Josh and I were spied in P-Bot's forums today testing out his new formatting. Josh played the role of the feisty robot and I the moderator who eventually deleted the rogue thread. There's no way to *actually* test the automated post until it goes live at midnight, but everything checks out when we post it manually.

Wish the little guy luck. :)

We finally got around to including our newest staff to my favorite part of this site, the Staff Select.

Now Psychogoldfish and Rob have been officially welcomed to the team, and only about a year after the former started working with Newgrounds on a certain project that still isn't finished yet that I won't name...

Anyway, go check it out for yourself, help me proofread it for errors. And for those of you who are wondering, Ross wasn't entirely deleted from the staff but will live on in secret until the end of time or until he decides he'd enjoy commuting all the way to Philly again, whichever comes first. (I'm not holding my breath since he's got a pretty sweet thing going on up there in Hoboken.)

Of course, I don't deserve any of the credit for this fine piece of work. All I did is upload the beast, Stamper deserves all the credit.

While working out some IE styling issues for the new store (to be launched sometime this year), I stumbled across my user page in IE7 for the first time since... well since updating one of my userpage posts.

Apparently, the little blurb at the bottom of a post -- the little "Updated: 04/18/08 4:16 PM" -- still had a little bug associated with it. I only noticed it today because I normally use Firefox, but in IE7 only it pushed the tiled site background to the right, leaving a large dead space between the content and the background image.

The issue is fixed now, but was linked to the following style:

.commentlink .updated {
position: relative; /* Added 6/25: fixed HEADER SHIFT in IE7 */
max-width: 300px; /* Added 6/25: fixed HEADER SHIFT in IE7 */
font-size: 11px;
float: right;
color: #fff }

The fix as noted in the comments was technically working, but not to the extent it should have. Apparently, the greater the number I specify for max-width, the greater the width of the centered site-containing content box. The odd part is that it wasn't related to the width of the text at all. The text I had in there is well under 150 pixels. What's weirder is when I made the offending text longer, the amount it pushed out of its container was actually less.

Anyway, all I had to do is lower the max-width to 270px -- again, odd because the text is well within the specified maximum -- to have it look fine. Of course, this is until the text length changes or I view the same element in a different context elsewhere on the site. Then it's time to address this issue all over again.

If any of this is confusing, then good; because it sure the hell confuses me too. The moral of the story is that my secret to debugging CSS that otherwise works fine is to 1) quickly identify the offending tag -- my method of choice is to delete large chunks of HTML one by one until the page renders fine -- then 2) add a background color of red to see the area you're dealing with, then 3) change the shit out of your existing atrributes until you see noticeable change. Once you've done that, figuring out what you need to do to fix the problem is elementary.

Note that the steps I listed are for debugging "CSS that otherwise works fine". It's a lot of hard work to get the styles to look good in the first place, but if you've laid the right groundwork then debugging little things like some extra margin on a floated element is relatively simple.

Also, if any of this is garbled or doesn't make any sense, it's because I'm suffering from a post-lunch food coma and had a beer with my meal. I'm feeling verrrrrrrry relaxed right now.

Here are the correct and incorrect shots:

Ever considered buying a graphics tablet? Well there's a great deal on one today over at Woot.

It's only $33. Seriously, that's uber-cheap if you ever wanted to test one out. It's probably crap, but at least it's better than using that mouse of yours.

Act quickly, and it coult be yours. And I do mean quickly, as Woot deals only last a single day.

This would make me want to scream.

.
/* */
Linked from this page.

Instead of working on fun stuff like 2007 awards nominees layout or our internal admin page overhaul, I got to spend the morning fixing the Awards section in the Portal front page. Specifically the Turd of the Week award.

The CSS isn't that complicated. But it's definitely made more challenging when you consider it's a heavily viewed portion of the site, located in an area on the page where it affects the position of the pods around it, and that it needs to be tested in Firefox, Safari, Opera, IE7, and IE6 (where the bug was more than just a visual thing, it actually pushed boxes around making the page harder to navigate). So not a hard thing to implement, but something I had to recheck a dozen times before making the decision to push a new stylesheet live. The good news is that my fix didn't require anyone else, I didn't have to bother any of the programmers to change any of their code; something I could just tell Tom about after I fixed it.

Then there are the larger questions. Do we delete the user who so delighted in making the site look ugly for a time? ("Nah, not *that* big of a deal"); Do we ditch Turd of the Week altogether since it's just a headache anyway ("No Tom, let's not be hasty"); Do I quietly delete the review of the user who claims the ugliness brings a tear of joy to his eye? (Nope, that would be an abuse of power).

