position: relative;

So last night I ran that ClearType tuner I mentioned, on the Microsoft site. It turns on ClearType and runs you through a few text samples to supposedly get ClearType to a point that it works well for you. Didn’t work for me – I turned it back off, and everything looks fine. This is on a Samsung Syncmaster flat panel monitor – where ClearType was intended to work best.

This morning I’m checking my mail (in Thunderbird, not Outlook) and all of it is washed out and blurry. Was something wrong with my eyes?

Nope. After right-clicking on the desktop to check properties, I found that the ClearType tuner on the Microsoft site had apparently talked to XP Pro and turned on ClearType for all my screen fonts too.

Talk about Big Brother. I can’t stand sneaky things like this – ClearType had never been enabled on my machine and Microsoft decides that now I must want it because I check out an online tuning page for IE7. That doesn’t follow.

See what I mean by looking at this image of my email with and without ClearType.

If your screen fonts are blurry, try right-clicking on the desktop, go to Properties > Appearance and then Effects. Change ClearType to Standard font smoothing and see what happens (remember to click Apply in the Appearance screen).

Today I was putting the finishing touches on a client’s site built in X-Cart. All was looking pretty on Firefox, but side-by-side I noticed that all my fonts were looking a bit fuzzed out in IE7.

Confounded, I did a search and discovered that this is not a bug – it’s a ‘feature.’ A feature of IE7 called ClearType that’s automatically on in the browser.

I turned it off (do that by going to Tools > Options > Advanced and scrolling about halfway down to ‘Always use ClearType for HTML.’ Uncheck that box). And now everything looks great.

Now this may just be me (although I’m seeing a lot of unhappy posts about this subject) and I read that ClearType was intended to make things easier to read on LCD monitors. I’m using one, and it definitely doesn’t work for me.

However, my problem is that it’s on by default. Why not offer a choice? Why force users to accept a new feature without letting them know what it is and what it’s doing to the websites they visit?

I see that there’s a tuner you can use to configure ClearType for specific monitors and/or users. But do you think that the average web user knows this or even suspects it exists?

I found a neat article today on Colourlovers.com‘s site – a nice extensive set of color palettes taken from the art of da Vinci, Monet, Matisse, van Gogh and many more. This is fun because a lot of the commenters posted their own palettes.

Today is the second day I’ve sat down and worked on the layout for my new business website. This is, without a doubt, the trickiest layout I’ve ever done. Which is a good thing…

Today I found this super-handy little hack (it’s a hack, I know, and ordinarily I wouldn’t use this but for now I’m going to because it works perfectly and I’m not sure about using the Microsoft expressions for IE lt 7…). This is from Dustin Diaz:

selector {
min-height:500px;
height:auto !important;
height:500px;
}

Sweet and simple. And it works with min-width too.

I was looking for scripts for compact, on-page image galleries this morning and came across this great post on scripts for galleries and slideshows. Mostly I’m looking for a CSS version and there are a number of really good-looking ones here. I need something for a new photography client, but I’ll also want to use one of these for my web portfolio maybe on my new site.

Got a link today from Good Experience to this neat little video about the breakup of a consumer/advertiser couple.

I’d been using Marketleap‘s link checking tool for a while, but today began using Yahoo’s query terms because they allow the user to remove internal links from the results.

Here’s what you do:

1. To check the full number of links to a domain use this:

linkdomain:www.mysite.com

2. To do the same but without including backlinks:

linkdomain:www.mysite.com –site:mysite.com

3. To check backlinks to a specific page:

link:http://www.mysite.com/subpage.html

4. And to do the same without including those internal links:

link:http://www.mysite.com/subpage.html -site.mysite.com

Nifty to know for a quick check.

I haven’t posted in several days – my spare time has been thoroughly occupied with building a new web site for my web design business. I’m changing my look completely and have a new logo that fits my business much better…

I’m having a few issues with the CSS on my prototype site, though, frustrating… The first is that my Faux Columns (which I use all the time) aren’t working. I think I have an error but can’t locate it, so I’m probably going to wind up tearing it down to nothing and working back up to include all the elements. I don’t mind this, but I wish I didn’t have to do it.

Also, I got the footer to stick to the bottom of the screen, but because the Faux Columns aren’t working the main content area appears to end before it reaches the footer. I’m hoping that fixing the first issue will help get the second one under control.

Other than these problems, the site looks great, IMO. I’m very excited to get it up and running – my target launch date is August 1.