When I look at my data through the Web interface, the most peculiar data is displayed. I’ve been to update my birthday to January, 1961. However, what I’m seeing is December, 31st 1969. Sometimes my age is correctly displayed as 45, then again as 36.

Then I’ve been trying to update my avatar to something else. Again, the same unpredictable result. With each browser reload, I’m seeing something different. This is all very annoying.

Somehow I think, this fits with the uglified user interface of the Windows client due to much advertisement. I’m getting a much more solid feeling from Google Talk.

Anyway, I’m still running the September, 2001 version of TWiki with some local design modifications. Since I have redesigned my departments website, I thought, it was time for an Twiki refresh as well. A release candidate for version 4.0 was announced recently on freshmeat, so I gave this version a try. And I must say, that I’m very probably going to switch to Drupal. I found TWiki’s customization layer not very user friendly and somewhat hard to understand. There are so many files with so many TMPL definition. In the end I might not have tried hard enough to understand it all, but it sure looks intimidating. Drupal on the other hand was very easy to understand, one template file styled with CSS. To have a little more flexibility, I installed the PHPtemplate engine and after about a hour I had a basic working design implementation even though I never have programmed one line in PHP. With the installed Markdown module, text input for any user will be just as easy as with a Wiki.

So, I guess, Drupal will be it in the end.

I’ve haven’t been doing serious Web design and programming for more than a year. Since my company implemented a new corporate internal design sometime in 2005 for the Intranet and since my departments web appearance needed a face lift according to that design, I decided to plunge in and rediscover some old knowledge.

However, in the end I wasn’t prepared for shit, that come downhill. The Intranet design is implemented pretty 1999ish with tons of tables (somewhere I read, that some of the MS Visual .NET tools might be responsible for the bad code). Articles likes this and this come to mind, when you look at the source code. Having read stylin’ with CSS and Eric Meyer On CSS and More Eric Meyer on CSS I thought, that I was sufficiently prepared to recreate something in pure CSS, which looks just a good.

Well, in the end I think, I was sufficiently prepared as long as Firefox was concerned. I wasn’t prepared for the pile of shit IE really is. I now know more about IE misbehavior and the workarounds, then I ever wanted to know. Without position is everything I would have been completely lost. Even more depressing is the fact, that some of the workarounds won’t be working any more, when IE7 comes along. Still, I’m pretty happy with the final visual and source code outcome (without a table), even if I couldn’t reach 100% identity.

This whole project also gave me the occasion to refresh my Cocoon knowledge since I did the original implementation completely in XML. And I worked pretty intensively with Eclipse.

The Tabbrowser Preferences 1.2.2 however appears to not work any more. This probably has something to do with the new preferences dialog, which was introduced with 1.0.2. And finding the Mozex 1.07a extension, which is modified from the original to allow the installation into recent firefox version, took a bit of searching. Otherwise everything is now working again.

Update: That was, before I switched to the WordPress Default Kubrick theme.