Get­ting CSS rules to work across all browsers is a con­tin­u­ous fight. Thank­fully, there are workarounds and DHTML meth­ods to cor­rect many of these prob­lems, and if those fail, reluc­tantly there are hacks avail­able. Unfor­tu­nately, it seems I’ve run into a dif­fer­ence of opin­ion between the browsers, most likely as a result of the W3 Con­sor­tium fail­ing (yet again) to be explicit with their stan­dards. The prob­lem is the dif­fer­ence between the way Fire­fox and Opera inter­pret the “word-spacing” CSS prop­erty ver­sus the way Safari and IE inter­pret the prop­erty. More specif­i­cally each browser treats the non-breaking space dif­fer­ently. FF/Opera both respect the non-breaking space and Safari/IE both ignore the space. For exam­ple, if the text is “first foo bar last”, FF/Opera would like:

first        foo bar       last

whereas in Safari/IE the text would appear like:

first        foo        bar        last

Per­son­ally, I agree with the FF/Opera devel­op­ers and feel that the non-breaking space should be respected since I’m explic­itly telling the browser that words to either side of the non-breaking space should be treated as a unit. So now I’m going to have to put each phrase in some sort of HTML block and depend on a com­bi­na­tion of padding and mar­gins to accom­plish the same effect in order for it to be cross-browser compatible.

On Ubuntu 8.10, I ran into a bit of prob­lem. The Apache web server was work­ing fine, but the fol­low­ing commands:

sudo apt-get install php5 libapache-mod-php5
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

failed to work after cre­at­ing a phpinfo.php file in the /var/www/ root folder. Fire­fox com­plained, “You have cho­sen to open phpinfo.php which is a: PHP file.” Apache was not using the PHP pre­proces­sor for some rea­son. A bunch of forum posts and blogs said to edit either /etc/apache2/httpd.conf or /etc/apache2/apache2.conf in order to asso­ciate the PHP mime type with the file exten­sion. That wouldn’t work because I had also installed php­myad­min which has an apache.conf file that already has an AddType direc­tive. So, after some dig­ging around, it turns out the mod­ule wasn’t even being loaded, even though that’s what you’d expect the pack­age man­ager to han­dle when you tell it to install the mod­ule. Any how, to fix the prob­lem, just cre­ate sym­bolic links to the php5.load and php5.conf files in the /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/ folder.

sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/php5.load /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/php5.load
sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/php5.conf /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/php5.conf
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Update: Debian-based installs of Apache2 have some handy com­mand line utils for man­ag­ing the web server. So to enable a mod, which auto­mates the above, do this instead:

sudo a2enmod php5

a2dismod is the com­mand for dis­abling a mod. For sites, there is also a2ensite and a2dissite.

As a few users of MyGoogleCal3 have already pointed out, the script no longer works prop­erly. That’s the bad news. The good news is ver­sion 4 does work. In fact, with the lat­est changes Google made to their code, ALL the fea­tures that were bro­ken in 3 appear to be work­ing now—Agenda/Week view, the cal­en­dar nav­i­ga­tion but­tons, and IE is fixed. Please down­load and test out the lat­est ver­sion, and report any bugs in the com­ments and I’ll try to resolve them as time allows.

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Some of the reg­u­lar read­ers of this blog might have noticed that the design has changed. When I orig­i­nally setup this blog, I of course chose one of the many ready-made themes avail­able for Word­Press. I set­tled on WP-Andreas01 and mod­i­fied it for a two-column lay­out, swapped out the header image, and adjusted the col­ors. It was clean, it was light, and it was min­i­mal­ist. Even­tu­ally I grew tired of it and wanted a dark theme, instead. I even­tu­ally set­tled on Never End­ing Dark­ness which again was clean and min­i­mal­ist. In the back of my mind, some­thing both­ered me even after I made the req­ui­site changes to the lay­out, col­ors, and graph­ics. I finally deter­mined that the design was cliché. So if I was to be happy with the design, it would have to be a design of my own mak­ing. This is a post-mortem analy­sis of that design.

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