Derek has just announced GUFF: an aggregation service for the blogs of any interested Glasgow University student or alumni. If you fall into that category, or just want some damn fine reading (this site included), head on over to GUFF.
Note: I have it on good authority that the acronym expands to something quite obscene.
The Village suffers in several ways inherent to M. Night Shyamalan’s technique. The cold, distant shots; the abuse of misdirection in his writing (it’s more cunning when you put everything in plain sight, rather than just hint at it); and the trite twists.
Despite this, The Village is fairly good. Well, by fairly good, I mean in perspective of his recent efforts (let’s not discuss Signs). Sure, the main twist is obvious, but the film is still a solid piece of storytelling. While it won’t win any awards (well, it probably has already), it’s reasonably entertaining.
While poor sequels tend to re-use plot devices from their predecessors with a large and obvious wink, The Bourne Supremacy does a much better job of keeping previous plot lines alive while not being cretinous.
The story itself revolves around an assassination and fit-up that bring Jason Bourne back out of hiding. It’s as predictable as most Tom Clancy style books (Robert Ludlum most definitely falls into that category) but with slightly more panache. The fight scenes are slightly clumsier than before, but are reasonably solid.
Here’s to confident sequels and the inevitable sequel, The Bourne Ultimatum.
As you may have noticed (unless you use a feed reader or are reading this some time in the future), I’ve finally gotten round to doing a redesign of Solitude. This, the 4th full design since I started the site, is called Hazy Morning.
It seems like I’m in fine company when it comes to redesigns, given recent or in progress changes by Chris, Matt, Fiona, Jack Mottram, Drew Mclellan, Mozilla et al.
Anyway, onto dissecting the trickier parts of the design.
The header uses standard image replacement techniques and some CSS hacking to produce a full-length clickable region. It was more trick than it should be to get this working cross-platform. Much respect has to go towards the CSS Underscore Hack, the most elegant bug fix for IE that I’ve yet to see. Very nice.
Equally getting the individual post headings to be fully targetable was awkward. The key to getting it to work is to make the surrounding block be set to display: inline; and the heading itself to display: block;, and then set the width of both to 99.9%.
Other than that, it was really a matter of tweaking as much as possible to get it to look alright in IE. It still doesn’t look perfect in that browser but I’ve spent enough time catering to a broken application.
If you see any problems in your browser, leave a comment with details of the bug and your platform, browser and resolution. I’ll be tweaking over the next few days anyway, but it’s good to get feedback.
A few rules that recent CSS work has provided:
Bear them in mind.