biting kneecaps

In the past year, my job has changed drastically: from a bored Linux admin (even with a half dozen servers and a few thousand customers, really, my job was mostly boring...) to a Linux admin, webmaster for 5 sites (3 of which are very dynamic, getting a large number of page views per day) running Tikiwiki on one for a company intranet site and Drupal for the others.

Three of the Drupal sites are pretty tweaked in layout, but really just boring news sites. Bonus features are hacking the ad module to handle FLV ads, support for FLVs to be attached to items, and some fun layout and styling stuff, which is still pretty simple with Drupal and theming "views". This was all done in less than 3 months with really only me doing code and a cow-orker doing much of the basic layout and flow, and it replaced a project that costs tens of thousands in software alone, plus 7 servers and 3 fulltime employees for a year... and still didn't work.

The Tikiwiki site is mostly a stock Tikiwiki with some fun trackers for things like vacation requests... and an especially cool Jabber IM server which has been really useful... but it is pretty much something I ignore now, which is too bad, since I actually really enjoy Tikiwiki despite some annoyances.

And this month's fun is Yet Another Drupal site... but instead of having thousands of stories and different ways to show them, there are only a couple dozen pages (right now), but the layout is the important thing, with odd sized blocks overlaying each other, and precisely positioned.

Which is why I hate HTML and CSS, and especially IE. Stupid Microsoft ignoring standards and making it difficult to design for their browser. ("Hey, why is that box 40 pixels too low? It works fine in Firefox, Opera, Safari and Konqueror... oh wait, IE sucks.. that's why.")

My employer has saved a small fortune, in the order of tens of thousands of dollars a year by moving from a broken proprietary system to Free Software. And I still have my 12 year old waiver that any code I write or modify, I can release as GPL, so I can submit patches to Tikiwiki (yay!) written on company time... (simple logic: if I submit a bug fix or feature it stays fixed on future updates so I don't have to keep redoing the same work.)

Would be nice if I got a cut of the money saved, though.

But now back to figuring out why IE decided to move some boxes down, and why it is ignoring my z-index and stacking the boxes wrong.

(But, yes, that is why I am so quiet... and why this page is so neglected...)