[applause]
And enjoy your visit!
Vince
Click here to visit the main photo galleries at VMP.com or stick around and click here (or on the blog header from anywhere in the blog) to reach the Coriolistic Anachronisms home page and most recent posts.
My name is Vincent Mounier. I'm a photographer and designer of this site. My blog Coriolistic Anachronisms is now five years old. Find out more about the web site and me.
Click here to send me an email. Enthusiastic praise, technical questions, geek jokes and constructive criticism are always welcome!
If you have unanswered questions, why don't you check out this helpful FAQ's page. You could also email me and if your question is relevent, it might appear as a new FAQ.
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A few notes on what I hope will be a respectful visit, and my promise to play by the same rules. Basically, don't swear, don't steal, don't spam. Please.
Let me 
introduce you to my blogging and life soulmate. Different blogs, different views, different ideas, same passion.
A graphic, user-friendly navigational overview of the entire web site, which is made of two main sections:
• This blog and all sub-sections,
• Vincent Mounier Photography, where the main photo galleries are located.
Web site news: Design, templates, scripts, interface, new galleries, projects, etc - Learn it all here
Well, fame will have been short for the newcomer SexyLightbox. At 1:30 AM the same day, I have just decided that Shadowbox was stronger, more polished and better built.
Inspired by SexyLightbox’ rounded corners and colour schemes, I’ve adjusted Shadowbox to resemble it using CSS3’s new border-radius property. It’s a work in progress, but Shadowbox prevails...
Starting with the previous post « Taming Coney Island » and on, all slideshows will be powered with the SexyLightbox script, replacing Shadowbox - at least temporarily. It’s not necessarily better but looks very slick and was worth a try since I am always on the hunt for new tools. Click on these links or the images below, have a look, and please don’t hesitate to leave feedback!
With many - rather average but interesting - pictures on hold, the last week has seen me obsessively reworking the main site’s look and feel, and trying to integrate the blog into it more seamlessly. A striped background has emerged because, well, I always liked stripes. And they serve the unifying purpose very well.
The good old winged dolphin logo was reborn and modernized, another thing I’m quite fond of despite its age. Entry date display was upgraded from the original template’s calendar icon to this very sleek CSS-based system that uses a mapped single image.
I hope that the overall result is a nicer-looking, cleaner and yet more focused interface, with less visual disruption when switching from the blog to the main galleries and vice-versa.
Some posts about recent New York micro-events and mini-expeditions soon.
The menu is evolving. Granted, my icon collection is somehow limited and I’m not such a great icon designer myself. I will have to do something about the ones above, though, because they aren’t all really relevant. But this is all happening in stages.
The latest stage, as it is, was two-fold: I created a succinct « Rules Of Conduct and Copyrights » page, linked to from the main menu. It explains my candid expectations in terms of visitor behavior - yes, I allow myself to have some, and so should thee - and covers copyright issues.
Now, to be honest, my first beta tester was Marie and she went: « Uh? »The second part was a redesign of the site map to make it accessible from the blog without having to go through the main site’s overlay design - rather dark and immersive but out of context, it’s just dark. I found a very clever CSS graphic sitemap layout and tailored it to my needs. The truth is it doesn’t play well with Internet Destroyer Explorer, but I really don’t care any more - and neither do a growing number of web designers. Now, to be honest, my first beta tester was Marie and she went: « Uh? » Oh well, I like it, I guess that’s what matters.
Last but not least, I have finally taken the time to research, understand and implement a CSS « pullquote » feature for my longer posts which showcases a key sentence in a large block as seen above, magazine-style.
Oh, and we went on a very nice expedition all the way to the very northern tip of Manhattan, but that will be covered next. What did you do today?
The most unrelenting readers among you might have noticed design fluctuations in the top part of the blog over the last three days. I apologize for the inconvenience; I was upgrading the top menu and later conducting some heavy testing. Not having an option to test offline, I had to work live, and be visible about it.
I give you, tada... the Mac-looking Icon Menu! Yawn.It’s all over now and as I sit at home resisting the urge to scratch, corticosteroids having been tapered off and poison ivy rash ‘d itch still in full swing, I give you, tada... the Mac-looking Icon Menu! Yawn.
No, really, it’s brand new. It’s based on a script by N.Design Studio - that’s the folks who put together the original version of the fantastic template you’re looking at right now and which I seriously modified, I mean improved. It also uses qTip for the floating tooltips and is powered by jQuery, a javascript library to which I will be switching over gradually because, well, it just rocks. Shadowbox, which powers all my slideshows and the « about » pages of the web site, happens to be so well designed that it works on all major libraries - Prototype until recently, and jQuery as of now.
I am happy to report that it all seems to function rather-well-to-perfectly on all latest versions of the major browsers, IE8 being - as always - on the trailing end of things. I’ve also done some maintenance and fixed a few things on the back-end, and straightened out the FAQ’s section, with more to be added soon.
