Jun 22
Today, I have been fighting playing the html code in templates of Wordpress and the CSS of the site. I wanted to display the posts of the Cobra blog a bit more visible than an RSS feed, but not (like it was) importing every entry into this blog, so I came up with a block on the homepage which is fairly visible so it will attract most, but not that disturbing for others.
How a little addition to CSS can make a big difference in how a page looks. CSS3 has a box-shadow property, which puts a nice drop-shadow behind an object. Support is still pretty much lacking from all browsers except the latest Firefox and Safari.
As most people wont have these, here’s an image (which also has this dropshadow btw):
Compare this with the rendering on the homepage in your browser. For guys like me who cant do graphics, CSS3 can still make me look like a pro ;-)
It also turns out that aligning stuff bottom-right is not that easy. (for me at least). Getting the wrapping right took the best part of the day for me. While I’m pretty proficient in XML and it’s rules, I keep rowing against the HTML stream I think. Oh well, it’s sort of decent now. (in FF and Safari at least. I’ve given up on IE for hobby projects)
Jun 19
After quite a long period of using ecto, I have switched to using Marsedit. Ecto got sold beginning last year by Adriaan to Illuminix. There has been no update of ecto since and I’m seeing no signs of improvement either. Does this mean ecto as a product is bad? No. I still love the idea and implementation of it. It is still a rough product though, has a number of annoying bugs and generally needs polishing; in other words: maintenance. After filing a couple of bugs and generally getting minimal or no response to them, time has probably come to expand my options.
With the set-up I have (wordpress-µ self hosted, off-line editing, flickr for images) switching between ecto and MarsEdit is hardly any work at all. Key in the account details in the new client and you’re basically good to go.
The only drawback I saw upfront was that MarsEdit does not have a wysiwyg like editor as ecto has. I’m not so much looking for the wysiwyg part, but avoiding the html editing process. I worked around this by installing a server side MarkDown plugin which enables me to edit posts in MarkDown. MarsEdit has a Preview Text Filter which supports MarkDown, so I actually feel the situation has improved.
I find MarsEdit a bit more intuitive in terms of navigation and menu entries and quite a bit faster to work with. The most important thing however is that the product is properly maintained by Daniel Jalkut from Red Sweater Software. In the last year he has updated the application 4 or 5 times with healthy changelogs and (judging by the forums) Daniel is very much on top of things. That looks a lot better than the current ecto situation.
