I hate IE. I used to like it and then I discovered Firefox. And then I discovered how pretty sites can look, decided to learn CSS and convert my volunteer sites over to that nice clean look without all the table kludge which I have always hated.

While my band website was waiting for inspiration, I finally decided to take the design I had and restyle it using CSS, pending some flash of incredible genius for graphic changes, etc. After reading some really, really useful and great books, I settled down in front of the computer for this entire weekend, and actually came up with a site that looks really nice, all CSS with a few Javascript tweaks to fix IE’s pickiness and insert a scroller on the side. My only regret is losing my little Flash intro that I put together last year — I figured that since the music was from the 2004 drumline it was time to retire it and come up with some new bells, drums, and whistles. Well, it’ll look nice in Firefox, anyway.

Service Pack 2 messed up the standard IE tweak scripts, and it took me forever to find something to fix them and even now they’re not right. grrrrr. IE browsers will become frustrated because my drop-down menus only hover to the second menu entry and then stall. And after about 48 hours of getting the styles done and tweaked and beginning to update and move content, I’m about ready to SCREAM. I HATE IE! I HATE IT! If I weren’t so tired, I’d be stomping my feet.

This site is out of control anyway — this is the beginning of my third year maintaining it, and being the packrat that I am, I don’t archive much. Sort of like our house and our lives…little snippets of magic times all piled into a box to review whenever we please.

I expect I’ll be at this for a few more days, but I sure do appreciate the resources that are on the web and in print. Without them I’d just have a ho-hum home-stitched site, but they’ve really been indispensable for making it look more polished. I can at least say that I know much, much more tonight than I did on Friday just through the experience of doing this, which was my goal when I started. I’m also beginning to hate typing with upper and lower case — after writing all the CSS and XHTML and having to remember to keep everything lower case, it’s actually effort to go back to “the proper way”.

The books I like the best are Charles Wyke-Smith’s “Stylin’ with CSS”, Eric Meyer’s “Eric Meyer on CSS” and “More Eric Meyer on CSS” and of course, “The CSS Zen Garden“.

Even though I’m ticked off at Microsoft for their quirky browser, I do feel victorious, because it is very difficult to stay focused on something for this long and actually deal with the details. With this type of coding, I’m forced to look at each and every detail pixel by pixel, section by section and figure it out. For someone with an attention deficit, that can be a real exercise, but I credit the great book resources I had for making it tolerable and in the case of the Firefox result, actually rewarding!