things in Safari and they were perfect. Opened up IE 6 and spend the next week or so re-working things.

My biggest issue was with blinking or disappearing text. I just didn’t understand. In my research I found out I had the peekaboo bug. It’s a lovely little issue with IE that causes the text to show and hide as it feels necessary. It’s kind a panic attack and was pissing me off. Good news is I found a fix. Just add position:relative to any areas that are disappearing and they come right back.

Here it is, a brand new year and a brand new design is in the works.

Actually, I’ve been working on it for a few weeks now and it’s coming along quite well. I’ve got the blog probably 75% themed with the new design and I’m still wondering what to do with the rest of the site. Part of me wants to pull it all into the /blog/ directory and the other part wants to pull the blog pieces (header, footer, sidebar) out into the rest of the website. However, I’m unsure how to do the latter right now. Thoughts?

One of the best comics around is Dilbert. If you work in an office place, you will probably find it quite humorous. They play off stereotypes and worse case scenarios quite often and it’s just funny.

Most employees have had a time when someone comes in and ’simplifies’ their job. It’s bound to happen and when it does, it’s not quite as funny, but put it in a Dilbert cartoon, and it’s great.

See how the Boss works his design skills and creates a new logo.

This week not one, but two big browsers made major upgrades. I’ve gotten a change to play with both and I think everyone is on the right track, some just a wee bit behind.

IE7 has been a long time coming. I think they said IE6 was released 5 years ago or so? Anyways, the new IE seems to be better. I’ve been running it on my Mac (via Parallels) and it seems to be on the right track. It’s got transparent PNG support (finally), RSS support, tabs and I think it seems to work with the CSS :hover property too! All steps in the right direction but it seems like it could make things worse before it makes them better.

I’ve been making some blog design modifications and I’d love to hear your feedback.

Updates include:

• New Chat/Comment bubble to the right of the post title.
• New Info bar under the post title including digg, del.icio.us and other social bookmarks
• Homepage has shortened posts.
• Live blog search on every page.

I have checked in most browsers and it appears to be working fine.  Some oddities in IE but then again I haven’t seen my blog on XP.  Blog on a Stick is optimized for browsers that work with the web standards.  That’s pretty much everything except IE.

I’ve been playing around with Google Analytics’ goals recently and I don’t quite get how they work. They sound easy enough, but yet, they are very confusing.

For example, when you add your goal, it says e.g. http://www.mysite.com/thankyou.html. But on the ‘My site’s pages are dynamically generated. How do I set up funnels and goals?’ page it shows www.example.com/checkout.cgi?page=1 (no http://) and on the expressions page it shows www\.google\.com.

So which is it?

Also, on the expressions page there are 11 expressions available. However none of them have a very good examples or explanations. I guess if I were a hardcore programmer these would make more sense. But what about for the more average person?

I’ve installed two new plugins that are Ajax based.

Ajax Comments
Great plugin that takes the refresh out of adding a comment to the site. It simply accepts the comment and adds it to the list without ever changing screens.

Ajax LiveSearch
This replaces my default search box with a live search box. Start typing and it’ll automatically show you results. I think it has IE issues, but works great in most browsers.

I also had to get rid of Spam Karma and go for Akismet as Spam Karma and Ajax Comments didn’t play well together. Either way, I should have excellent spam protection.

It’s not always about having the most unique new service. Sometimes, re-thinking the most boring tasks can be quite successful. For example, check out Wufoo.

It’s purpose is to help you build web forms and collect data. It doesn’t sound very exciting but it’s well done and quite slick. I’d even say it’s fun.

You just select what form fields you want, what order you want them in, set required states and you are ready to go. Wufoo creates all the code and handles everything for you.

SkEdit is simple, fast, not bloated with useless features and it’s now my Dreamweaver replacement.

It’s extremely hard to find an application that can do all that Dreamweaver can, however, it’s even harder to pay $400 for a piece of software. I have been checking out all sorts of editors trying to find a great Dreamweaver replacement and I’ve ended up with SkEdit.

SkEdit is a nice, small application for Macs that offers a full array of features. It comes with built in FTP/SFTP/WebDAV, has code completion, a preview window, syntax coloring, tabs, Intel support and much more. The only thing I really miss is the ability to edit in design mode and spell check.