I could have simply deleted the entry, which would only be a short-term fix. Instead, it wasted around an hour of my time, something I hate to admit to the little bastards that revel in that sort of thing -- little attention whores love to know when they get a reaction.

But I share all of this for two reasons:

First, to say that these stupid little exploits are only temporary. Our fixes are permanent. In their own way they would even be a fun challenge if it didn't mean diverting our attention from launching new features.

Second, a warning to people who defend these lame movies by marking scathing reviews as "abusive". If I see a review calling these submissions out for what they are I tend to clear them of any wrongdoing. So anyone jumping on the bandwagon and flagging comments that are accurate in pointing the finger at spam groups, they're going to get a surprise in the form of a garbage whistle.

So keep playing your little pranks. The rest of us will just keep besting you.

I guess this could probably get filed under "99% useless for a site like Newgrounds", but it was something that was bothering me: NG finally has a print style.

There aren't a lot of people who come to Newgrounds to print things out -- maybe a Penicorn thread here, or a userpage post there -- but when they did it was butt ugly. The entire first printed page was nothing but header login boxes and useless links.

Now, however, we have a new style sheet that hides the useless junk like buttons and footer links, converts everything to black and white, and puts the breadcrumb trail back to what it should be instead of a bulleted list. Again, not exactly rocket science but definitely something that had been bugging me a bit.

For a *really* good time, print out a BBS thread. It's the only thing I could imagine myself printing in the future, so I gave it a little more attention than the rest of the site.

The only limitation to the css is where I didn't label giant sections of stuff properly from the get-go, like the stats column in the userpages. There's not a really good way for that to be deactivated while printing without bugging the programmers here, but if there's anything else that could use better styles for printing, note it in the comments.

Bluehippo kindly offered to make me a custom signature, and finally finished it today.

Here it is, in all its cryptic glory!

Soooo.... In celebration of Tankmen .5's release, we've released yet another shirt design in the NG.Store.

It's kinda blowing our load for surprise items when the new store launches, but there were just too many shots of people smoking in the latest installment of the Tankmen series that I couldn't pass up the synergistic opportunity. (How's that for corporate-speak?!)

It also means that Lisa's news post about finally making the cut has been rendered obsolete, but little does everyone know that it's actually her modeling the Smoking shirt design as well. Funny how we all thought it was Stamper's chest at first... Maybe she oughta rethink that goal of dropping weight all the way down to 99 pounds now that people think she looks like a boy. :)

So it hasn't actually snowed more than half an inch yet ('round these parts, anyway), but we're finally ditching the Winter header theme. I guess people accociated it more with Christmas, which is fine since I was a little sick of it anyway. So down it comes.

The challenge is to make it more simple to update the header in the future. It's not difficult as-is, technically speaking, but processes could always be improved upon. I found that when every time I made a change to the site's main CSS file (ngsite.css), I had to make changes to the backed-up version of the file too, the one without the fancy holiday theme additions. It wouldn't have been a big deal -- and still wasn't that big of a deal anyway, technically speaking -- if it was for only a day or two, but using a swapped-out style sheet for an entire month was a bit of a hassle considering the amount of tweaks and edits I'd been doing.

So, I've been messing around with swappable themes, the kind where all we have to do is toss in an additional style sheet that would overwrite the necessary header styles and call new images altogether. This instead of combing through a dozen different styles spread across the existing code. Not only would it make it simpler for me -- having all the styles in one handy place and not requiring me to edit multiple sheets for each change -- but it would be simpler for Jim and Ross too since there wouldn't be any timing issues. The art could be moved into a special holiday directory and the new style sheet could be added to the queue first, and then the script to activate the changes could be run at a later time. All around a simpler method.

The question remains whether there will be a noticeable glitch where the images are swapped out. For example, a user's browser loads the default header styles (which also call the new images) then load all the other styles in that first sheet. Will the browser display those images first, then swap them out for the updated styles a microsecond later? Or will it wait to see what the ultimate result is before rendering anything at all. I'm guessing it's the latter, but we won't know for sure until we test it out.

The reason I bring all this up now is because I've got the Peni-pals.com site set up to use a different skin for each section, and it's working out surprisingly well. I'm excited to use the technique elsewhere. It's a lot of extra code and a little bit of a headache but does help to keep things organized better.

Finally, a salute to our fallen header: