iPox Remix has generated a lot of interest in themes, but there are many unanswered questions out there. Here are a few that have come across my email.

1. How do I use a different image/skin for the menu bar and the bar with the address box?
The main menu bar with File, Edit, View ect. can be themed with this code:
#toolbar-menubar {
background:red;
}
#main-menubar {
background:none;
}

The URL bar can be themed with this code:
#nav-bar{
background:red;
}

I love CSS, but yet I hate it to. For some reason, the same code can’t work in all browsers. And I’m not just complaining about the non-standards compliant Internet Explorer (all versions) but I’m finding minor differences in different versions of Firefox. How is that possible?!! Getting everything to line up just seems to be way to much work.

The reason I write this is I’ve added a new header to Blog on a Stick. I really liked the design, but programming it in hasn’t been great. I have a search box that didn’t line up right with imagery so I had to ax that.  It also didn’t line up well in IE so they get served up a search link instead. Heck, even the search results are showing up way to far left. Go figure.

DownloadSquad told us about a great new tool yesterday called CSSFly. It’s not a Firefox addon, or additional software, it’s an XHTML based tool that allows you to see and edit the source code of any website at a push of a bookmarklet.

CSSFly creates a frame at the top of your browser where you can see the source HTML or source CSS file and you are allowed to make edits. The edits then update in real time. Great for troubleshooting web design issues or digging though someone else’s source to figure out how they archived a certain technique.

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?

I’ve stumbled across exclusive pictures of Jeeves the butler back at Ask! Is his retirement over?

I guess the man has been interviewing around as I also spotted him at Yahoo!

Checking out Google, I found that they interviewed Jeeves but have gone with Mr. T. That’s right, only the best results fool!

By now, you may feel my exclusive pictures are, um, fake. Well, not everyone is happy to see Jeeves go. So, with a little bit of code, you can add Jeeves back into Ask.com. Or add Jeeves to Yahoo, Mr. T to MSN, Sponge Bob to Google or a banana to Ask. Whatever you’d like.

I found a great extension that makes the iPox hacks even easier to do. Just go get Stylish!

Stylish allows easy management of user styles. User styles empower your browsing experience by letting you fix ugly sites, customize the look of your browser or mail client, or just have fun. With an online repository at userstyles.org, you don’t even need to know how to write styles yourself; just a couple clicks and the chosen style is applied. Stylish is to CSS what Greasemonkey is to JavaScript, and unlike other methods of using user styles, most styles take effect immediately.

If you’ve ever used CSS drop down menus and Flash on the same web page, you may have found out that Flash is always on top of the CSS. Well almost always, there is a fix!

Macromedia has a good tutorial on how to make a Flash movie with a transparent background. It’s quite easy and it allows for CSS drop down menus to drop down on top of a Flash file.

Basically all you have to do is go into the Flash publish settings, to the HTML tab and select ‘Transparent Background’ in the ‘Window Mode’ drop down. (I’m in Flash MX so newer versions of Flash may be sightly different.)

Google has now started offering free web sites. That’s right, with the Google Page Creator they have a WYSIWYG HTML editor, pre-defined designs and one nice, easy to use system.

I played with it for five minutes or so this morning and you can see my page: TwisterMc’s Googlie Home Page.

I even looked at the code and it looks pretty nice. It could use external CSS but that’s my opinion.
Good work Google!!

And now everyone can start speculating on how these pages will effect rankings and bla bla bla.