Dispatches From The Internets

I received an email announcement yesterday that WestHost (my host of choice) is going to be offering Ruby on Rails for install through its Site Manager. I guess it means that, sometime this month, my tutorial on the subject will no longer needed. Still, I’m glad it will be a bit easier to set up Rails on WestHost now.

We feel bad about missing Grey Tuesday, CSS Reboot and all the April Fools shennanigans (too much work, not enough sleep), but we finally found something we can join/support in with little to no difficulty: CSS Naked Day. For the whole of today (April 5th), we’ve turned the CSS off for both this site and Easy Designs. We hope you enjoy their rich, semantic goodness.

The fine follks over at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital are looking for a designer/developer to join their 5-person Intranet team. This year, they will be redesigning their employee intranet and moving from a static website to a role-based portal. They will also be implementing a new CMS to run the show.So if you’re an experienced designer/developer with good information architecture skills (an ar comfortable working in a Microsoft shop) who is interested in leading a team (not just coding alone in the dark), give them a shout.

As opposed to just adding it to the comments in my original post, I decided to post the continuation of my email conversation with the unnamed executive at my former employer about the Target.com lawsuit as a new entry. This is mostly for Derek’s amusement, but I thought of a few other things to say on the subject as well.

While working on a new site, I started playing around a little more with 8-bit PNG files, comparing them to GIFs. In a few cases the PNG was smaller (it didn’t used to be that way, but perhaps Photoshop CS2 does a better job of compressing PNG files or something), so used it. All was good until I started testing the design in IE, where the colors were all off. Here’s a breakdown of how the same graphic (placed as a CSS background image against a background color equal to its own background color) rendered between the two browsers:

I am well-aware of the issues regarding IE’s handling of alpha transparency in 24-bit PNGs, but had not heard of any color-related issues with 8-bit PNGs in IE6. I did a test in IE7B2 to see if the error was there too and it was.