And neglecting almost everything jewellery-related, unfortunately - although I have managed to catch up with things a little bit today.

What has been devouring my life over the last little while (and for much of this year, to be honest!) has been a very major web upgrade project I’ve been undertaking for St James Ethics Centre (which, despite its name, is not a religious organisation - although it is a non-profit).

Currently I’m working around the clock to get an interim version of the new site ready to go live - hopefully by the end of this week.

The interim website will feature none of the (rather amazingly good!) functionality that is to come - new forums, blogs, a wiki, a proper user accounts system and much more - but it will feature the new visual design and site organisation. And it will allow me to get back to doing my regular work (and hours!) while my friend the programmer (Hi Colin!) gets on with his part of the slaving away.

The interim version of the site upgrade was supposed to be a quick thing to do as the rest of the project has taken much longer than we’d hoped (as is always the way with these things!), however, even this has proven to be a very time-consuming task.

So I’ve spent much of the last couple of weeks wading through hundreds of pages to ensure the new formatting is correct, fixing any errors, doing some editing of content and writing new content.

I’m exhausted! And I’m very much missing my workbench and tools. However I do hope to get back to them soon.

But until then the only handmade thing I have to share with you is a very sneak preview of the new site design. Note that very few - if any - of the links will work at this point - and that in a week or so this interim link will most likely no longer function!

You can visit the creakingly old version of the website for a comparison (which I also designed and built, but several years ago when the organisation had a vastly smaller site and when web standards were only talked about by people who insisted that all links should be in blue and underlined … and we hate those people).

Edit: I’ve changed the links in this post as the new site is now live!

I went into the Etsy Treasury for a quick poke around this evening, with the intention of soon after knuckling down to work.

But there was this empty list looking pleadingly at me. Normally they get snapped up so quickly and I thought that if I just ignored it then it would surely just disappear.

But no … and I found I could not resist its charms!

So I now have a shiny new Treasury list called Silver which will be in existence for the next 48 hours. It’s a collection of work by members from the lovely Etsy Metal street team, of which I am also a member.

Go there now to click and comment!

I was recently rather chuffed to discover that Di Overton had featured some of my handmade jewellery along with some lovely feedback on her great design blog, Designers’ Block.

Di is the former owner of wheredidyoubuythat.com and is also a guest blogger on the wonderful ThisNext.com, which is also highly recommended if you’ve not been there yet.

Yes, it’s finally on its way to the exhibition venue after much hard work. Since I last wrote about the piece I think I’ve entirely redone the finish about three times. And finally the last time was successful enough that I could coax myself to leave it alone.

The difficulty was in trying to leave the exterior with a dull, muted and worn-looking finish, while making the interior bright and shiny - which was made all the more difficult by the fact that the only openings for the box are through the small cut out windows, which don’t exactly facilitate doing any work with hand tools or even my fingers!

However, with the aid of much glad wrap, electrical tape, my trusty homemade tumbler (thanks Dad!) and a bucketload of patience, it was finally done. And today it was packed up and posted off to Metalab in Surry Hills, Sydney - after a few final photographs to try to capture the end result.

There’s no absolute guarantee that my piece will be included in the show at this point, but I’m fairly hopeful it will be.

If you’re in Sydney, the show - Expeditions - opens on the evening of 2 November 2006 (6-8pm) at Metalab, 10b Fitzroy Place, Surry Hills. It closes on 25 November, with Metalab being open from 11am to 6pm Tuesday to Saturday. You can also attend a ‘high tea’ on 4 November.

I put my Christmas pudding coins/tokens/charms up in my Etsy shop yesterday and thought I’d post here to let people know. So now you can go Christmas pudding coin shopping!

If you’ve been paying attention (as I’m sure you have!), you will know that I’ve been working towards creating sets of pure silver Christmas pudding tokens - and finally I’m ready to go. I plan to put the tokens into my Etsy shop tomorrow.

