I spent nearly three hours working on the CSS issue on the Mac browsers and got them fixed. I was going to flesh out the rest of the site but felt it more important to fix this nagging eye strain instead. Guess I lied to you, Bob.

I tell you, the fix for category icons was an amazing feat of frustration. Once I had it figured out in IE (Windows) it was totally messed up (worse then before) in Firefox (all platforms.) So I worked on the Firefox (all platforms) fix and then the Windows one fell into mold, too.

I tell you, to get those icons to show up on the same “line” as the title and post details was like a major pain. CSS kept wanting to move it down on it’s own line. I finally gave up on the float and went with absolute positioning. That worked…until I had more then one icon. CSS pros know that they just ended up stacking on top of each other. So, I thought outside of the box and added another one. A box. I put that box as the absolute position and then the icons box inside that and BINGO it worked.

So now that’s done, I need to fix the lame roll-over link issue in the TOC. For some reason, the visited link is white and should be the blue. It’s not obeying the CSS command. I guess that’s my next three hours to burn but only after the rest of the site is fleshed. The v.link thing isn’t that big of a deal.

Now I’ve never been to Chicago, but man, today it felt like I lived in it. The wind was kickin’ as high as 40 MPH and blowing everything from flags off of poles to tumble weed over the freeway. On the way home, I saw our main strip into our neighborhood dotted with tumble weed through out, causing drivers to dart around them as if they were in the military and on maneuvers. I had to go home and get my camera and come back to snap some photos of the troops in action.

I also went hunting for tumble weed to bring back up for our backyard. Ouch, they’ve got might sharp thorns on them! Mind you not, though, I found one big enough that it happily filled up the cargo area of our Yukon. The kids loved it and when I threw on the icing on the cake — driving like a mad man in a big, BIG, mud puddle — they laughed uncontrollably as Katelyn gleefully shouted, “Look at all the mud on my window!” That’s my girl.

Hey, just checked svenontech.com and it resolves. Guess registering your domain at 12:01 a.m. does show up the same day. There may be ISP’s that still don’t have the new domain name in its servers, so if you get a 404, wait a day or just keep using svenrox.com. Only problem is if you click on the comment links, it’ll resolve to the new domain. But I figure if Comcast is resolving already, the majority of the other ISP’s should be, too.

BTW, I keep typing svenrontech.com which of course has been causing me problems. Don’t do the same.

Wow, I almost think this is an event in itself with all the fire works going off outside my window tonight. Yes, it’s New Years Day and as promised, here is SvenOnTech. I spent all night preparing and tweaking code to get this out. I didn’t exactly make 12:00 a.m., but it was like 12:10 when the site did go live. Not bad while everyone else is out celebrating 2006.

As you can see, I have a LOT to do. All the sub-sections, except Reviews, has to be done. I hope to have them done by Tuesday. There’s really not much to do for them, so it shouldn’t take too long. I also have to “hide” away Svenrox. Oh ya, I have to redo the error pages, too. Got to write that down.

I figured out most of the IE problems except that big gap between the header and TOC. It’s quite annoying but I hope to fix that soon, too. I haven’t even looked on my Mac at this yet, but I developed most of it in Firefox. So it should be fine on the Mac.

Lastly, I hope svenontech.com will start resolving by tomorrow night. When that happens, I’ll change the DNS to forward from svenrox.com to svenontech.com. You are on your last days at the svenrox.com domain. Hope it doesn’t trash my Google catalog.

Okay, it’s almost 1:00 a.m. and I’m tired. Got to go to church and see my new nephew tomorrow today. G’night!

I’ve been spending parts of the day getting SvenOnTech all diced up and pieced into code and the CSS is giving me headaches. Actually, Internet Explorer is. While Firefox is giving me one headache (the footer won’t clear to the bottom of the page,) IE is giving me several. While Firefox respectfully listens to the colors of my links in the table of contents, IE thinks it’ll just ignore that class and use the standard call for links.

Speaking of the table of contents, the bar in which it’s in has a one pixel white line through it. It was a CSS box but IE put this huge white-space in it. I figured it was the fact that the DIV tags weren’t all scrunched up together as is a common bug for IE so I just added a clear image instead. Still, the same problem. Ugh. At this point, I have no idea why it’s doing this. Stupid IE.

I also was having issues with the Archives box which hangs off the TOC bar. Since time is running out, I’ll have to introduce that later. It’s now in the comment stream of PHP.

