What the Browser God Giveth

The whole thing started with a background color. Just that—one color change, maybe a new header, nothing dramatic. Meanwhile little Ira was in the hospital eight hundred kilometers away, half the blogs I read were going dark one by one, and I was sitting at my desk at two in the morning fighting with cross-browser compatibility like it was the only thing keeping me from thinking about any of that.

It escalated the way these things always do. First the background, then the header, then I read about CSS3 Grid Layout and decided I needed it immediately, inside my site, which meant a whole new design, which meant nights. The first version looked beautiful on day one. By day two I was bored with it. So I scrapped everything and built what felt, at the time, like an absolute masterpiece—clean, valid, working perfectly across Safari, Firefox, and Opera after god knows how many sleepless hours of adjustments. And then came the moment every web designer has to face eventually: the Internet Explorer test.

I checked. I shut down the Mac. I did whatever sacrificial ritual felt appropriate. Went to sleep. Woke up. Still broken.

And here we are. This journal has a new face, even if the gap between before and after is hard to see from the outside—most of the work was structural, most of the blood invisible. It was a long road. Worth it, I think.