If you’re not familiar with Christmas pudding coins (because you’ve not been paying attention afterall!), the idea is that they are mixed into a traditional plum pudding (yes, the pudding that actually has no plums in it) and whoever finds one or more in their piece of pudding on Christmas Day has good luck for the forthcoming year. You can learn more about Christmas puddings, coins, charms and other such traditions right here.

The tradition has been increasingly difficult to keep alive since silver ceased being used for coins and the base metals now used were deemed unsafe to cook with. So I’ve decided to create my own tokens to make up for this!

My own take on this tradition has been to create sets of six pure silver tokens, each of which has been etched with a vintage Christmas illustration.

The sets will be selling in my shop on Etsy for US$65.00. They include six pure silver pudding tokens, along with recipes for my family’s traditional Christmas pudding and very delicious brandy sauce.

Below are photos of the the packaging I’m planning to use (the cherries fabric wrapping is for buyers in Australia). You can see more photos of the set on Flickr.

Given that I’ve probably ostracised half of my regular readers with my previous geeky rant about MySpace, I thought I’d get all of the geekiness out of the way in one day before we return to our regular scheduling of handmade jewelry, indie design and other arty stuff.

You see, I’m pretty sure I’ve found a new and very simple fix for a nasty list styling problem in IE6 and I’m hoping to become a godlike figure in CSS circles … or something.

Before the non-geeky readers turn off completely - please, please … get Firefox and ditch Internet Explorer as your browser if you’re still using it. It will make good web designers all over the world love you long time! It will also make you a happy browser in many ways. Trust me.

So, back to the CSS. Those of you who try to build standards compliant sites with CSS layouts may well have seen this bug, where IE6 starts using the most general styling you’ve set for lists even in places where that styling is very clearly overwritten with a class/ID which has different styling in the CSS.

I’ve recently had this problem right across a new site design, simply because I wanted most general lists to be bulletted with a little brown square by way of an image. Suddenly in IE6 my little brown square was randomly popping up in all sorts of other lists, despite those lists very, very clearly having ‘list-style: none;’ written in the CSS. Of course every other browser on the planet got it, but not IE6.

I found this fix from Focal Curve, which I started putting into place. The fix basically tells you to be very specific with your selectors in order to override IE6’s complete stupidity - and ideally have all lists with a specified bullet style residing in a specific div which you give this specific style to.

In my case, I couldn’t do this without creating a special div just for these particular lists, which I didn’t want to do. The lists are being used in all sorts of different divs and it was those without the styling that were more consistent. So instead I gave all of those very, very specific selectors, listing the div they reside in along with all of the nested divs above.

However, while it worked a lot of the time, in some instances it just didn’t. Plus I started having CSS selectors that looked like War & Peace, given that my fluid-width design needs to have a lot of nested divs due to various other IE6 bugs to do with fluid box measurements that I won’t bore you with here (have I mentioned that IE sucks?).

So I kept battling away at this issue until I finally hit upon a fix that works - at least for me - apparently all of the time. I’ve not seen it mentioned anywhere else, so I’m hoping that if I share it then other people might find it useful.

Basically, if you’ve set a style in your CSS for all general lists as follows:

ul li {
list-style: square url(/img/bullet.gif);
}

And then you want to have, for instance, a navigation menu with a class of ‘nav’ with no list style image set you need to put in declarations for both list-style and list-style-image as follows:

ul.nav li {
list-style: none;
list-style-image: none;
}

Yes, it’s effectively the exact same piece information written out in two different ways - the second line should really be regarded as redundant. But IE6 eats it and all is well in my world - at least when it comes to this bug! I’ve since tried out the same technique in other designs and so far so good.

I’m not sure how it would go if you’re problem isn’t specific to using an image as a bullet, but I’d love to hear how it pans out in other scenarios. My guess is that if you write out both the shorthand and longhand versions of what you want, IE will finally get it.

May IE of all flavours soon die even more painful deaths than the one I recently wished upon MySpace!

