CSS Only In IE and Jquery UI Datepicker

I decided to take this Sunday and work on the website instead of Flex. I have improved the formatting of user comments and updated the blog calendar. User comments will now show formatting such as return characters and is aligned on the left not to wrap underneath the avatar picture. The blog post calendar will now show the title of the post when you mouse-over the date. The blog calendar update in particular was a much needed improvement in my opinion.

There is a known bug with the blog post pages that display user comments. The web-server will randomly return a "this page cannot be displayed" error. You just have to refresh the page a few times. Brock and I traced this to software called ion-cube in combination with PHP's XML parser running on the web-server. We were unable to re-create the error on my development environment (XAMPP) and my test Linux machine that runs fedora core 4 so the error still randomly crops up.

Another known bug is with the tag cloud generator located on the left side of the main page. This is Johann Burkard's Dynacloud that utilizes Jquery. It is supposed to generate tag clouds based on frequency of word usage across the entire main page. However it seems to rank links and items inside div tags much higher then normal text. I also have to manually adjust the maximum allowed font size of this script whenever I update the site due to the irregularities in rating words. Perhaps a future update will be to fix the cloud myself or find another candidate. In any case, thanks to Johann for his nice contribution!

While messing with the CSS for the comment posting, I learned a nice little tidbit. When you place an asterisk "*" in front of a line of CSS, it means that only IE will read that line. This came in handy for the chunk that I use on the comment formatting. Take a look:



I wanted to mention Marc Grabanski and Keith Wood for their work on the Jquery UI Datepicker. The blog calendar on this site is a modified version of the UI Datepicker before it became officially integrated into the standard Jquery UI components. I again modified the core of the Datepicker to include the blog post titles. These modifications haven't been that difficult due to the excellent job Marc and Keith did on the Datepicker. Thanks fella's.