supersonic feet

McLaren unveiled their 2006 livery today for the transition between sponsors (they don’t get Vodafone until next year). The car will be mostly chrome and certainly is rather striking.

I assume they’ve checked it out, but it looks like it could actually cause trouble for the other drivers in the field at hot, sunny circuits like the opener in Bahrain if the car really is that reflective. I suppose the saving grace for the other drivers is that when you’re behind the car you just get exhaust and tyres, while when you’re in front the wing mirrors on an F1 car aren’t exactly big.

Can’t wait to see the car in action at any rate

Browsing through the latest entries at CSS Mania this morning, I came across happygiraffe.net (thought titled Jabbering Giraffe when you get there). The menu down the right hand side of the page has a nice little touch, whereby each link has a little tick-box next to it.

When a link has been visited, the box gets a red tick in it:

This is obviously quite a simple thing to set up in the CSS, but works really well at marking links you’ve already visited. For general site links like those in the image above, it’s perhaps more of a novelty as you’re likely to already know of BBC News and visit more than once. For links to articles, or other pages you’re only likely to visit once or twice however, it could be very handy.

On a high content website where you aren’t likely to remember every page you’ve visited but would rather avoid the ones you already have, the ticked/un-ticked styling could work much better as a quick-glance reference than just a purple link.

I’ve started trying out the recently-released Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 and it’s a big improvement over IE6. There’s been plenty mentioned about CSS bugs that are either still there from IE6 or new to IE7, but I just came across a really weird one that might just be a setting somewhere, but until someone shows me how to change it, I’m assuming it’s a bug.

I’ve been working on a layout for a new website today and have just been sticking to Firefox for testing as I put the basic page together. With that done, I went to open the file in IE7 and it seemed to be refreshing the page in the Firefox window on the other monitor.

After a few more attempts to open the file in IE7 (I’m slow, I know), it dawned on me that it was actually loading the file in the default apllication for the filetype as it’s a local file, not one from the web. As Firefox is my default browser and it’s an HTML file, IE7 was kindly opening it in Firefox for me.

There are probably instances where this is helpful, but trying to test compatibility of some CSS in IE when IE isn’t your default browser is certainly not one of them.

On the assumption this is a bug and not an option, I’m posting it over on the Microsoft discussion group to see what’s going on…

Being slightly less than serious for a moment, I’ve decided on another reason comment spam is evil (aside from the whole unsolicited junk, ruining content of an otherwise good site, making people sift through often offensive nonsense reasons).

On a small blog (such as this one), any comments are basically mini high-points for the author. When I check my mail and find that there’s a comment awaiting moderation, it’s a great feeling to think that some of the nonsense I write has actually caused someone to write a reply - it doesn’t matter whether it’s positive or not (though that’s nicer), it’s just nice to know that it’s being read by someone and that they’d like to continue the discussion with you.

Now we come to comment spam. When I click on the email telling me I have a new comment awaiting moderation only to find that it’s a list of links to casinos, viagra and other drugs I’ve never heard of (probably more of the same ilk I imagine), it’s quite more than a little irritating. It’s a classic quick high-to-low scenario and it’s just not fair to play with the emotions of we poor unpopular bloggers.

I’ll be honest, I’m blowing this out of proportion slightly, especially as I don’t even get much comment spam, but I did just get one a moment ago and it I had nothing better to blog about