You can now find me on MySpace. And I must confess I feel a bit sick about it - embarrassed even - but I’ve been told over and over that it’s great for networking … so I shall do my best to resist the very strong urge I’ve got to delete my account, thereby committing myspaceide.

Gosh, I really do want to though … But instead for now I’m going to rant about it in a mildly geeky way, I’m afraid (don’t say I didn’t warn you!).

Firstly, this is one of the least user-friendly sites that I’ve encountered since, oh, around about 1998. It’s utterly appalling to interact with. The simplest things take so many steps, the information is both dense and almost entirely unhelpful, it’s impossible to find your way around without really stopping and thinking about it and even after setting up a page I don’t really understand how it works or what it’s for.

And I’m not some technologically challenged newbie - I’m someone who spends a really considerable amount of time using the web and net more generally - and who also designs and maintains websites for a living. I’m truly stunned that MySpace could be as popular as it is given how non-intuitive it is to use.

Secondly, MySpace are completely obsessed with telling you all about how important your privacy is to them. Yet even if you go there entirely to network, you have absolutely no option but to give a date of birth and set a relationship status. Appallingly, this information (your age in years, star sign and relationship status) is on your profile for all the world to see - and as far as I can see there is nothing you can do about it if you want to maintain a public profile.

On what planet are these not private and potentially sensitive pieces of information!? Why on earth would people I want to network with in a business sense have any legitimate need to know whether or not I’m single, how old I am and what my star sign is? I don’t even believe in star signs and now I’m going to have people all over the world making judgements about my personality based on what I consider to be a piece of random non-information!

I’ve now written to them asking why there is no option to keep this information private - so far there’s not even been an acknowledgement of me lodging a query and my confidence about getting a response is rather low. I’ve also now just randomly selected my ‘private’ information rather than putting in anything accurate - and I’ve put a note to that effect in the ‘about me’ section.

Then there are the layout and technical issues. So many pages won’t load or lay out properly in my browser (Safari for Mac OS X). There’s no point in telling them this because you can just tell the whole site has been built by a bunch of PC-only users who probably tested in a few versions of IE for PC and thought their work was done. Or maybe the real issue is that they allow all of their users to contribute their own HTML and CSS, which of course is going to be dodgy more often than not.

My psychic abilities (or is it my stars?) tell me that if I raise any such issues - even about MySpace’s own ads not working - they’ll be very likely to tell me that it’s because I’m an unfortunate Mac user and Macs are an alien species that they don’t support and why don’t I try using IE5 for Mac instead?

IE5 for Mac is dead!

Now, to go off on a tangent, this is a suggestion I often get (and dodgy web designers / support desk people of the world, please take note) which just indicates how utterly ignorant that person or organisation is and illustrates that they are clearly in the wrong business.

Just because you’ve tested your site in various versions of IE on PC does *not* mean it will work in IE5 for Mac - it is *not* the same browser even a teensy weensy bit just because the name and logo are the same! On top of that, Microsoft hasn’t supported IE5 for Mac for over three years now - and very few sites work perfectly with it. It’s dead and buried and best forgotten.

The reality is that if a Mac user with either Firefox or Safari tells you that you’ve got a problem with layout or javascript on your site, it invariably means there really is a problem with your site, not that Macs are weird and create weird problems of their own.

Safari in particular is one of the most standards compliant modern browsers currently available. Like any browser it has its own idiosyncracies, but if a site shows a problem in Safari then it’s 99.99999999% likely the problem is with the site’s own markup, CSS, javascript, etc. and the people running it should pin it down and fix it or it will only come back to bite them later as browsers evolve and improve. Just because it works like a dream in IE6 on PC doesn’t mean it’s not broken - quite the reverse, more often than not!

Anyway, there’s my rant. I’ll probably be banned from MySpace at some point for daring to make the outrageous suggestion that it pretty much entirely sucks, but so be it. My hope is that it will soon die a painful death and replaced by something elegantly easy to use which has perhaps been made by the lovely people who built Flickr.