Entries for April 2007
April 2, 2007 at 12:28AM Potential new design: Northwest
This design’s getting a bit old, isn’t it? So I’ve been trying out a few newer, cleaner designs lately. One of them is called Northwest and is inspired by the new logo design I did for the site. It’s primarily a clean-up of a minimalist experiment I did ages back. Take a peek and tell me what you think. In particular, if you’re using Firefox, try resizing the font. ![[smile]](/images/smilies/smile.gif){kind=small}
And yes, it’s meant to be as minimalist as it is. The focus is on good typography rather than mindblowing graphic design. There’ll be more in there (such as the redesigned logo in the top left and extra navigation in the footer), but the bulk of the work’s already there.
Here’s what you ought to see (click to zoom):
And here’s what you’ll see if you bump the font size up twice with CTRL-+:
It looks best with Perpetua, but any Palatino variant will work just fine.
Update: Quick tweak to add a line across the top to break up the monotony and taken from an older potential design, and added an breadcrumb trail. Now I just have to decide where I’m going to put the search form...
April 5, 2007 at 2:15PM CSS Naked Day, 2007
No, the site’s not broken, it’s CSS Naked Day.
Update: All over. That was fun!
April 12, 2007 at 5:45PM Bank of Ireland don’t know about 3D Secure?!
At work, use Realex as our payments gateway. Recently, they asked us to implement a protocol Visa created and which both themselves and Mastercard have implemented called 3-D Secure. I spent about a fortnight and a bit in total integrating our billing system with Realex’s 3-D Secure API. Actually, it meant rewriting a whole section of the billing system, but never mind that. It was tested and went live today.
Most of us here at work have AIB credit cards, and when we attempted a few transactions with their cards (which we needed to do anyway), we were automatically sent through to be validated by AIB’s validation server. Lovely!
On a whim, Paul decided to try is BoI card. No validation page popped up. Decidedly odd. So he called up the BoI’s customer support desk, and apparently they’ve never even heard of 3-D Secure or any of the trademarked implementations.
Now, this doesn’t matter all that much to us: now that we’ve implemented this in our billing system, we don’t have to worry about chargebacks. It’s a bit demented though that the Bank of Ireland, Ireland’s second biggest bank still haven’t implemented this.
The mind boggles!
