I won the second place at the Winmod’s February Desktop Contest with these:

See the Winmod’s Desktop Hall of Fame.

I experimented a new background for all the blockquote tags on the site. The concept is quite simple, but the restrictions are a lot. You need to have the same background color everytime and the blockquote element must have a fixed width.

blockquote {
display: block;
font-size: 8pt;
padding: 5px 46px 5px 9px;
width: 380px;
margin: 22px 0px 22px 15px;
background: #DDF0F5 URL(img/quote.gif) no-repeat;
border-bottom: 1px solid #9CCAD8;
}

This is the code I use for the blockquote element. With a nice background image:

Note: the white space you see in the middle is transparency. The white made by the “wicked and worn” effect is “real” white. Result, on a white background:

This is a simple blockquote element.

That is expandable. But not too far.

Because if it goes too far, we’ll lose the background image because we didn’t set it to “repeat”. Although it won’t make a huge difference, because the background is still simple. We’ll just lose the “dirt” effect on the box sides.

Some questions still left though:

• What if we don’t want to use fixed-width blockquotes?
• What if we have a 400 lines quotes?
• What if we have to work with different background colors?

So, you can see it, the technique is not very optimal. But it still works correctly.

Well, everyone (’would be too long to name them all…) got at least one post about the South by SouthWest festival. Here was mine.

In order to make you using my weblog’s comment form — which seems to have been less used for weeks (maybe my readers are all busy with commeting everyone’s entry about SxSW; no, I’m not jealous!) — I give away free Gmail invites because I got 50 of them on my account.

But with the huge number of requests in Jerermy Flint’s entry, I don’t think a lot of people still want one.

If you do, just drop a comment here with the “awesome” form. No need to write your email address in your comment, only in the E-mail field.

• Why do you come to the exotic melon?
• What do you like?
• What do you dislike?
• Does the design matter?
• Does the writing style matter?
• Do you read or skim everything, or do you skip entries based on subject and/or the first paragraph?
• Do you ‘explore’ exomel; that is, do you also follow the sidebar links?
• Do you use any RSS feeds related to exomel?

Thank you.

Note: Questions were ripped from this post from Michael Heileman’s blog.

The spring break will start in 1 hour and 30 minutes. However, no big plans for me…

• Snowboard weekend at Le Massif.
• Increasing my contribution to WikiPedia.
• Sending my résumé all around to get a nice summer job.

YAY!

When I was in secondary 1 (grade 7), in 1999, during an informatic course, our teacher told us to search for something in the web, using a search engine. And because I was wiser (!) than other students, I went to yahoo.com and I thought I was the smartest in the class.

But the the teacher told us something like:

Yahoo! is not that good. There’s a new search engine that will be more popular in the coming years. Its name is Google.

I didn’t understand why Google was better, but it certainly was. That was a good teacher.