I just tested my personal “résumé” – British would say “CV” – website at oliver.doepner.net successfully on IE8, IE9, Firefox 3.6 to 9, latest and older Chrome versions, Opera 10 and 11 and Safari 4 and 5.1. It works on all browsers and looks fine.
You might wonder if I have all these browser installed? No, I don’t. I used the amazing browserling.com service that runs all the various browsers in virtual machines “in the cloud”, and embeds the UI in their website. Cool stuff and currently free for everyone to use!
One caveat with browserling.com is a tool called IETester that they use to emulate the ancient IE5.5 and IE6 browsers. Its seems to have bugs related to PNG graphics which prevented reliable testing. So if anyone out there still uses IE5.5 or IE6: Please visit oliver.doepner.net and let me know if you can see the photo of me on the page with the transparency effect.
On the newer CSS3 capable browsers, my site now sports drop shadows and rounded corners, using border-radius and box-shadow.
I also tested W3C standards compliance (XHTML, CSS3) and all my pages did pass those tests as well. What a nice way to end the computer oriented part of the day …
My sources.list entries:
# local repo (manually downloaded debs, etc.):
deb file:/usr/local/packages ./
# The closest Debian mirror is at Dalhousie University, Halifax:
deb http://mirror.its.dal.ca/debian/ squeeze main contrib non-free
deb http://mirror.its.dal.ca/debian/ squeeze-updates main
deb http://mirror.its.dal.ca/debian/ squeeze-proposed-updates main
# See http://www.debian.org/mirror/list for mirrors closer to you
# Security updates (not mirrored)
deb http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main
# Official backports repo for squeeze (I install the Linux kernel from it)
deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports squeeze-backports main
# Debian multimedia, a must-have for mplayer et al.
deb http://mirror.its.dal.ca/debian-multimedia squeeze main non-free
# Repo that provides latest Iceweasel (aka Firefox)
deb http://mozilla.debian.net/ squeeze-backports iceweasel-release
I am a pretty happy user of Debian 5 stable (“Lenny”). But some Lenny packages are a little too old for my taste.
For example, Iceweasel is version 3.0.6 in Lenny. But the latest Adblock Plus (1.1.1 and later) requires Firefox/Iceweasel 3.0.12 and Adblock Element Hiding Helper does not work correctly with Adblock Plus versions older than 1.1.1 (keeps ignoring the configured hiding patterns).
So I decided that I want Iceweasel 3.0.14 from Debian testing (“Squeeze”). I googled for APT Pinning and found this page
http://wiki.debian.org/AptPinning
The lower half of it explains a “conservative approach” to pinning that only installs testing packages when the user explicitly requests it. I created /etc/apt/preferences to look like this:
Package: *
Pin: release a=stable
Explanation: prefer stable
Pin-Priority: 900
Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian
Explanation: require approval
Pin-Priority: -10
Then I added the Debian testing repository to /etc/apt/sources.list, told apt to update itself and installed Iceweasel from testing:
apt-get update
apt-get install -t testing iceweasel
That worked nicely and upgraded only the Iceweasel package, nothing else.
Now I can use Adblock Plus with the Element Hiding Helper to get rid of the ads in Facebook by adding these Element Hiding Rules:
facebook.com##DIV.adcolumn
facebook.com##DIV.UIEMUASFrame.UIEMUASSLikeFrame
facebook.com##DIV.UIEMUASFrame
Yay! That was worth the effort …
