Slimstat – Statistics software built using php and mysql.
(0)Archive for the 'design + dev' Category
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Great image:
Click for larger version
I just love that image. It’s from the movie Alexander in case you haven’t seen it… that image comes from a major battle almost half way through the film…
update: Just finished the 2nd half of the movie… damn good story.
Tasks Pro 1.6 beta 1 is out – I gotta check that out one day… I think it’ll make life easier by helping me keep a good strong list of stuff I need to do…
(0)Communication Nation from the founder of XPlane. Gotta spend more time reading this latter.
(0)I found an opensource/free flash based image viewer application today that I totally dig:
I may use it to build a few special galleries in the future instead of PhotoStack, which powers my main photo gallery needs at englers.org.
Writing HTML for email newsletters has always been a pain in the butt for me. I’ve never been particularly good at it, so I was pleased to read this new How to write HTML for email guide was a welcome read.
Ok, this is an egg on my face story:
On Janaury 9th, I wrote about adding Jeremy’s comment spam prevention code to my site. I also added the code to my .htaccess file. All has been well. I’ve gotten dramatically less spam since then… however…
I logged into my Google Adsense account the other day, and noticed that my earnings were way down… waaaay down. And that got me concerned. At first I suspected Google did a Google Dance on their servers, and that was sending a lot less traffic to me… but I figured if that had happened, a lot of other people would be complaining too, and I hadn’t noticed that… so…
I started looking at when the traffic dropped off, and I realized it apparently happened on January 10th. So, I read what I wrote on the 9th and/or 10th, and realized that I probably broke my site when I played with my .htaccess file, as it was all working fine before I played with that file.
Sure enough, none of the links on my site were working. See, I’ve got “extension free urls” which is a trick I pulled off, so that you can look at this url:
http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/2005/01/09/comment_spam_prevention/
instead of this url:
http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/2005/01/09/comment_spam_prevention.php
Not a huge deal, but enough that I like having “extension free urls”. Well, none of those links were working… but the real url (with the .php) was working fine, so I knew it wasn’t my entire site that was broken…
Anyways, I started investigating the .htaccess files for this site, and I had like 4 or 5 saved versions (I always save a copy, just in case I break something)… but none of them were from Janaury 9th. (I save files with this filename format filename.save.20050109 so that I know when they were saved from.)
I figured that maybe I didn’t save a copy, so I started playing with the .htaccess file powering the site, deleting stuff, and moving stuff around, and nothing was working. So I changed the owner to my useraccount and to root, and chmod’d it to 777, 755, 555, 677, 766, all manner of different combinations…
All to no avail.
Then I thought maybe I created a new .htaccess file in the /weblog directory for some reason, in addition to the one that sits at the root directory for this site.
Sure enough, that’s what I did. And the two files weren’t playing nice to each other, for whatver reason.
I deleted the extra file, and viola, all is well again.
Like I said, beware the power of .htaccess when you don’t really understand how mod_rewrite works, or rather, beware my own idiocy.
So, here’s to getting the Google traffic back to my archive pages, which is obviously where 90% of my Google revenues come from.
This is the coolest web page header design on a ‘news’ website I’ve seen in a long time.
On this page, and doubtless on the rest of the International Herald Tribune web pages, they have this really cool header that is the whole header at the top of the page, but becomes just the useful part (the navigational part — minus the ads) as you scroll down the page.
Just wanted to point out that I think it’s a very cool design.
Following the footsteps of Jeremy Zawodny, Jason Kottke, Mark Pilgrim and others, I’ve established my very own linkblog.
On it, I’ll post links that I think are interesting enough to read, but either don’t have the time or energy, or need, to write anything in depth about them.
An RSS feed is here, and the templates are here for those wishing to do the same thing on their own MT weblog.
I’m using the MT Excerpt field to hold comments about the link that I want to add to it, and using the MT Body field to hold the URL of the link… I might change it up a bit in the future, to add more context, but for now, I think that’s plenty.
The linkblog also shows up in searches now, so you can search from the linkblog homepage, or this weblog homepage… either will get you the same results.
Keith posted a question, and the answer to that same question:
How do I add an ‘edit this page’ button to a Movable Type weblog?
Very cool. Thanks Keith.
Angie McKaig tackles the Full RSS Feed question. I subscribe to Angie’s full feed, and I think her site has a wonderful design.
