JollyBOX blog - web

JollyBOX, the next generation

nospam@example.com (Thomas Jollans) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 22:19:15 +0000

The original creation of this blog in April 2008 was the beginning of a JollyBOX.de renaissance. Maybe the key change was the usage of Serendipity, giving up on AFoC. Since then, I have created a new, simple and refreshing reference design with simple, regular logos for sub-sites. Nice.

Since not too long ago, the website has been hosted on an external server, meaning it's faster and more reliable than before. Finally, even JollyBOX code now uses the new design, and is based on PmWiki instead of simple HTML, which is a great help now that it's going to host information on software I write (previously at the now-dead zombieHQ). To celebrate this new splendor, the JollyBOX sites now all carry a bar at the top referencing each other.

Privacy @ JollyBOX

nospam@example.com (Thomas Jollans) — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 14:38:52 +0000

I would like you to know that

I do not save your IP address in access logs.
All *.jollybox.de web sites are available over an SSL-encrypted connection, including this blog. The server's SSL certificate is currently self-signed. If you tell your web browser to trust it, please tell it to permanently save it to make sure you're always connected to the same potential imposter.

This site has an IP address !

nospam@example.com (Thomas Jollans) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 21:53:35 +0000

Until recently, this site was hosted on my home server, which is connected to the internet over an asynchronous DSL connection, without a fixed IP address, that broke off at least every 24 hours. And hosting a web site on a crappy connection is never really good.

Anyway, I now have a VPS, and I can only hope that means everything jollybox will experience a lot less downtime in future. I have already migrated this blog (which was relatively easy, since this Serendipity setup uses SQLite3 instead of some dinosaur of a server) and set up a mail hub, which basically means that all the new spam is stuck in one central location when my home mail server isn't accessible.

Seriously, I can't wait for proper IPv6 deployment, I can't wait until having a few IP addresses of your own becomes natural once more. We already have the software, now the development of a v6 internet must continue at the leaves of the network: if ISPs don't provide IPv6 addresses and routing to customers, why would anyone want to properly hook up their servers to the IPv6 network—it costs at least a little time, after all. I know the Windows Firewall isn't suited for the internet, but we can't cope with less than 2³² addresses forever, especially if we want to give Africa civilized access to the 'net, and, while I don't know if I'll have any influence there at all, I want high-speed lines all the way from Cape Town to Helsinki.

The new face of JollyBOX

nospam@example.com (Thomas Jollans) — Sat, 24 May 2008 00:15:47 +0000

Having finished the blog's style, it is now time to implement a common theme out of that for all of jollybox.de (except maybe the zombieHQ). The designs will follow a common scheme, but not be identical—the blog is slightly wider (due to the sidebar), and they shall have different Tango-based colour schemes. The root logo looks like this:

This uses the Tango Butter colourset, which was also used in the style sheet. Similarly, on this blog, the logo and style alike use the Tango Chameleon colours. I have created logos in all Tango colours, but probably won't need them all The images were created in Inkscape, the fonts used are Gentium and Century Schoolbook.

Just for reference, here is what I used as logo before:

Any comments are, as always, welcome.

New blog style

nospam@example.com (Thomas Jollans) — Tue, 20 May 2008 22:37:26 +0000

Since I started this blog, I've wanted to make it look the way I wanted, even though I didn't really have an idea what that could be. I have now, after reading what Pascal Klein has to say on the subject, crafted a design I think is nice and elegant, and emphasizes the content enough in a beautiful way. To be honest, it still needs some work

While I chose the precise text style manually, for colours I used the Tango project's palette and drew inspiration from that same project in designing the header graphic and the icons. I am going to use Tango emoticons and a Tango RSS icon as well soon.

Here you have some example code, including my font choices:

body {
    font-size: 81.25%; /* 1em = 13px IF font size is set to 16px */
    font-family: "Liberation Serif", "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
    background: #2e3436;
    padding:0;
    margin:0;
}

blockquote {
    font-family: "Liberation Sans", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
    font-size: 0.923em;
    ...
}

pre.sourcecode {
    font-family: "DejaVu Sans Mono", "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono", monospace;
    font-size: 0.769em;
    ...
}

Note that the default fonts are all libres, and included in a number of GNU/Linux distributions

Where's that web SVG support ?

nospam@example.com (Thomas Jollans) — Sat, 17 May 2008 10:34:34 +0000

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) are a promising technology. We've all known for years that vector graphics are, scalable as they tend to be, a great thing and often more useful than raster-based image formats. SVG in particular is nice because it's

all text
an XML-based format, and thus hip in the industry
an open format
an open XML-based format, and thus portable and good with stuff like XSL-T.

Web browsers like to boast about their SVG support, it being a hip technology pushed as a web standard by the W³C, and the support isn't bad. Recent versions of Gecko (Firefox etc), Opera, KHTML and WebKit have all implemented a working subset of SVG and are able to display simple images correctly. Some browsers (at least Firefox and Opera) have decent support for XSL-T style sheets, allowing you to display an XML data sheet graphically in a browser by linking a suitable style sheet at the top — I never expected this, but I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered that last year. Also interesting is the support of ECMAScript within SVG, making it possible to play tetris in a vanilla IceWeasel.

What was this stuff called again?

We're talking about scalable vector graphics within a WWW context. The fact that these things are scalable could be used to our advantage, n'est-ce pas ? Let's say you have a website styled with only ems for measuring distance, no pixels or other absolute stuff. Being nice and accessible, having the whole website scale when you hit Ctrl++ or Ctrl+-. Something like <img src="foo.svgz" alt="An illustration of bar" style="width:20em"/> should be just what you need. So, which browser supports that ? Bingo, not a single one !

There is a standard, portable way to include SVG in websites: you use the <object> tag, like so: <object type="image/svg+xml" data="foo.svgz" ...>. This works in pretty much all modern browsers (if you don't count IE7, but why would anyone call that bastard “modern” ?), but it doesn't do what I want it to do: it doesn't scale the graphic. At all. It stubbornly uses the size in the SVG file. If you're lucky, zooming with change the font size in the image, but only the font. What's the point of that, I ask you ? Why bother with scalable vector graphics support if you can't scale them ? Maybe we should call them scriptable vector graphics when using them on the web...