I want to make this site fully CSS and very limited in images. I want a quick download of the page as Svenrox is just full with complex tables and images all over the place. My preliminary tests of the new site shows that it does download a lot faster. That’s good. But I still have lots to do. The site isn’t going to be fully functional by tomorrow, but my hopes is at least the main part of it will be. And hey, it’s New Years, so give a guy a break.

Boy! Jeremiah was born at 9:51 a.m. this morning. Mommy is tired but elated to be holding her new baby boy in her arms at last! Daddy is tired but happy to see his boy out from within the womb. He’s also happy to know that the Chargers game is nationally televised. Wow, two great things for daddy today!

I’ll pass on weights and measurements as soon as I get ‘em — getting them now! He weighs 8.9 pounds and is 21 inches in length!

Sean and Daniela thank everyone for their encouragement, thoughts, and prayers. They respectfully ask that you refrain from calling or visiting them until at least next year as they are very tired and need their rest.

Congratulations to the new mommy and daddy! Happy New Year!

I just finalized the proof for the look-n-feel of SvenOnTech. I’ll give you some hints. The colors will be purple (woo hoo, I get my favorite color back into my site!), green, and some highlight of orange. You know, I’ve got to keep some aspect of Svenrox in it. Speaking of that, the logo will be the most similar thing of SvenOnTech to Svenrox as it has changed very little. But what has changed puts the logo right on mark to what that site’s about. I’ve also got the slogan done, too. But you’ll have to wait for that.

I hope I can cut this up and slap it out on my test server tomorrow and then fineness it Saturday. If all goes well, I’ll be able to flip the switch Sunday on the look-and-feel. I’ll also register the domain then, too, but it’ll be a day or two before anything resolves to it.

So here I am, past mid-night and I still have a cold trying to get my site all done in time for the new year. Silly me.

Can you believe it? This is my 6,000th post! Who would have thought nearly four years ago when I made my first post that I would be getting over a 1,000 unique visitors a day and close to a million hits a month? Looks like my geekness has turned my blog into a serious place for others to come and gleen from. You know, maybe in the next year or so, SvenOnTech will become as well known as Gizmado or Engadget. With my writing on Lockergnome and MyPalmLife, it’s possible.

Thank you for making Svenrox, soon to be SvenOnTech, so popular and I hope to continue making this site worth visiting for even more readers.

Looks like the majority of people like SvenOnTech.com. So I think I’m going to go with it. I’ll probably register it January 1st to usher in the new year but don’t know if I can get a matching site in time for it.

I’ll be dumping some parts of the current Svenrox site such as the phatlinx (they might come back later in some other form) as well as the roxfamily tab, obviously. I still am debating about the digipix as that makes it easy for friends and family to find since they only have to come to my site and then click the tab. I might just move it over to RaffertyFamily.com and that might take care of that aspect. In fact, I may make it a sub-domain (pictures.raffertyfamily.com) and dump the digipix name all together.

I will leave my testimony up, though. It’s an important part of who I am and an important part of what makes me and since me is this site, I think it’s valuable. I’ll also have to update the About but that’s always a work in progress anyway.

I’ll try to keep a hidden link to the Svenrox site so you can see it as it was. In fact, it’ll be a fully functional site with the new content and all as it’ll pull from the same database. I think it’ll be cool to have it still here, just like 1.1 is still here if you look hard enough. I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to pull it off (I hope.)

Okay, so there you have it. We’re about a week away from having SvenOnTech.com being official. I hope that next week the site will be up, too, but if not, it’ll be soon enough. Maybe I can do it on the plane to and fro for CES.

With little sleep, we all tiredly started off our morning before the sun was fully up and opened some gifts before going to church. I got an iTMS gift certificate from Katelyn. It was such a surprise.

See, the story behind it is that I was in Staple with Katelyn and Joshua last week and I pointed it out to Katelyn that that’s what daddy liked. She asked if she could call mommy on my phone. I called mommy and she talked to her out of ears shot. She then handed me the phone and Liz told me to buy it, but to “forget you bought it!” Katelyn kept telling me to forget that I bought it I promised her that I would. It was just too cute! So today, I “remembered” and got it.

We’re now waiting on Liz’s side of the family to arrive to start Phase II of Christmas Day.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Originally posted on The Dad’s Group