Gentle readers, important things are happening this week. At the risk of telling you something you may have heard before - in only four days, on May 1st, ten countries will become members of a European Union that will hopefully not just become larger, but better (alright, over time). Only fifteen years ago, predicting such a development would have been considered hallucinary - and rightly so. So much for lacking European dynamism.
Reflecting this important development, afoe is welcoming the new EU cititzens with a new and improved design. I know - de gustibus non est disputandum - but we like it and hope so will you. By the way, the random banner images already include some pictures from the new member states - we are forestalling a little. Please note that we are now showing abstracts of the three most recent posts from our partner site Living in Europe.net in the sidebar, right under the ‘quicklinks’.
The design has been tested on a good deal of OS/browser combinations. But there will always be the one combination that will not produce results at least close to the visual effect that we have in mind. So please let us know if you are experiencing any difficulties while reading a Fistful of Euros.
Update: Thank you for your comments! I would be great if Safari 1.x as well as IE 5.2.x users could tell us if the remaining display problems have been solved. Thanks in advance!
Feed: A Fistful of Euros
April 27th, 2004 at 5:24 am
The new site looks great and I can personally vouch that it works fine on Firefox, unlike blogs on some services. Curse you, Pyra!
April 27th, 2004 at 6:16 am
Looks great — but doesn’t display quite right on Safari (mac os x.3)
April 27th, 2004 at 9:06 am
Way cool. The Solaris/Mozilla bug is gone to. There were a lot of problems with textarea boxes on my system, but it looks like they’ve disappeared.
April 27th, 2004 at 10:31 am
I got garbage the first time (WinXP/Netscape 7.0), but I reloaded the page and it was ok. I occasionally get garbage from Blogspot blogs too.
April 27th, 2004 at 10:58 am
af?? Hmm, not quite sure I like how that sounds.
April 27th, 2004 at 12:18 pm
Mac OSX 10.3 with Explorer 5.2.3
Everything’s appearing in one column: i.e. the “worth a look” down to “powered by” box /above/ the blog entries. Also, it’s over-running the top banner.
Otherwise, looks nice.
April 27th, 2004 at 12:34 pm
But why, Mr Keh??
April 27th, 2004 at 2:25 pm
Tobias, the links to authors’s sites and posts seems not to have survived the reformatting. Are we to be an anonymous anarcho-syndicalist commune now? (Not that there’s anything wrong with that….)
April 27th, 2004 at 2:31 pm
I dunno, Mrs T, what do you think about strange women lying in ponds distributing swords as the basis for a system of government?
April 27th, 2004 at 3:06 pm
Doug; Dunno. Maybe because the closest English phoneme to ?/?/oe is a South of England -er, and whenever I say that in English I feel affected, a bit of a twat. (I’m from Ireland, and have no problem with actual English people pronouncing it in context, but I’d probably snigger at an otherwise Irish-accented person doing it.)
As to the spelling my surname; it doesn’t reflect how the word is pronounced, and never has. I’m seriously considering moving to the _leagan Gaeilge_ to intimidate people out of trying to pronounce it.
April 27th, 2004 at 5:00 pm
Just had a look at the Mac OS situation. Seems to work absolutely fine except in IE 5.2.x and Safari 1.0 (with different bugs). This is a little strange - the only structural change in the markup is the additional float containing the drop down menu - and both Safari and IE 5.2 seem to read the “clear” for the top float (albeight with messed up positioning in the latter case). Below the clear nothing in the markup has changed, so I am a little surprised that they seem to wrap the right column below the left one.
I’ll see what I can do.
April 27th, 2004 at 5:01 pm
Mrs T.,
for the author links and posts to all afoe posts click on A Fistful of Euros in the drop down menu.
April 27th, 2004 at 5:33 pm
I like the randomised picture changer on top!
April 27th, 2004 at 7:34 pm
Groovy random images. Is it a quiz? Can anyone play? Are there prizes for those correctly identifying the location of all images?
More seriously, any chance of a list of captions for those of us more geographically-challenged than most?
Thanks. Keep up the good work.
April 28th, 2004 at 8:58 am
Aidan, actually, I grew up with a number of Kehoes (Danny and Jimmy and…), so I know how it’s pronounced, at least in south Louisiana. Umlaut looks cool, though, so if you ever find yourself in a heavy metal band, you’ll know what to do, right?
“Af?” sounds like someone should say “Gesundheit” afterward. (Oddly enough, “Gesundheit” is exactly what all of my Scotch-Irish, ex-dirt-farmer ancestors said when somebody sneezed. Don’t have the faintest idea where that odd bit of German came from.)
April 28th, 2004 at 9:08 am
works on Safari now — and damn, it looks fantastic!
April 28th, 2004 at 11:09 am
Thank you for your comments! I would be great if Safari 1.x as well as IE 5.2.x users could tell us if the remaining display problems have been solved. Ah, you’re great anyway, Tobias. (Obligatory design nerdage: Maybe the menus at the top should drop down on hover, or have a title= attribute to indicate that the page won’t reload if you do click?)Doug: cool. Though if I was going to change my name for Reasons Of Fame And General Rock Excellence, it would probably be to Kjoː
April 28th, 2004 at 1:07 pm
The first couple of days were kind of shakey with Safari but it looks beautiful now - all is fixed. Great work!
April 28th, 2004 at 3:50 pm
I’ll see what I can do.
That’s fixed it. Thanks.
April 30th, 2004 at 12:40 pm
Bit late - but works great on my primitive Netscape 5 and Windows 2000.
May 1st, 2004 at 3:55 am
I use Firefox. Maybe it’s something about the way I’ve configured it, but the rollover menus don’t show up at all. (I only know they’re there because I couldn’t believe the Archive button didn’t lead anywhere, so I opened the site in IE).
May 1st, 2004 at 7:46 pm
cf,
I’d say this is due to your configuration as I am using firefox and it works just fine.
May 2nd, 2004 at 9:45 pm
Having been forced to take responsibility for the problem, I reinstalled tabbrowser extensions and voila, everything works. Thanks!
May 3rd, 2004 at 1:30 am
Random banner images, a cunning plan to increase your visitor numbers by making everyone bash refresh 15 times to look through them?