I subscribe to her full feed because I’d like to read her site whenever it’s updated, and… I really don’t have the capacity or desire to remember to visit her site every day to see if it’s updated, and… I really like to read everything she writes… but often don’t have time to click-thru to her website from my RSS reader, and then go read her site, then return to my RSS reader to read the rest of the feeds I’m subscribed to…
So, I’m very thankful to Angie for offering her entire feed… and, if you need MT templates to offer your readers multiple feeds, you can steal my RSS templates.
I’d also make a plea that more traditional publishers start publishing RSS feeds, and, if they can include advertising in the feeds (to pay for them) go right ahead, just save me time and I’ll read their content more often.
A few links from the month:
- ADHD Observations – interesting comments from a parent of children with ADHD.
- CSS Dropshadows – from ALA #172.
- The Lowering of Loyalty from FastCompany (great first comment).
- How Not to Win Customer Loyalty from Business2.0.
- Top 25 Cities in the US for Doing Business from Inc.
- The Three C’s of Personal Branding from brandchannel.com.
- MacRumors Buyer’s Guide — know when to buy that new Mac.
- The Perfect 404 from ALA #168.
- 15″ Powerbook Battery Life Tests.
- Agenda Detection — great read for people that end up attending a lot of meetings at work.
- RSSTop55 – a list of RSS submission sites and blog directories.
- The Best Bosses from Fortune.com
- Speeding up MovableType.
- No Salesperson is an Island from BusinessWeek
- Mail.app Plugins and Suggestions.
- Web Economy Bullshit Generator.
- A Standard for Site Organization from stating the obvious (read more from the archives).
- Movable Type, Static Pages, Flexibility and Scalability.
- Web site user modeling with PHP
- 5 reasons you need an IRA from Fool.com
- Why I Fucking Hate Weblogs!
- Technological Fanaticism
- Crafting a Powerful Executive Summary from the Harvard Business School.
- The Logbook of the Saturday Dining Conspiracy – Austin, TX restaurant guide.
I learned a neat little HTML/Javascript trick on the about page of the newly launched Orkut from Google.
Here is the trick (let the page load entirely, then watch the next line (on smaller pages it’s much cooler… see the individual story archive page to see it happen the way it should really happen)):
This text will fade in on page load. But this text won’t (It’s displayed in-line as the page is built).
It’s accomplished with code that looks like this:
<html>
<head>
<script language="javascript">
col=255;
function fade() { document.getElementById("fade").style.color="rgb(" + col + "," + col + "," + col + ")"; col-=5; if(col>0) setTimeout('fade()', 10); }
</script>
</head>
<body onLoad="fade()">
<p>
<span id="fade">This text will fade in.</span> But this text won't.
</p>
</body></html>
Pretty cool huh?
(If it doesn’t seem to work for you, it’s probably because this page loads pretty slowly… see the individual archive page for it to look more natural.)
First, let me say, I don’t know Nick Denton at all. I also only know Noel Jackson through email (though we’ve emailed a bit for two complete strangers) and I’ve only read some of Joe Clark’s stuff online, here and there.
But, when I read this post by Noel, and then more here on the same topic by Joe, I couldn’t help but feel like Noel and Joe obviously got the royal Denton for Christmas this year. The big question for me is “what can Nick and/or Joe do about what’s happened?”
The best answer I can come up with is “pretty much, nothing.”
Sure, they could likely sue Nick and/or Gawker Media, but that would most likely cost more than it was worth, and they did submit an unsolicited idea to a company… those unsolicited ideas are generally not something an individual can claim much of a pay-off for after giving them to a company, unless those ideas really pay off in the long term for the company that ‘steals’ those ideas.
So, is there a lesson here for the rest of us? I think so:
Don’t give away unsolicited (or solicited) ideas to companies that you may want to work for in the future… It doesn’t pay you enough and not all companies follow “honourable business practices”.
Another lesson (this one for Denton) is that if you are a company that “can’t afford” to compensate someone for their ideas and work properly, don’t use those ideas and/or work… bad PR is worse than no PR.
Chuq was bitching about Marc Canter’s whining about Paolo’s pointing to a post by Todd Dominey. I read Chuq’s post, and followed the trail through to Todd’s post about the text-shadow CSS2 attribute, and am pleased to announce I am using it on this here website.
