Today started off an Opera day. Driven by the new freeness of the browser I started to look into a lot of things I knew I could do with Opera but never got around to. I now have a working spell check for all my form data (provided that I remember to use it), I learned a myriad of new hot key and mouse features, and I did a lot with user javascript. I eventually got annoyed when trying to play with a per page user CSS hack that is supposed to add some of the functionality of CSS3 selectors (one of those few areas where I think FireFox is ahead of Opera). I dropped it once I realized that full support for CSS3 selectors is rumored to be in the next release of Opera...don't want to do the work twice.
I still wanted to play with custom CSS for sites, so I decided to fire up FireFox and see what I could do. I am gonna drop everything this paragraph was supposed to be and just say that I assume that there something wrong with FireFox on my machine. I went through a phase where I used FireFox a lot, I don't remember it being sooooo slooooow. I even went through the effort of properly removing everything FireFox related, reinstalling, and going extension free...still annoyingly slow. I would wipe my system to see if it would help, but why go through those hoops for a tertiary browser.
And oddly, all that leads into the reason I started this post: I have been playing with the site. I finally got around to trimming up the RSS feeds. Now it presents the content similar to what you would see on the page vs showing the entire post for every post regardless of how it shows on the page. Also fixed the titles for the feeds, so if you use them and you are still getting the full "...rss.xml?user=... stuff, you might want to update. I have seen some styled feeds, and while that seems cool, it also seems to defeat the point. Oh well. Um, what else did I do? Oh yeah, I fixed a couple of validation issues. I had apparently done some funny things with the blockquotes on the commentable pages. They rendered right, but did not validate right. They should be happy now. I also tossed in some cheap hacks to assuage the validater with random chars strewn together. Once again, this stuff displayed right, but kicking it through the validater shot up flags, so I tried to fix it. I still need to get around to finding a new encoding def for the page that won't just kill the wife's page.
Oh, and I wasted over an hour trying to get the site to play all happy with Opera's fast forward feature. The geist of the fast forward button is that it "figures out" what the next logical link on the page is, and lets you go to it with the button (cool with mice that have a forward button, just click and go, no looking for a link). I am fairly sure I was following the rules right, but never got it to work with what I wanted. If I am not logged into rantfest, it tries to make me. Oh well, I will save it for another day I guess.
Complete sidenote, the rewrite of the backend is on hold for a bit. I have decided to make it more database generic so that if I ever want to start using a database other than MySQL I won't have a lot of work porting it over. This might be nice if I ever decide it is mature enough to open source it. (*cough* yeah right :) )