If you don’t like it, you can always collapse it with the Toggle button. Comments and reconstructive criticism are always welcome. So is unbridled praise.
I’ve started collecting my favourite shots from the New York area and they are now featured in the brand new New York album. It will probably grow into a full-fledged, multiple-album gallery of its own the way Vancouver did. Stay tuned. Tip of the iceberg.
A long time ago, a talented hacker named Bill Gates decided to take control of home computers worldwide and he launched a massive virus called Windows. Bundled with the virus came a web browser labeled Internet Explorer. The browser was very similar to its Windows host in that it was buggy, crippled, imperfect and vulnerable - but therein resided its strength: early release allowed Microsoft to inundate the market with a less-than-perfect product at a rock-bottom price with the promise of updates and improvements that, it turns out, never came. But in those days, IE had an almost-total monopoly and was considered better than nothing.
Sure, there were updates. But they never fixed anything. The browser remained bugged and more importantly, its many subsequent versions never became standard compliant. You see, there are a bunch of very smart and Microsoft-proof people out there who set the standards for web programming languages and protocols. They are the ones who shape up the internet as we know it, by adopting new guidelines and progressively enhancing old ones. They don’t decide of anything, but they are the authority on the subject. When designing a web browser, one would be smart to follow their lead and comply with widely accepted standards. Gates never has.
As a result, even in its current 8th version, Internet Explorer still plain and simply sucks. It remains the least standard-compliant browser out there 
and is every web designer’s nightmare. It forces one to double-code and invent workarounds for many features and visual design aspects that work well with most browsers but still fail on IE.
And so if you are reading this from the lazy comfort of your good old Internet Explorer version.x, I have bad news for you: you are not getting the full effect of this web page, and neither will you on a growing number of other web sites. Many designers, me among them, are stopping once and for all the impossible quest for IE-compatibility and creating web sites that are specifically optimized for better-complying browsers, Firefox obviously being the leading contestant. Much of this has to do with simple eye-candy and won’t necessarily affect the core functions of a page. But in an age where web programming languages have evolved to the point of allowing full application-like interfaces, incredible user interaction and fluid animation, eye-candy is really one of the hottest feature out there.
As a small example, consider this very blog. Every main browser out there, be it Firefox, Chrome or Safari, will render its various boxes and frames with rounded corners, and will apply elegant drop-shadows to picture thumbnails, quotes and comments. In IE however, you’ll see none of the above. All corners (apart from those rendered at the template level with images) are square and drop-shadows invisible. Does that affect your reading of the blog? Probably not. But you are missing something, not seeing the page as I intended it; and somewhere along the line, at an artistic level, a absent drop-shadow becomes as important as period gone missing at the end of a sentence.
So what are your options? a) Stick with Internet Explorer and become a dinosaur, accept or ignore the headache you are causing me and many designers, and slowly fall behind everything so 
cool the web has to offer. b) Get yourself a new browser. It will take minimal getting used to, and then you will be all set. These browsers are free and none of them is force-integrated with an operating system the way IE is.
My recommendation? Get Firefox. I’ve seriously tested Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox and IE in their latest versions and Firefox remains my absolute favourite in terms of overall performance, speed, ease of use, security and customization options. The ex aequo second-best would be Chrome and Safari, in terms of standard-compliance. However, Chrome seems to be the new fast-rising kid on the block with the recent announcement by Google of an upcoming open source Chrome OS, a lightweight and mostly web-based operating system initially targeting the laptop market. I can already hear Bill’s teeth grinding...
The pie chart above right represents visitor browser distribution on my site for the last 30 days, as per Google Analytics. As you can see, Firefox is going strong. Of course this isn’t necessarily representative of the internet as a whole because of demographics and subject-specific browsing trends. But it shows the 3 major contenders these days. I believe that a global survey would reveal Firefox slightly ahead of IE, both of them in turn largely ahead of the competition.
Any way. Switch. Jump. Take the plunge. Ditch Internet Explorer. You won’t regret it and I sure will breathe easier next time I add a feature in here!
There’s a new kid on the blog. You will have noticed the green (or red) vertical tab, left of all things major - on the very edge of Coriolistic Anachronisms. It’s called Tweetboard and it’s a new widget that links to the blog’s Twitter account and allows, among other things, for visitors to leave threaded (or nested) messages, a feature blatantly lacking on Twitter itself.
The sweet little thing is still very much in alpha phase and being released on an invite basis, but seems worth a test run. I might keep it or I might not, since at first glance I can see it competing with the main entries for visitor comments. But as always, I like doing live trials and I’ll ditch whatever doesn’t suit me...
So if you are Twitter-equipped (Who isn’t nowadays? Nobody, I fear.) feel free to tweet back right in the window and watch your prose appear after a minute or so in forum-like threaded style.
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Take care »