If you’re using Safari 1.1, then you’ll notice the drop-shadows on the title of each post, as well as in the sidebar title’s and the banner at the top of this page… pretty cool, in my opinion.
It looks like this in the stylesheet:
text-shadow: dimgray 3px 3px 3px;
And that code produces this type of a title:
If you can’t see the drop shadow under my entry titles in your browser, you’re not using Safari 1.1, and for that I apologize… I wish your browser supported the CSS2 attribute properly. (If you can’t see the image of the drop-shadow above, then your browser doesn’t support PNG files, and I’m sorry for that too).
Here’s a few links to stuff I’ve read over the past month or so:
- Deciding On The Advertising Media – good pros and cons list of different advertising mediums, but leaves out online advertising
- The On-line Marketer’s Secret Weapon: A Site that Works
- Salted Wound : Perfect Weblog Ads
- Seth’s Blog: Why Web Ads Don’t Work
- Fresh Inc: Creating Buzz
- MacMinute: RIAA may have sued the wrong (Mac) person
- “Dude, I could buy mad weed for $129.” – hah! too funny comment
- Letter from Cupertino – reflections from the first month of being employed at Apple
- Smart Playlists.com
- 15-inch Aluminum PowerBook G4 – Page 1 – (10/2003)
- The iPodlet
- decaffeinated: AppRocket – AppRocket is a complete copy (for Windows) of LaunchBar, a fantastic utility for MacOS X.
- Why do Bloggers prefer Macs? – question from the Scobleizer
- The Tao of Mac
- PithHelmet – An ad blocker hack for Safari from what I can tell (haven’t installed it, as I like to support tasteful advertising on the internet.)
- Leaves Rustle: Favicon Creation with GraphicConverter
- Safari Bookmark Exporter – what I am now using to build my link-dump posts
- Mac-Mike: Waiting to be opened
- kasia in a nutshell: The lost art of esthetics
- Lick Me, I’m A Macintosh
- online advertising: sbb
- A Shareware Life – shareware marketing and everything else for shareware authors
- Suppose you could really figure out why advertising works.
- marketing/pricing myths
- Sole Proprietorships: "Sole Proprietorships"
- FCNow: What Business Are You In?
- Inc.com | What Kind of Business Should Your Business Be?
- Seth’s Blog: Traffic doesn’t matter
- A Penny For…: Firing Customers
- Sept. 15, 2003: The Seven Heuristics of Brand Aligned Organizations
- CapitalistBrief – Business News
- The Occupational Adventure (sm) Blog
- Inc.com | The 60-Day New Employee Survey
- Control Your Time: Time Management – BusinessTown
- BusinessPundit: The Value of Sales Experience
- Inc.com | Getting to No
- Cvent – Event Planning, Event Management and Online Event Registration Software – might need this someday
- Brain Brew Radio | Creative Business Thinking
- Inc.com | Better Methods
- BusinessPundit: Successful Implementation of a Corporate Culture
- How To: Score Higher in Google Search Engine
- Breadcrumbs PHP Class
- Julie Albertson | Thoughts | The problem with usability testing…
- Testing Slow User Connections
- AdMonsters – support and networking group for online advertising traffickers
- IDblog: an information design weblog
- Salted Wound : Perfect Weblog Ads
- Usable Digital Media ::: Web Application Usability Blog.
- Seth’s Blog: Helping Jack with web design
- Whitespace
- ClearSilver – HTML template system
- Russell Beattie Notebook: Load Acrobat Faster
- Outlook Tips – very useful information for Outlook users
- AppRocket – still in Public Beta, but a very cool idea that is available on the Mac has been stolen and ported to Windows XP.
- P.S. Fudgeworks – ummmm! Looks good…
- BARTON | FUNK – love this design firms entry page, had to note it.
- IDEA HOUSE – I like this advertising firm’s elevator speech
- American Girls — requires sound, so turn on your speakers (too funny)
- How to Write a Thank-You Note
- Kevin Kelly — Recomendo – totally cool idea, and a great read.
- A tidbit for Movable Type users
- eclecticism > Weblog Ethics
- Google News Creator Watches Portal. Quiet Critics With ‘Best News’ Webby
- the typewriter-keyboard conversion
Advertising
Macintosh
Business
Design and Development
Windows stuff
Misc.
