Peiratikos

And another thing about Internet Explorer! It doesn’t display PNGs properly. If you’re viewing this page on IE, you won’t see a lovable little pirate underneath the Peiratikos title (by the way, “peiratikos” is an Ancient Greek word which, being translated, is “pirate,” or “pirates,” or something like that). If you want to see what IE does to our poor pirate, check out our 404 page.

The MIME type for XHTML is application/xhtml+xml. If you point Internet Explorer at an XHTML document with that MIME type, Internet Explorer will ask you if you want to download it. Why? Because Internet Explorer doesn’t recognize the MIME type! You can trick IE by using the text/html MIME type for XHTML documents, but you’re really not supposed to do that with XHTML 1.1, which is what we use here at Peiratikos. So we have to serve up our blog as XHTML 1.1 for people with good browsers (Mozilla and Opera) and HTML 4.01 for people with bad browsers (Internet Explorer). Bad Internet Explorer! IE also fucks up CSS. Support a browser that supports Web standards: download Mozilla.

WordPress is the best web-publishing platform I’ve encountered (certainly tons better than Blogger, although Blogger has the advantage of free hosting on blogspot.com). Full compliance with Web standards (so the developers claim, and I believe them), TrackBack, Pingback, no page rebuilds, pretty typography, smart text formatting, etc., etc. and so forth.

WordPress is open source freeware, but you do need your own web server to host it on. We’re paying $80 a year to use WordPress rather than Blogger or something, and it’s more than worth it.

Right, so we haven’t updated our blog in what, a month? Well, that’s going to change. Here’s the first new update, you’re reading it even now! We’ve switched to the WordPress publishing system, which is much cooler. We’re soon going to roll out a brand new site design. We’re soon going to actually post posts on our blog.

The old blog is still available in archival form, and any permalinks people have linked to will remain working. The new URL for the blog is https://peiratikos.net/, and old links to http://www.peiratikos.net/blog/ will redirect automatically.