A ll the true artists here at Newgrounds are busy doing artisty stuff, and I don’t like to bother them when they’re busy. Rather than sit on my hands and wait for them to become available — only to bog them down with stuff they aren’t excited about — I’ve been parlaying my excitement into a final product of my own. Lately, it’s been the postcard/flyer that we’ll be giving away at Comicon.

It’s mainly busywork, but it does require an attention to detail that I like to think I’m able to provide. From graphic stuff like drawing sunbeams and prepping files to the frustrating task of tracking down artist signatures, I’m putting a lot of time into this thing. Unlike the doll hangtags I mocked up just to fill my time until Stamper could give me his version, I think I’ll retain this one as my creation. I didn’t draw the main artwork but a lot went into this thing. It’s been a while since I did anything remotely creative that didn’t involve HTML, plus I think it’ll look good in my portfolio or whatever.

Too bad it’s super-top-secret or I could post a copy of it here.

W hen I’m not writing CSS for the Newgrounds.com redesign, or goofing off with little things like mailing out stickers and T-shirts or “brainstorming ideas for stuff”, I’m supposed to be just plain writing. When I was hired almost a year ago, Tom mentioned that in addition to writing code one of my job functions would eventually be to manage the print version of the Newgrounds magazine. And while it quickly became apparent that the title of NG.Mag Editor was in the distant future, I knew in the back of my mind that I’d eventually have to dust off my formal writing skills.

Well, this week I took advantage of a recent lull in website coding duties to officially kick off my NG writing career, and wrote my first press release. It took a lot longer than I had hoped but I’m delighted with the result — and more importantly, Tom appears to approve as well. My first draft took two days off and on, but it may have been some of the most organized, straightforward writing I’ve ever done. We brainstormed the outline last week, and I just worked from that to plod through paragraph after paragraph; by the time I reached the last line it only required a few edits to make it presentable. Five or six Tom-edits later and it was pretty much a done deal unless we think of something else we’d like to announce.

F inally, I took the time to work out the kinks for Internet Explorer — not only version 6 but the IE7 beta, too. It took a few minutes to familiarize myself with the style sheet again but after that it was smooth sailing.

It really wasn’t even that hard. Since the layout wasn’t too complicated and the patches I had to put in place for the lesser browsers were technically valid, I decided to take it a step further and see what happened when I changed the doctype to “XHTML 1.0 Strict”.

It surprised me to see that there were only six small errors necessitating “Transitional” status. Once I deleted the two unnecessary <br clear=”left” /> tags and added a <div> around my search form elements, that was it.

So there you have it, a site coded in strictly valid XHTML along with its valid CSS counterparts yet still renders in every major browser. Except for the search results which I have yet to style, I can almost put the design of this part of my site behind me.

I ’ve been lazy about “fixing” the site for Internet Explorer (fixing as in neutering my beautiful style sheets, not correcting a wrong), but I do think that everyone should be able to see like the rest of us do. Sometime soon I’ll put an hour or so into it though it shouldn’t take nearly that long.

This month will probably be the last chance I have to work on my site (for reasons I’ll expound upon later), and though I don’t want to ease up on the workouts too much I really should use most of my time after work to put the bulk of my site to bed. I figure on spending a week on the About page, and a few days revisiting the photo section design could go a long way towards accessibility. Until I can look into other ways of the albums, I can at least ensure the page loads on 800x600 resolution screens and give it a bluer, bolder look.

W elcome to my newly-redesigned blog. It’s coded in valid XHTML and the CSS, while in need of a little cleaning up, is compliant as well.

As of this writing, my new blog looks as I intended in standards-compliant browsers such as Firefox, and with the exception of an error on my sister’s laptop that I can’t replicate, the site views cleanly (as far as I can tell) in Safari and Opera as well. I still have not debugged for Internet Explorer, so if you’re currently viewing websites in any version of IE I suggest you do yourself a favor and head to mozilla.com to download a real browser.

I still haven’t gotten to everything on my list, however at this point it’ll make my life easier if I don’t have to continuously worry whether I’m viewing the right page when I refresh to see the latest tweak or edit. The remaining minor changes indude the RSS feeds, HR tag replacement image, and that pesky yet necessary IE-debugging. The final major piece to the puzzle — the archive template — has already been designed and requires only one or two more hours to implement. I think I’ll take a break until Sunday before finishing that off.

While I’m ashamed of how long it took, I’m pleased with the result. And while I won’t be going out of my way to present employers with my latest ramblings, I can once again use my email address without being ashamed of my ugly, clunky, blog built from an old table-based Blogger template. Next stop: The About Page.