Worth reading to any Macintosh-using developer or dabbler:
BBEdit Version Control by John Gruber [via Daring Fireball]
Thanks John.
In case you didn’t notice, I finally did a little housekeeping with my URL structure (after writing about it many, many times). Thanks in large part to a bunch of articles I’ve read recently about URLs, and an excellent conversion tutorial from Olivier Travers (which is where almost all of my tricks came from), I’m pleased to announce that my site now has a much better URL structure (in my mind), but it didn’t come without a lot of work.
The premise was to create a cookie-crumb trail URL scheme so that anyone could read a story:
http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/2003/06/14/acuna/
and by deleting the directory (or crawling up the directory structure), they could read all of the stories for that day:
http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/2003/06/14/
or month:
http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/2003/06/
or, that if they wanted to they could browse the category archives more easily:
http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/categories/leadership_management/
http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/categories/marketing_advertising/
though I still need to build the master category page that should reside at http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/categories/
After reading this article against file extensions on the web, I also didn’t want people to have to know that I was using PHP, though I don’t mind them knowing, so I really wanted everything to look like it was sitting in a directory (even if it’s really a file, or it’s really sitting in its own directory). It should be transparent to the user, and still Google friendly, and user friendly… so:
Here are the steps I used to get my URLs straight, and not lose any traffic from old links, or search engines (GoogleJuice) that haven’t updated their links (stolen largely from Olivier and improved in a few places)
1. With the individual entry path still set at <$MTEntryTitle dirify=”1″$>, replaced the individual entry template to:
<?php
$NewUrl = "<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/%d/"$><$MTEntryTitle dirify="1"$>/";
$NewUrl = "http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/" . $NewUrl;
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: $NewUrl");
exit();
?>
This is so that all of the old inbound links will get redirected to the proper place which will be created in a few steps.
2. Rebuilt individual entries. (This took a bit of time, but not too long. As Olivier’s example states, at this point, old links aren’t working anymore, but we’ll fix that in a few steps)
3. Changed the individual entry path (in MT’s archiving settings) to:
<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/%d/"$><$MTEntryTitle dirify="1"$>.php
Note: This is different than Olivier’s approach, as I didn’t want to have a whole lot of individual directories to maintain in the filesystem, but rather one directory per day in each month containing however many posts were created that day.
Also changed the daily archive’s entry path:
<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/%d/index.php"$>
the monthly archive’s path:
<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/index.php"$>
and the category archive’s path:
categories/<$MTCategoryLabel dirify="1"$>.php
4. Replaced the individual entry template with my old template.
5. Rebuilt individual entries. (At this point, old links almost work again because the redirects set up in step 1 now point to directories much like the files created in step 5, but not quite… I’ll fix that in a minute with a mod_rewrite trick I learned… read on.)
6. Added the following lines to my .htaccess file to redirect monthly and category archives pages which were easy to handle through regexp thanks to their previous structure.
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule weblog/archives/200([0-9])_([0-9])([0-9])_(.*)(\.php)$
http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/200$1/$2$3/$4 [R=301]
RewriteRule weblog/archives/200([0-9])_(.*)(\.php)$
http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/200$1/$2/ [R=301]
RewriteRule weblog/archives/cat_(.*)(\.php)$
http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/categories/$1/ [R=301,L]
(formating note: each line in the .htaccess file starts with “RewriteRule”, ie. there aren’t any breaks in the code when it’s in the real file on the server)
7. Added the following rule (taken from Keith’s “no extensions” entry) so that category pages (which are technically category_name.php) can be delivered as directories (among other page types)
RewriteRule ^([^.]+[^/])$ $1/ [R=permanent,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.php -f
RewriteRule ^(.+[^/]) $1.php
8. Added some code to all of the internal links (depending on which type there were that replaced the ‘.php’ or ‘index.php’ with ‘/’ (as appropriate) so that all links on the site go to the correct place:
<?php echo str_replace("index.php","","<$MTArchiveLink$>"); ?>
<?php echo str_replace(".php","/","<$MTEntryLink$>"); ?>
Oh, and if you’re looking for a decent mod_rewrite primer, here’s one at Kuro5hin.
One last thing, Olivier, since you’re stuck on IIS as your dev platform of choice, you’re probably going to be looking ISAPI_rewrite which I pointed to back in November of ’02.
