Have just about finished a site I'm putting together for me & some friends & would appreciate some opinions on it, what do you all think?

dev.mixmonkeys.com (http://dev.mixmonkeys.com)

Works fine for me on Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome & IE8 (not finished for ie6 & 7 yet) but I know that different OS's render fonts with slightly different spacing & it was developed on Linux & just tested on a friend's IE8, would appreciate knowing if anything's broken on the above browsers using Windows & OSX.

You should put it through the validator first :)

http://validator.w3.org/

Oh believe me I have, like it says in the footer...

"Valid xhtml & CSS3, apart from the bloody soundcloud plugin, dammit."

And xhtml 1.0 strict at that, thankyouverymuch.

And it's not only valid css3, it falls back to valid css2.1 for browsers that don't support it *cough*ie*cough*.

Why don't you use swfobject for the plugin? It takes care of writing in that sort of thing properly and cross-browser. http://code.google.com/p/swfobject/

I think to make the semantics better you could use <p> tags where you've used <div>s.

The 'Article Tags' bit is also dropped right down below your main content in FF3.6 when NoScript is blocking. Fine when JS is enabled though. The tag text in the cloud needs to be bigger for the stuff that's further away as it's unreadably small.

In your '<!--[if lt IE 8]>' block, you'd be better doing something similar to:


<!--[if (lte IE 7)]>
<link href="/resources/css/ie7.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<![endif]-->


But the design and layout are nice and looking good :)

Why don't you use swfobject for the plugin? It takes care of writing in that sort of thing properly and cross-browser. http://code.google.com/p/swfobject/

I'll definitely have a look at that later, thanks. Doing the whole thing full xhtml strict, finding other plugins that validate & then having it broken by the soundcloud plugin (which is the only plugin that's completely necessary & has no alternative) really sent me off on a :rant: at the time.

Most of the mass of divs are due to the curvycorners jQuery plugin, it actually looks quite tidy without that, all the actual content is as, erm, un-divvy as it's going to get, the navs are all ul (pop-up sub-menu to be completed, I've just worked it out on another version), headers are proper h tags & so on, but anything with curvy corners gets chucked in a div by the plugin.

I've had that much trouble getting the thing working as it is (with a load of jQuery) that I'm going to stick my fingers in my ears & shout "ner ner ner I'm not listening" at any mention of noscript.

Lol :) No worries, most people don't use it anyways.

I use swfobject for any swf plugins I need to use and seems to work a treat.

I use swfobject for any swf plugins I need to use and seems to work a treat.

Well can't get it to work with this one, though it's probably down to my limited knowledge of the coding side of things. I can get jQuery plugins working if I swear at them enough, but this seems immune to my magic cursing abilities...

I'll have to be happy with managing to make a fully xhtml strict Wordpress theme (which is an achievement for me, I've a right amateur at this stuff) & swear at sound cloud, if it works with jQuery plugins you never know, someone may make a valid soundcloud Wordpress plugin.

There's actually an swfobject Wordpress plugin which got my hopes up for all of 5 seconds :hihi:

Have a look at the source on here....

http://www.learndirect.co.uk/browse/

The Flash player there is using swfobject :)

Feel free to PM about it, might not get around to looking this weekend as I'm doing stuff for Corporation at the moment.

I'll have to have a proper look over the weekend, using proper swfobject & that learndirect site as an implementation example, I can grab the URL of the player from the generic soundcloud embed code & hopefully use that.

Feel free to PM about it

Thanks for the offer, I may very well do that. I want to get the site live ASAP as I've been working on it far too long already & my fellow mixmonkeys have mixes ready to upload, but was always intending on taking a copy to still run under the dev address for further tinkering, so I'll probably take out the bit saying it's valid xhtml/css for the live site, & run a separate copy for plugin tinkering.