Today (and yesterday), I spent some time trying to upgrade the Planet! software that runs Planet Perl and friends to the latest version.
I said "trying", because I'm declaring the upgrade a failure.
It appears to be because I'm testing by running two "update"s in a row, and it doesn't like rapid updates within the same minute or something, but it seems to randomly decide to only include certain people in the output. (And no, it's not always the same people.) That just isn't good enough. I could dive into the python code and fix it, but there are many other things on my todo list, and the old code works just fine, 99% of the time. It was also complaining bitterly about the RSS2.0 <items> block, so I had to tweak it for that.
Of course, instead of giving up, I got persistent, and it seems to be working ok now.
So... lets start over....
Tonight, I upgraded Planet Perl (and Parrot, and Six Perl) to the latest, greatest, Planet! Feed Aggregator.
While I was at it, I took the time to tweak the look of Planet Perl. (Thanks for the comments on the previous post.)I fixed up the CSS a bit, although it still needs more work. We're almost at the point where we can have alternate stylesheets. I did make one controversial change, which is to have it be full-width. The fixed-width we were using was a little too narrow, and picking another arbitrary width seemed silly.
Anyway, now I can leave this alone for a while.
Regarding the width something like max-width: 35em works quite well, in that it limits the max line length for people with wide browser windows (which is otherwise difficult when you have to jump from the end of one line to the start of the next).
ReplyDeleteBy using max-width rather than width you avoid posing too wide a width on those with narrow windows (which causes horizontal scrolling, which is horrid to deal with in running text); and by using 35em rather than something in pixels or whatever, it's proportional the font size, so that those with big fonts on big screens do get to use all the width and don't have ridiculously short lines.
Of course that's only for browsers that support max-width; 'IE' doesn't, but then it just ignores it so it won't make things any worse than they are at the momment. Or you could look at Dean Edwards's ie7, which I think kludges in max-width for 'IE'.
Oooh, max-width. I like it.
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