I read an article today about Amazon’s new RSS feeds, and quickly moved to investigate the PR. I added a bunch of feeds to NetNewsWire. I’m thinking this could be dangerous (feel free to grab these feeds for your own use):
- DVDs:
- Science Fiction and Fantasy DVDs
- Today’s Deals in DVDs – this is the one that’ll be dangerous
- Boxed Sets DVDs
- Action Adventure DVDs
- Romantic Comedies DVDs
I’m excited to see a company introduce RSS feeds for the public in a revenue generating environment. It’s only a matter of time before other companies catch on. To me, the importance of Amazon introducing RSS feeds for products isn’t really that big of a deal for News Aggregator software, but rather for how super easy it would be to add these feeds to web sites.
Amazon will make money with this one.
In case you haven’t noticed, the “Steal My Buttons” effort run by Taylor at gtmcknight.com is up to 839 Buttons. Wow.
Tom Coates wrote an article that says people don’t need Search Engine Optimization companies to help them get good rankings in Search Engines. I’d say that I disagree with such a blanket statement.
A lot of companies do need SEO consultants as long as those consultants are trustworthy and will help those company’s build good sites built on those basic principles that Tom tells his readers about. Search Engine Optimzation consultants are what companies that want good search referrals need, not those kinds of companies that sell you a bunch of inter-client links, or one that just submits you to 1,000 search engines… just a good old fashioned consultant to teach their client how to do things better.
I can’t point you to a great SEO firm off the top of my head, but I can tell you that my buddies at MarketingFix (soon to be Up2Speed) are experts at search engine ranking.
Also, keep in mind that Search Engine Optimization is quite different than Search Engine Marketing.
What is hypertext? It’s one of those things that make the web so wonderful, but how many of us have stared into the various, intricate patterns in the rich tapestry of hypertext and pondered them? We’ve certainly come a long way from the ‘ click here ‘ days of old.
Interesting read… although I’m sure it’s too short… lots of linky goodness though.
Dear Client,
Netscape 4 is now six years old. Could we please stop catering to an old, buggy browser that is incompatible with all other browsers?
Thanks.
I mention it in full, as my web dev department asked our internet general manager just today if we could drop Netscape 4.x support in the next major redesign of our website… the big problem with doing that is that we still use Netscape scheduling software, and thus 90% of the organization uses Netscape 4.7, as Netscape 7.x isn’t supported by the scheduling software we’re using (or some such other BS reason)… so guess what? It’s gonna be very hard to convince the folks that matter (the bigs guys) that Netscape 4.x is a dead browser platform in my company…
…maybe one of these days.
Years ago, major web-sites were ‘re-launched’ every year or two, and some were relaunched as often as every six-months. This often resulted in major usability changes for a large group of core users that ended up sounding very vocal to the designers and managers of those websites. Today’s approach is to no ‘re-launch’ a website in one fell swoop, but rather to have ‘creeping site re-design’ and continual improvements added all the time. This article is a great overview of the practice, and one I’d recommend reading.
For the past week I’ve been pretty busy… here are a few things I’ve read recently and needed to blogmark:
Let’s Make a Cell-Phone Deal – I’ve done this. It works. More from ArsTechnica.
Working with Forms in PHP, Part 1 and Part 2. Great information on PHP and forms handling.
Great tutorial on Cookies and PHP.
Famous Fonts [via angiemckaig.com]
Upsell More [from XPlane]
Closing the Sale [from XPlane]
Increasing Customer Loyalty [from Xplane]
The Anatomy of a Style Sheet (brought to you at 37,000 feet courtesy of Net News Wire Pro’s caching of RDF feeds – Thanks Brent) Looks like a great start to a useful CSS tutorial… and something I can really use the help on learning.
Automating iPhoto 2 with AppleScript
So Much for Economic Principle :: Apple Computer’s persistence defies the law of increasing returns.
A article on software development and the business side of it: Risky Business part 1, and part 2
Just wanted to share with those of you looking for a job, or a better job, that LJWorld.com is looking for a web programmer/developer. I’d highly recommend the job to anyone with the reuqired skill set. LJWorld is one of the leaders in the industry. Good luck if you apply. And if I know you, let me know you applied and I’ll pass on a recommendation if I feel that I can.
