So I discovered the other day that it is possible to make transparent favicons. Favicons are a good idea. Transparent favicons are just awesome.

Here’s a screenshot of my site in a Firefox tab with my original favicon:

As you can see, it looks fine in the location bar, but you can see the white square of the favicon on the tabs (especially when a tab is not selected). Here’s the new version:

Much better! Want to know how to do it?

Go here. I was going to try to explain it, but his step-by-step is really the best way to go about it. Let’s see what you can come up with!

Well, as I was telling Eric, I’ve officially moved. Sunny Bloomington, Indiana is the city I now call home. Emily and I have mostly finished putting everything away and moving around our furniture (you really don’t realize how much stuff you have until you have to move everything…), and now all that’s left is hanging pictures and organizing shelves. Last week was a crazy, stressful one, but now I finally feel kind of settled in. Emily started orientation today at IU, and I’ve been purposely trying to get lost in order to explore the city.

One unfortunate byproduct of the move was that it made me miss the Cleveland Area Web Standards Meet-Up that was last week. I was hoping to make it, since I’m not sure when the next one I’ll be able to attend is, seeing as though I’m now a good six hours away. I heard it was a good meetup though, and hopefully they’ll only get better. Everyone’s been doing a great job (especially Joseph James Frantz for organizing the whole deal), and it’s just a very positive thing overall.

Speaking of Meetup groups, there aren’t any like-minded meetups in the Bloomington/Indianapolis area, so as of today:

We’ll see what happens, but I’m excited.

Back from the trip. It was wonderful. Some catch-up news:

Inspired by Brad and some whisperings in the back of my head, I made a few modifications to the layout of the site. Got rid of the welcome page (I’m not sure what I was thinking; I hate welcome pages with no content…), tossed the big buttons, and changed the header at the top to something more…pleasant. I also added headers for each main section.

For the headers, I really wanted to use transparent PNGs, so that I wouldn’t have to change all of them if I ever changed the background color. The problem with these is that IE 6 doesn’t support them (surprise!). Unfourtunately, a decent amount of people still use IE6, so I can’t just ignore it. Once again, Google saved the day. I found an awesome little tool that goes through and fixes them. You don’t have to change anything in the HTML, and you choose which images it changes using normal CSS selectors. In conjunction with a little conditional comment magic, you can even keep it from messing up your stylesheets (and keep them valid!). As far as I can tell, it works on everything except tiled images and links. Booya!

Another happy suprise on getting home was that my Moo.com MiniCards arrived. They look great, feel great, and at twenty bucks for a hundred, how can you miss?

Emily (pictured) and I are leaving this evening for our annual trip to Cape Cod. We’ll be gone for a whole glorious week, hanging out on the beach and drinking beers. I can already smell the ocean. See everyone in a week!

I came across a post (via Daring Fireball) by Joel Spolsky regarding comments below blog posts. While I think that he sort of misrepresented Dave Winer’s post about blogs (Dave’s post was about what it means to be a blog, and the fact that having comments don’t make a blog), Joel does bring up some interesting points about comments:

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Judging is underway for the latest CSSOFF contest, so, as promised, here’s my entry, and here’s the jpeg of the initial file we got. As I said before, I’m pretty happy with the results. Here are my thoughts on this entry.

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