This entry will consist of four items related to Simon Willison and web design. First, check out the redesign at Simon's site. He went from Zeldman orange to a forest green that is pleasant and easy on the eyes. My only gripe was that the link blog was floated awkwardly into the first entry, but it looks like he has framed it by adding some margins, so it is not as smooshed as it was before.

Second, Simon mentioned using the edit styles Javascript bookmarklet to preview style changes as he redesigned. This bookmarklet fills a niche because it updates pages in real time as styles are typed into a new, editable pop-up window; as of now, this is the simplest WYSIWYG CSS editor to have this function that I know of. Not only that, but this latest version of the bookmarklet imports existing linked and inline stylesheets into the pop-up window to make editing even simpler.

Third, I took advantage of the bookmarklet to do my own re-re-design of Simon's site, which I captured in a screenshot. Thanks to the flexibility of the edit styles, though, the screenshot will only be necessary when Simon decides to change the markup of the page: the new CCS styles can be applied at any time by simpy invoking the bookmarklet on the page, and copying-and-pasting the saved new styles over the contents of the pop-up window. This even works on the pages of individual entries. This is a credit to an elegant site design on Simon's part. (By the way, I did DiveIntoMark too, screenshot and all.)

Fourth and somewhat unrelated, I almost fell out of my chair laughing when I read the first two comments on Simon's entry on the Berkeley DB. It looks like somebody discovered his anti-blog-spam measure, seconds too late:

Damn, your blog has high pagerank, how do you do it? Well i can only hope some off it will rub off on my site. oh, and don't forget to vissit Online Casino Chique $30 Bonus!

Online Casino Chique $30 Bonus! - 26th November 2003 03:06

Damnit, what kinda re-direct is this, greedy bastard.

Online Casino Chique $30 Bonus! - 26th November 2003 03:07

Simon's method for discouraging blog spam is based on the premise that the purpose of weblog spam is to increase the Google ranking of a spammer's site by leaving URL of the site as part of comments on highly ranked weblogs. Simon changes the code of all links in comments into redirects, so that links themselves do not point towards the intended page. This means that Simon is not contributing any of his own PageRank (Google's notion of how valuable a web page is) to any of the site URLs left by people in their comments. The spammer above didn't realize this until after he had left his first comment, hence the frustrated rejoinder.