We’re preparing to move our website to a new server Tuesday night. As a result, there will be some instability on boxcarpress.com on Wednesday, August 31. You may experience a lag time in requests to our website and even in our email correspondence due to DNS caching.

If you are in need of new photopolymer plates or other supplies within the next few days, we strongly recommend getting your order in by the end of the day tomorrow – Tuesday, August 30. Things ought to settle down by Thursday, September 1.

Printing customers: The server change will not affect you beyond the delays in correspondence mentioned above. We’re always available via phone.

Platemaking customers: During this time, we’ll be wiping all credit card information, so don’t be alarmed when you make a new purchase & your information is gone. The platemaking ordering process has been re-written from the bottom up, but you should not experience major changes otherwise. Let us know if you have any problems submitting orders!

Supply customers: We will not be able to process credit cards initially, but we will still take your order through our shopping cart. We will touch base offline to work out payment details. You can call us at 315.473.0930 & provide payment information over the phone.

We apologize in advance for the disruption, but rest assured that our IT team is working to make this transition as painless as possible. So don’t forget to grab a bag of popcorn and check the @letterpress on Twitter for real-time updates for the exciting transition!

OK this is off the beaten track, but I’ve been trying to get one of our websites free from the Georgia/Verdana death grip through using CSS @font-face and Typotheque web fonts. I had some problems getting a CSS @font-face formatted text to look right in Firefox because it first loads in the fallback font; this is a Firefox issue that’s well documented, and I’m comfortable with how Safari and IE are loading the page. Since there are a lot of images on the page, it can take a few seconds before the text “jumps” into the right typeface. None of these tricks really improved the situation, so I decided to hide the content until the page loaded. Here is the code I’d used.

(all the examples assume that you're loading the jQuery javascript library)

$(document).ready(function(){
$("body").hide();
$(window).load(function(){
$("body").fadeIn();
});
});

Since the body was hidden while other scripts were running, though, other elements of the page broke (specifically a jQuery plugin and a YUI component). This wasn’t ideal either because the browser screen had to go blank between every page for every visitor. This code affects all visitors to the site when I’m really only worried about the 30% who use Firefox. So I came up with this solution which only affects Firefox users and which doesn’t hide the body elements (so that nothing breaks):

$(document).ready(function(){
$("body").css("-moz-opacity","0"); //this css is only used by Mozilla browsers like Firefox
$(window).load(function(){
$("body").css("-moz-opacity","1");
});
});

It doesn’t seem to be working when I use this “-moz-opacity” style in a “loading” CSS class (and then use $("body").addClass("loading") and $("body").removeClass("loading") to change the styling). Perhaps this is because Mozilla has deprecated this style. I also don’t like reading that Gecko 1.9.1/ Firefox 3.5 and later do not support -moz-opacity. By now, you should be using simply opacity. However, it seems to be working when jQuery applies this style with css. Just to make sure this trick works in the future, I’ll instead use the css opacity style after doing a jQuery browser detect:

In the stylesheet:
.loading{opacity:0;}

In the javascript:
if($.browser.mozilla){
$("body").addClass("loading");
$(window).load(function() {
$("body").removeClass("loading",500);//I'm using the jQuery UI animation here to fade content in, omit the ",500" if you aren't loading jqueryui.1.7.2.js.
});
};

Ah. This appears to be working and only will affect the Firefox users with the screen going blank. But once the fonts are formatted, the body will gracefully fade in. Your thoughts or suggestions are appreciated!

If you discover any bugs, or if you have any requests for any part of our website, please report them here. Thanks for helping us make www.boxcarpress.com a better site!

Thanks to everyone who placed orders over the weekend and today! Here’s an update of the status of website problems that we’ve corrected and the ones we’re still working on.

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We commissioned our favorite photographer-superstar Doug Lloyd to create portraits of our presses. The results are sigh-inducing works of true love. You’ll also find stories about our presses’ past lives here.

Flurry: a Journal Among the Printers launches with articles about the eco-green letterpress scene; a profile of fine press genius Walter Hamady; and Hamady’s never before published essay that will inspire and rekindle your passion for printing.

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Welcome to the newly birthed Boxcar Press web site!

Just because we’ve been working on our new web site for most of our lives, please don’t feel obliged to go lovingly through every single section and then call us at 315.473.0930 to read us your favorite parts. You are under no obligation to send us flowers, dark chocolate with a 70% minimum cocoa content, or long e-mails to explain how pretty the new site is. Under no means should you allow us to bribe you into memorizing the jsp code, tattooing the urls of your favorite pages across your elbows, writing poetry about the new site, or mailing us hundreds of gold stars.

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