Noel Jackson has released the truly fantastic PhotoPal 1.0b. I’m using it here… you should be too.
Think MovableType templating, with the ease of PHP understanding for a photo store, photo blog, or even just a handy place to hold your images for personal archival and retrieval purposes… truly fantastic.
I’ve installed another hack: Google Hilite from Dean Allen over at Textism.
So, now if you search Google for somewhere over the rainbow-mp3 and follow the first link, you’ll see a page where the terms you’ve searched for are highlighted.
Pretty cool. Thanks Dean.
When you’re designing advertising, or pretty much anything for that matter, you should know the reasons for using certain colors:
About.com: The Psychology of Color
Interesting: The Meaning of Color in Cultures
From HP (a PDF): The Meaning of Color
Scott’s Feedster has made the blogrolls quite a bit lately, and while definitely cool, it wasn’t something I was following all that much, but, while I was telling him to call AppleCare to get his iBook diagnosed over the phone yesterday, he showed me Feedster Images.
I think Feedster Images is totally cool… in fact, I’m blogrolling it.
Found this handy dandy Character Entity Reference thanks to a link from Zeldman
This is something to add to my weblog this weekend.
Later: Just found Google Hilite from Textism… cool stuff.
News.com’s got a great ‘history of the browser‘ in celebration of Mosaic’s 10 year anniversary (which is today btw).
Ugh… oh how a thief must feel after being caught stealing someone’s code. Adam Kalsey has publicly shamed a thief. And it’s really sort of sad that someone would steal Kalsey’s code, and then put it online to claim as their own. Don’t people realize that there’s just about nothing on the internet that Google doesn’t know about?
I’ve never really paid much attention to accessability guidelines, thought I’ve found them quite interesting. I’m not a designer or a developer by trade anymore, but rather am a sales person, so I just pay attention to them peripherally, but…
I’ve got a new Palm that talks to my phone via bluetooth, and the web via GPRS, so, when using the snazzy little web browsing application, I was quite happy when reading inluminent/weblog and marketingfix (which are basically the same template, but using CSS to position the sidebar on seperate sides on the pages), they both look the same on the Palm browser, that is, the content shows up before the long sidebar/linkrail, which is what I’d prefer, if I were using a small PDA based web-browser.
Sadly, the images aren’t turned off on inluminent/weblog like they should be (thanks to CSS) but still, it’s a great relief to know that the pages are quite readable thanks to CSS positioning…
For more on CSS positioning and accessability/usability guidelines, I’d recommend the following links:
That’s a short list, but a good one… add your links in the comments.
Looking for stock photos for a project you’re working on?
Look no further than:
Inertia Stock Exchange: share your photos with fellow designers. For personal or commercial use. Long live the free exchange of information and ideas.
[via angiemckaig]
Adrian Holovaty just published an Interview with Web optimization expert Andy King in which she asks Andy a great set of questions that deal with website optimization for news sites specifically, which would also help weblog writers. Here’s some of what I gained from the interview:
“67.5% of us are still plugging away at 56Kbps or less” (See this report: Bandwidth Report)
Writing compelling headlines and decks, or “blurbs” as we call them, is an art form in itself. At WebReference we used to see who could “out-blurb” each other in one or two sentences. The folks at ClickZ.com are especially good at this. I always look forward to seeing what they come up with next.
for all bloggers and journalists I would recommend two books: “Hot Text: Web Writing that Works” and “Wired Style.” They’re both excellent reads and will improve your writing for the Web.
Great little tidbits.
[written on 3/2 at 10:00 pm]
I justed finished reading the latest Media Professional email newsletter by Adam Cohen and I could these two great resources that I couldn’t help but share:
Direct Creative which is a “direct response resource site from copywriter Dean Rieck.” Adam’s newsletter points out this page with some great offers to try specifically.
And Anybrowser which will help you see what your design looks like in browsers other than your own default browser. (A lot cheaper than buying more than one computer (or Virtual PC) just to test a website design).
I use BBEdit to write all of my entries for this weblog, as well as to edit the templates remotely, so finding this MT Glossary for BBEdit was quite cool. I’m looking forward to using it soon to update some parts of this site and MarketingFix.
