I’ve spent the last couple of days tweaking a few small aspects of the site. The CSS that lays out the main page’s three column look is now as it should be, I believe. Previously, it was a rather hit-or-miss affair, with the potential for the AdSense to overlap the main, centre column at low resolutions. Everything should display properly now at any resolution.
The Amazon links in the sidebar now provide an image of the product to which they refer in the small pop-up that appears when you run your mouse over the link.
In case you’re interested, I thought I’d document the various bits and bobs on which this site runs. The following components are used to bring you caliban.org.
The server is Apache 2.0.52, running with PHP 4.3.11 and mod_ruby 1.2.4.
The blog is constructed around Movable Type 3.17, with MT-Blacklist 2.04b and the latest beta snapshot of SpamLookup providing anti-spam capabilities. New blog entries are entered using Markdown, rather than raw HTML. I find Markdown to be much more convenient, as it simplifies the commonly needed stuff, whilst still allowing the full spectrum of HTML to be used as necessary.
The Amazon products are periodically pulled from Amazon’s AWS API, using Ruby/Amazon 0.9.0 and stored in YAML format. These are then reloaded and processed dynamically when the front page is requested, thanks to some server-parsed Ruby scripting within the page, interpreted using eRuby. The final display of the data in a nice little pop-up is handled by version 4.17 of Erik Bosrup’s excellent overLIB library for JavaScript.
The stock quotes come from version 0.2.1 of Ruby/Finance. The quotes are regularly refreshed and saved as YAML. The server-parsed Ruby code loads the file and displays the quotes whenever a page request is made.
Does MT use some sorf of user-agent check? On Mozilla/Mac, everything displayed in a single column, no left nav or right ads. It was fine in Safari at the time. I made it pretend to be IE and all cleared up. Weird thing is: now that I switched it back to default, it’s still OK.
Very strange indeed…
No, no such check exists. I would hazard a guess that you happened to load the page whilst MT was rebuilding the style sheet, although that’s merely my conjecture that such a race condition even exists.