Back in the early 2000s, when there was the big push for web standards in HTML and CSS, I used to do a lot of web design. So, when I was designing this, I was delighted to see that the design I developed in Firefox just worked in Opera and Safari. It was like opening a china cabinet to get out a platter and finding the Holy Grail stacked on top of it. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer is just like in the olden days except that there are two new versions with new bugs to make me bash my head on the wall. No two versions of IE will display the same code exactly the same way. I invite you to give the site another glance in something standards-compliant so you can see the extra layer of background pattern and subtle overlapping translucent blocks in their liquid glory.

The lovely headline font is courtesy of Cufón. I had previously been using the Wordpress plugin for Font Burner, which had an amazing selection of fonts and could be set up in under 15 minutes, but had some errors in IE 8 that I could not fix. Cufón took longer to set up but is more flexible, and will not break if people have Flash blocked. Did you do web design before SIFR existed? Then you understand what a treasure trove all these new font replacement tools are. Pretty text which still behaves (well, mostly) like real text, even for screen readers. Freedom from Times New Roman, Arial, Georgia, Verdana, and Trebuchet MS. Now, for the day when we can just copy the font file to the server and have it all just work…

Finally, Wordpress, Flickr, and the Flickr Photo Album plugin are all awesome. This site would have been much more complicated and expensive without them.