CommenTag | official blog

It took a bunch of hours but now it is done.
How come can  people still use IE? It is pure rubbish and a real nightmarre for web developpers.

Anyway. I’ve borrowed an old and noisy Dell Inspiron 5100  which runs IE6 and I spent my last evening focusing on making IE6 understands standards.

The most annoying thing is its lack of support of transparent PNG files. I’ve used the excellent script of 24ways which takes advantage of the IE-only functionality of post processing a page using an AlphaFilter.
More info here.

Amongst other  hacks I had to go through, there is to mention that there is a way to specifiy CSS properties which will be only interpreted by IE6.

For example, if you start your CSS property with an underscore (eg. _background: …) then only IE6 will interpret it.

In the same way, if you start with a double slash (eg. // background: …) then all browsers but IEx will interpret it (note: the standard way to put comments in a CSS file is only to use the delimiters /*  …   */ ).

Last but not least, Firefox and Safari both consider a defaut left margin of 0px for <ul> while IE6 does not.
So don’t forget to state
ul {
margin-left:0;
}

It also looks like floating elements do not always have a good presentation under IE6. Sometimes it’s better to put your object with a _position:absolute; (what I did for the commentag logo to make it overlap the main part of the site).

Other useful links to deal with compatibility issues between IEx, Firefox and Safari:

• CSS Contents and compatibility
• [ws] The Underscore Hack | Podtržítkový hack 

As promised in our preview video, we launched the private beta this first of January 2008 at midnight.

This is a great step to begin this New Year and we all hope that 2008 would be a fantastic year for our venture.

At the moment, we only support Wordpress. The installation on your blog is dead easy as you just have to put one single file within your Wordpress plug-in directory (/wp-content/plugins/) and “boom” the plug-in magically appears within your administration panel (don’t forget to activate it). That’s it, you’re done! Yes, no configuration is required!

[here is the complete howto with some screenshots]

We would like to thank people who committed to help us for this private beta stage. Starting from today, they are going to be on the grill to provide us feedback, bug reports and other improvements to our service.

We expect to launch CommenTag as a public beta as early as the first of March. “Release early, release often”.

If you want to help us test CommenTag, please send an email to support (at) commentag.com.