minning.de VI

It’s been more than two years since the last major revi­sion to minning.de. To coin­cide with the upcom­ing release of a new ver­sion of Nor­mal­ity I thought it would be a good idea to finally push through with the new design that’s been cook­ing for almost ten months.

Word­Press remains my CMS of choice and I am very happy with the lat­est ver­sion. I was con­sid­er­ing both Dru­pal and TYPO­light, but WP does every­thing I need and does it well.
My new design also makes heavy use of jQuery, which I am using to spruce up the site with some neat effects and also to sig­nif­i­cantly cut down on load­ing times through the use of AJAX; accord­ing to my tests, this iter­a­tion of minning.de is fastest I’ve ever devel­oped, even though it is by far the most com­plex per­sonal web­site I’ve worked on.

And thanks to web browser’s increased stan­dards com­pli­ance devel­op­ing this site was rel­a­tively pain­less and at times an actu­ally enjoy­able process. Fire­fox and Safari pretty much ren­der the way one expects them to.

At this point I’d also like to send out a really big F***YOU to Microsoft’s Inter­net Explorer.
From the get go I decided not to make any effort what­so­ever to sup­port IE6. Lit­tle did I know that IE7 would require per­sonal atten­tion as well.
It’s almost like Microsoft is inten­tion­ally try­ing to screw web devel­op­ers: They have accu­mu­lated nearly a hand­ful incom­pat­i­ble ver­sions that each require indi­vid­ual hacks and to top it off, you can’t install them at the same time to test your site – brilliant!