Accept this invisible bottle of wine as a virtual housewarming gift for your new cyber home. V pretty!

Those who do not give a rat's ass about Web jargon and the specifics of this site's implementation are hereby warned that there's nothing to see in this comment.

Uhh... I seem to recall you carrying on some months ago about being a CSS n00b, but... da-amn. I keep on telling people it's easy, what you've done here is proof of my point.

There are boatloads of people dithering around in WYSIWYG Land, billing hours - and delivering work that's utter crap compared to what you've done here.

However, I need to appeal to your perfectionist nature...

I see a bit of a booger with the navstuff in Firefox (and presumably Mozilla and Opera as well), captured at:

http://www.io.com/persist1/temp/smitten-cap.gif

If you put the vertical padding on #navtop and #navbottom, and the horizontal padding on your list items, the problem should go away.

Also, you've got some extraneous stuff in both your page markup and your stylesheet - if you're wondering how to get at it and fix it, e-mail me.

Thanks for the feedback! I'd had that padding issue when I first showed this on Firefox, I stayed up very late, gave up, and the next morning it was gone. I considered it some sort of early Hanukah miracle. Sigh. I'll email you later.

OMG this is sooo hot.

love it.

cheers,

jocelyn

The new site looks great! You did an amazing job.

The Smitten is officially the New Hotness.

And of course, all links have been updated.

Congrats on your new digs! I know diddly about coding, but it looks great on my Firefox.

Oh! The design is lovely. And you know I'm picky :)

Looks quite nice. You change the drapes since I was here last?

Hi deb, nice digs. :-) And good job indeed on the markup.

I need to point out some more boogers though.

For one, the bottom navigation not only has the pixel boogers, it also wraps. Although that will probably go away once the other booger is wiped, assuming that you picked the width just so it'd fit everything that belongs in there.

That other booger is that a lot of characters look funny here (which includes the copyright mark in the bottom navigation thus causing it to wrap, I assume).

Firefox tells me you want this site to be served as UTF-8, but the server tells it to use ISO-Latin1 instead.

Indeed, if I look at the server's headers, I see

$ curl -I www.thesmitten.com | grep -i charset
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

Unfortunately, the standards say that the browser has to ignore an encoding specified in the document in favour of one specified in the headers. (It really should have been the other way around, but it's way too late to fix those standards now.)

That means you'll need (someone) to fix your server configuration so it either says UTF-8 in the headers (this is preferred) or does not specify an encoding (so the browser would fall back to looking for a definition in the document).

welcome to your new digs! happy site-warming! cheers to you, deb, it looks fabulous!!!!!!

i like that it reminds me of fall, but not in a hit you over the head leaves and trees way. very nice.

Aristotle, dimes to donuts says that MT serves everything as ISO Latin by default... and yeppers, when I dig into MT3 tag documentation, I find:

"MTPublishCharset The value of the PublishCharset setting in mt.cfg; if not set, defaults to iso-8859-1."

For the umpteenth time I'm jealous of myself, that I can just write my own damn software.

I love the new design - and the smitten logo. Absolutely superb. Kudos!

ben, sure, but the pages here are UTF-8. It's just that the server tells clients that the pages are ISO-8859-1, and so anything other than US-ASCII characters is misinterpreted.

...So the fix is either to insert the PublishCharset tag, or change the relevant mt.cfg setting to utf-8, right?

(I looked in the panels for the MT2.6x site I post to, there was nowhere I found to change the setting, dunno if that's been fixed in MT3, or if I just didn't look hard enough. *shrug*)

One of you wants to fix this for me, right?

If the one who set up MT for you in the first place can't do it, then I'll gladly volunteer. Doubt it'd be much effort at all.

congratulations on the finished product, it looks great. to be honest, i check in for your writing more than the look of the site itself, but this is pretty easy on the eyes too! it's great to see hard work pay off :-)

LOVE your site!

ben: no, the problem is not the MT setting. The page is UTF-8, and MT does put the appropriate header in the pages.

The problem is that the server insists that the document is actually Latin1, and since browsers must obey the server headers over the document's content, that means it gets rendered as Latin1.

So there are two options to fix this. The MT setting and the server headers need to coincide, so either Apache would be configured to say the pages are UTF-8, or MT would be configured to produce Latin1 pages. Which way it's done matters little. Serving UTF-8 is preferrable for "ideological" reasons, but I'm not one to scorn pragmatism either.

deb: I'm certainly volunteering, if you want.

Aristotle... oh. I'd misunderstood, mostly because I'm still kinda green about headers and the like.

Hurrah for .htaccess, I guess. (Haven't laid eyes on a Dreamhost control panel in something like two years, so I couldn't say if Deb's got lower-level access to the needed config.

...And I'm with ya on the ideology.

Aw, so pretty! Congrats on your new baby - you must be very proud.