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I'm looking at you, Linux. Is perfect code necessary? In this episode of "I finally got my site working for my four Linux guests" (aka "Radical Transparency'"), we'll be discussing the drawbacks of imperfect code and discovering when 'good enough for government work' isn't.
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She doesn't like it much when I tell her that less than one percent of my hits are from Linux users. She gives me that look that says, "You told me Linux was really cool when you installed it on my computer, and now you're telling me that not only am I part of a minority not worth coding for, but that your site still doesn't work for me."
Her looks can be complicated.
Take 3232design.com, for example. I've known since the start that it didn't look all that great in Linux because of a bug in the Adobe Flash Player for Linux that doesn't render transparent backgrounds. See, that little spinning Flash animation up in the right corner that pops down so you can browse the portfolio was taking advantage of a transparent background: as you rolled over the device it would pop down in Flash. That meant that the entire Flash movie was covering up the part of the page it rolled into all the time.
That's fine if you don't have links or anything interactive underneath the movie, though I've had to do some creative writing to keep my text links in the blog entries from appearing under there.
But now I'd like to announce that 3232design is now better than government work. I've re-written the Flash to be static and now the movement is controlled using javascript instead This means that I can link wherever I want in the blog, but more importantly, the site is usable for Linux users.
I haven't exactly tested it on Linux Firefox yet. It's late, and I'm just happy the code works. There are still a few pieces to clean up, but now at least I can quit apologizing to all four of my Linux users for a broken site.
Also, I don't have to sleep on the couch anymore.
