Talk about sending so humor my way just at the right time. My friend Allen and I are heavy users of del.icio.us. He happened to use the 'from' feature to send me an image that not only made me start laughing out loud, but depicts exactly my struggle with web design. I'll share that in a moment, but let's focus for a second on the pains of being a web designer.

It just so happens that at least once, usually more frequently, per day I'm complaining about designing my website so that it's compatible with Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. I guess it's more than a complaint, it's a 10-minute violent rant on why I wish I could put a hole through my computer. Basically, I only design for these three browsers because that's about all I have time for.

As you know, I've been ahem working on the music section...as if you didn't know that already. Well, I wasn't satisfied with the interface to the albums and tracks. If you hadn't noticed, it was a little crowded, especially with long album or track names. After about 12 hours of IE, Photoshop, and CSS hell, I've managed to brute force my way into what I think is a better design. Of course, I'll let you be the judge and jury since I'm always up for new and interesting opinions! If you now navigate your way to view a track or an album, I've added some new features and a few yummy tabs (as svi would say). Introducing first, the 'Album' interface.

• Larger album art
• Less crowded design
• Track listing including popularity of the tracks on each album (read the fine print)

Up second, we have the nifty 'Track' interface.

• Larger album art, just like the album version
• Less crowded design, umm, just like the album version
• Recent play dates (Tab interface)
• By this artist (Tab interface, including album art thumbs)
• On this album (Tab interface)

That sums up what took me about 15 hours to complete. There may be a few bugs here and there, so if something doesn't look quite right, let me know.

Although the title might imply that this is a blog dedicated to Mazda's 'Zoom zoom' campaign, I'm sorry to inform you, it is nowhere close. In fact, the only campaign this geek has been heading up is the 'why can't all browsers do the same thing' campaign. Heard of it?

I'll tell you what, my new saying for web development is '3 browsers and 12 hours later'. I've been working on this new little feature that emulates the iTunes Music Store's 'New Releases' section. Basically, it displays a few albums and you can click left or right to display more of them. There is this soothingly smooth scroll across the screen that I thought would be nothing more than some fiddling with the Prototype javascript library. Riiggght...easier said than done!

Since I'm about 95% complete with the blog section and it's 100% valid in XHTML transitional mode, I decided to do the compatibility test across three browsers: Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer. I must say, for the most part, it looked fine in all three browsers. However, as usual, there were a few discrepancies between them.

Safari and Firefox seemed to do most of the right things and I was quickly able to diagnose and fix some of the differences between these two browsers. Then came the brother from another mother, Internet Explorer.

It's one thing to be able to create a blog, but what about deleting them? Yeah, I didn't forget about that, just hadn't gotten around to that particular feature until tonight. Since I try my best to put my HCI classes from college to good use, I decided to include a confirmation message that asked the user if he/she really wanted to delete the blog.

So thinking about the problem for a while, I came up with a few solutions. We'll split the solution into 'input' and 'confirmation'. Input is defined as the way the user initially interacts to delete a blog. The 'confirmation' is defined as how the user is provided confirmation that the blog should be deleted.