• Introduced improved handling of missing or incomplete HTML elements.

• Made a change to the method used to capture the slide description. Instead of trying to step through the child nodes of the <dd> element, the entire innerHTML string is captured. This enables the use of anchor tags and other formatting within the image descriptions.

• Added support for unordered lists – <ul>, as well as definition lists – <dl>. Using unordered lists means that there will be no image description; only the image title and the slide number will be displayed.

• If no alt attribute is supplied for the slide thumbnails, then an attempt will be made to parse the filename from the image path.

This is made even more exciting for me as I’m using new slide show software that I have designed and written myself. For the last few years I’ve been using an open source solution called Gallery to display my artwork. Despite being an impressive piece of software, some time ago I came to the realisation that it’s not the best fit for my needs. It’s very feature rich, and with that comes a level of complexity that isn’t justified by the number and type of images that I want to display. It also uses a lot of hacks to maintain compatibility with older browsers, and despite my best efforts I haven’t managed to set it up so that it produces standards compliant HTML, something that is very important to me.

Some months ago I had the seed of an idea for creating a very simple, lightweight browser image viewer that can be configured just by editing very clean, simple, standards compliant HTML (or XHTML). This seed has grown to become Image Engine 4.0, and sees me returning to a home grown solution for displaying my images after nearly 5 years using Gallery.

I’m very pleased with the results; I think it looks nice, and it has made adding more than 100 images very simple indeed (it only took me a couple of hours to add all the images, including typing all the descriptions). I’m so pleased that I’ve decided to make the Image Engine available as free to use software. It’s still in the early stages of development, and there are a number of features I’d like to add as time goes by, but at the moment it works, and works well. I will be adding content to the Project Page over the next few weeks, so if you would like to use this software on your own site, please check back soon, or contact me.

However, my Javascript skills are rather out of date, and my understanding of OOP is weak at best. So I could really use some help with the coding side of the project. If you are a web developer with good Javascript/DOM skills who would be willing to help me out, please get in touch. Unfortunately, I can’t offer any financial reward, but you would get ample credit for any and all work, a prominent link to your portfolio, and heaps of praise on this site. I’m also willing to discuss some form of skills exchange if you need any artwork; for example illustration, icons, or design for another project.

I know it’s small beer in terms of recompense, but at the moment it’s all I can offer. Please let me know if you think this is something you’d be interested in.

The premise is simple: Internet Explorer 6 is antiquated, doesn’t support key web standards, and should be phased out.

When I was developing this site, I chose to use PHP to generate browser specific CSS. This method is less than ideal, as browser sniffing is fraught with potential pitfalls, but I thought it was the best way to avoid the ugly CSS hacks needed to get around bugs in Internet Explorer 5 and 6. I decided some time ago that when I next change the appearance of this site, I will not be using any browser specific hacks, so I’m happy to make it official by signing up to this campaign. Internet Explorer 6 is an outdated piece of software that doesn’t deserve the time it takes to support it. It doesn’t even support PNG transparency; IE6 was released in 2001, almost 6 years after the release of the PNG standard.

So long, IE6. I’m very, very glad to see the back of you.

Bobbin has priced it at a very reasonable £2.99, and it’s available now on the iTunes App Store. For more details visit the Air Cadets web site.

What brings the score down is my lack of visitor votes (hint, hint). If you would like to help me improve my overall rating, you can vote here. If you are feeling very generous, you could even link to me on your site. I’ll let you to bask in the warm glow of my appreciation (and a probably a reciprocal link) if you do.

If you are a returning visitor, you will notice that everything around here is brand new. A while ago, I decided that my site needed a complete overhaul, and in my spare time have been working on this new version for the last few weeks. This is the most complete redesign the site has undergone since I rewrote the site scripts 4 years ago.

The most difficult decision I made was to completely rework my portfolio browser. For the last few years, I have been using a piece of software I wrote myself using Perl and XML, which I called the Image Engine. This worked well, but I wanted to add new features, and realised that adding the features I wanted would require such a comprehensive rewrite that the time involved would not justify the end result.

So, at the beginning of the redesign process, I decided to switch to using Gallery, an Open Source software solution. This was a big step, as apart from the work involved in integrating my new site design into the Gallery templates, it also meant that I had to manually add each image into the new albums. Previously I was able to upgrade the existing XML database each time I updated the Image Engine, but this was not an option with Gallery (well, it is beyond my meagre programming skills).

I hope you will agree that the effort has been justified, as I think that the new Gallery albums are much easier to use and make my work more accessible. However, because adding all the images has proved to be so time consuming, I have decided to launch the site before finishing all the editing, so you may find a few holes in the descriptions and summaries here and there.

Also, although I have tested the site as comprehensively as possible in as many browsers as I have access to, you may still encounter a few glitches. If you do, please leave a message on the bug reports forum, or use the e-mail form on the contact page.

Personally, I think the new design is leaner, simpler and more attractive. I hope that you agree. If so, please feel free to let me know in the comments, on the feedback forum, or use the contact page to get in touch.

Let me know if you have any ideas.

Fixed now. The problem was caused by the margins I had used to position the main titles so that they line up with the speech bubble. I changed the margin to padding, and it works in Opera now too. The problem was masked originally because I had used overflow: hidden on the banner. Opera was the only browser that didn’t honour the overflow settings, thus exposing the flaw.