New theme, at last!

Written on December 16th, 2007 at 5:04:02 CET

I spent about 24 hours drawing, making and coding this one. Macromedia Fireworks and Notepad, as usual. And, of course, the one and only Wordpress. Then I put it up and an error popped up in Firefox 2.x. and IE 6.x and all versions of Opera. It was only working properly in IE7. Two people were trying to help me and, in the end, it turned out it would work in Firefox after two footer layers are merged into just one and after clarification of the famous IE6 bug with layers that have a left margin, it now works in IE6 as well as Opera 8 and 9. I have no idea how it looks in e.g. Opera 7 and below and IE 5.5 and below. If anyone’s using any of those browsers, they’re living under a rock, anyway.

I do mean to tweak the whole site a bit more and actually add navigation where it’s meant to be (there indeed is a navbar, but there are not any links on it, I’m afraid…); as well as fix the comments pages and add some plugins so I could play with them.

Either way, what do you think about this Squirrel Pad theme? I am quite pleased and I’m glad I let my imagination explode, in a positive way.

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Fansites are unoriginal, part #1

Written on December 11th, 2007 at 23:55:06 CET

OK so…this is the first part of my rant regarding fansites/unofficial “celebrity” sites. This was not meant to be offensive, I just visited many, many of them for the purpose of writing this, even some about people whom I had to google further to see who they actually were; and I was surprised to see how manifactured they were. I thought the days of the “me/you/www” pattern were over, but nah: now the clichés have extended to other types of websites.

It all started sometime last year when an owner of a female celebrity website (I don’t even remember for whom) asked me to exchange links with Invisible Movement. I asked them in what way does the subject of their website relate to John Frusciante and/or RHCP and they said that they have no idea, but they’re looking for a website with Google PageRank of 4 to affiliate, so they could improve their own PageRank. That was surely amusing, especially now that I have examined the reportedly elite fansites, with 1000+ hits per day and discovered that none of them has a PageRank higher than 4. During that quest, I noticed how many things all those sites had in common. It was creepy. I thought I’d share the results of what appears to be some sort of a study I did.

Let’s analyse a typical fansite from start to finish and debate it a bit. Ready? Here we go!

The first thing you’ll notice upon entering a fansite, is a huge PNG image as its background. In some cases it could be a huge jpg or a flash file; but seriously, the most of them are huge PNGs. Oops, I was wrong, they are BLENDS…those lil’ things thrown together in Photoshop, saved instead of being exported. I saw one with a censored boob, even. Very artistic.

In some cases, people actually pay someone else to do them “a header” or “coding”. Let’s dive into the coding of a fansite and see what we paid for, shall we?

<body bottomMargin=0 topMargin=0>

<table width="640" border="0" bordercolor="#ffffff" bgcolor="#ffffff" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="10" align="center">
<tr>
<td style="BORDER-RIGHT: #ffffff 1px solid; BORDER-TOP: #ffffff 1px solid; BORDER-LEFT: #ffffff 1px solid;
BORDER-BOTTOM: #ffffff 1px solid">

<table width="625" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1" height="15" align="center">
<tr>
<td class=box1 style="BORDER-RIGHT: #BA251D 1px solid; BORDER-TOP: #BA251D 1px solid; BORDER-LEFT: #BA251D 1px solid;
BORDER-BOTTOM: #BA251D 0px solid">

<table width="400" border="0" cellpadding="1" align="center">
<tr>

<td width="65"><div align="center"><font size="1"

Know how, huh? Inline css, applied right after the element itself, font size of 1 (1 what?) and it’s quite obvious that people don’t even know what they’re doing. Web standards? I’ll have that with fries, thanks. Nested tables? Hello, 1999!

When you’ve recovered from the initial shock containing of a large image and horrible code (shame on you, you looked into a website’s underpants), take a peek at the domain name. It’s usually someonefan.com, miss-someone.com, ultimate-someone.com, someone-firstletterofsomeoneslastname.com, love-someone.com, oh-someone.com, someonenet.com (note the digresy), someoneweb.net …someone-online.com. Of course, there are also .net and .org domains, but you get the idea. If it is a website (duh), why does it need words like online and web? Of course it’s a website and it’s online.

The introduction texts are the same everywhere. It goes like this:

Welcome to domain.com, your newest/biggest/247 online source^[1] for mr/mrs/miss Someone. Here you’ll find all the information about Someone, plus latest pics and videos.

If you’re lucky, such text won’t be written in font with bizzare dropshadow, of ridiculously small size, having its name begin with 04b or, why not, all three of those. Also, if you have not seen it scroll upside down and claim enormous amount of visitors as if there’s never been any differences between hit counters and visito counters, you have not seen anything.

Why is it “my” online source? If it’s online for everyone to see, why is it “mine”? Seriously.

Why are they 247 online sources? Do websites close at night, perhaps? The appropriate answer would be Of course they don’t, silly me, we all have to know when Someone went to pee and make a scandal of how they were actually leading lives of normal people. Duh.

¹ They can also be “online sources of information” and “ultimate sources”, mind that.

In part two, I will be ranting more. The way I’d started, there might be up to five parts to this series, so look out for it!

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