I saw some really kick ass mouseovers on Phil Ringnalda’s site, and decided I wanted to use them on inluminent/weblog, so… I stole the code, and implemented it here…
The thing is, I think the code only works in Mozilla or at least Gecko based browsers on a Mac (though it sounds like Safari might support it soon too). It works ‘sort of’ on IE 6 on a PC, but doesn’t look as good as it does on a Mac using Mozilla…
Anyways, here’s what you should see:
I think it’s cool. It’s a combination of CSS and Javascript, and I dig it. It only happens when I add “title=text” tags to the links, but that’s cool, and serves the purpose I want it to.
[update: I just learned this technique is called "nice title" and the source is Kryogenix through a trackback on this post.]
On Monday, I downloaded the latest version of Opera for Mac so that I could test some of the problems that people have reported with the new “images: on/off” option that I’m offering on inluminent/weblog. Then I read this article on C|Net.
It basically says that Opera might be dead on the Macintosh due to the release of Safari.
The question for me now becomes… do I really care about ‘fixing’ a problem on my site that only really affects Opera for Mac users?
On one hand, I’d love to figure out how to make the CSS switching Javascript work in Opera browsers. On the other hand, only about 0.74%% of my readers use Opera on Windows or Macintosh. Only 2% of those users use Opera on a Macintosh. That’s an amazingly small number.
Is it worth my time to fix a Javascript problem with Opera, or can I count on Opera to either fix it, or quit developing a Mac browser?
Honestly at this point I don’t have the time to worry about Opera browser support on top of my regular work life… sorry folks. Use IE, Mozilla, or wait on Safari to come out of beta to get the “images: on/off” feature.
It’s never to late to learn about the Q Tag from diveintomark.
So, now the question is… should I go back and fix all of my old code?
A long, long time ago… Kasia asked me to get rid of the images on inluminent/weblog.
I immediately wanted to do what she asked, as I didn’t mean to offend Kasia, or any other female readers. But, I didn’t know how to do it quickly, and I was in the middle of getting ready to start a new job, and move to a new city. Scott also asked me to make the images optional.
At the time, I couldn’t figure out how to do it easily. No one else emailed me with a complaint, but I’ve seen a few comments on other blogs since they asked.
Alas…. I’ve figured out an easy way to do it, thanks to the clean code on Zeldman.com. I’ve watched how Zeldman does things like hiding menus and switching stylesheets with awe (ok, it’s not that hard, but it was something I didn’t know how to do) and finally sat down today to play with the idea of ‘hiding’ the images from readers.
And, I figured it out. I’m using two stylesheets to do this. The default stylesheet includes this piece of code:
img {
display: none;
border: 0;
}
And the alternate stylesheet includes this piece of code:
img {
display: block;
border: 0;
}
I’m not sure that I know what that little difference does, but I do know that if you click the little no images or images link on the right sidebar above the calendar, you’ll get the effect that you’re looking for.
I’ll get rid of the image in the header graphic eventually, but wanted to tell Kasia and Scott that I’ve succeded. Individual posts still contain the images, as well as a call to an old stylesheet, but I’ll fix those soon.
[update: I've modified the switch.js file so that it is a complete copy of the zeldman switch.js file, which means that it now sets a cookie when you change the style, which saves your default style to your browser... so next time you come back, your prefered style should be preserved -- thanks for the request Erik]
[2nd update: All pages now default to no images, but if you select the image rich stylesheet, that behavior will follow you throughout the site, and still work when you come back. Choose your own desire. -- Sidebar: RSS feeds will still include images for a while... unless someone requests that I offer an RSS feed without images]
[3rd update: seems to work fine in Mozilla 1.1 on OS X, IE on OS X, and crashes Safari on OS X... no idea why... haven't checked any Windows browsers... leave a comment if this switching of stylesheets breaks your browser]
So, I’m seeing this page in my referrers:
The visitor’s IP from that page resolves to yahoo.com so I’m wondering what ilist.yahoo.com is.
Anyone have an idea?
[update: Jeremy tells me that it's an internal mailing list manager and that someone was probably reading their archives and clicked through to inluminent]
Wow.
Brought to you by Dean Allen.
Looks totally cool, very useful, and fun.
I’ll definitely be looking into it for a client in the near future.
Dean, if you’re reading, I’ll need to know what the pricing will be buddy.
Oh yeah, one more time:
WOW!
