As most of you are aware, I moronically™ allowed my FTP client to delete my last custom wordpress theme, and I moronically™ didn’t have any backups of it.

Well, it slowed down my posting. For some reason, it’s difficult for me to write when I believe my websites design isn’t up to par. Well, now it is. I started a new design a few days ago and finally went live with it tonight. I haven’t tested in IE6 or IE7 yet, but I’ll be getting to that. Maybe.

That said I designed it with speed, simplicity, and ease of use in mind. I’m not an artist by any means, so I hope it’s aesthetically pleasing. Drop me a few comments and let me know what you think!

There was a phenomenal response to the IE6 banner idea. I promised a followup, so marinate on this for a few. Another idea for phasing out IE6 dawned on me just after I wrote the last article. If I spend 20% - 25% of my time developing for IE6, should I not charge 20% - 25% extra for IE6 support?

The idea is simple. If you’re going to be wasting time, you might as well be paid for it. This expense could be an ingenious way of gathering momentum for stamping out the IE6 embers. That makes me wonder… how much time do YOU spend developing for/fixing IE6 bugs? 10%? 20%? 30%? Is the notion of charging extra for IE support appealing to you?

The old school developers will remember, and for the new ones, a quick history lesson. In the 1990s, Netscape Navigator (Mozilla rendering engine) was the dominant browser. It “had a few bugs”, and as a result, when Internet Explorer started playing catch-up, there were a lot of reasons to start using IE instead of Netscape. Towards the end of the paradigm shift, we all started doing something deemed unacceptable by todays standards. The dreaded “Your browser is not supported” page.

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Want a cool tip on how to make a nifty 5 star rating image using only 1 small gif file, as opposed to 10 seperate images?

In this tutorial we’re going to cover just that with a technique known as CSS sprites. Most people by now have heard of CSS sprites. For those that haven’t, a sprite is a technique that partially covers background images and uses that to your advantage in both filesize and HTTP requests when loading a page. Let’s get started, shall we?

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In this video, I convert the indicator into working HTML and CSS, using the CSS Sprites method. If you’d like to download the source so you can follow along, have a gander.