Archive for April, 2003

Back Home, New Design

Sunday, April 27th, 2003

I have returned from Florida, pulled in at 12:30a this morning. Its’ good to be home.

As you can see, I have redesigned my site. It was largely done in CSS with a few minor changes to the markup but they were only so I could select things a little better. For those running Mozilla (and its derivitives), Opera and other browsers with native style sheet selection, the old design is still available (dosen’t stick though). I plan to write some JavaScript to expand this functionality to other browsers, but that will have to wait.

Please let me know what you think and definitely alert me to any bugs in the design.

Checking In From Florida

Thursday, April 24th, 2003

I’ve been down here since Monday, doing various things like visiting my grandmother (she did recognize me!!), visited the Kennedy Space Center (the Apollo rockets are just huge) and just enjoying the weather (averaging 80°). My dad and I will be heading home early tommorow and should arrive home around late Saturday night/early Sunday morning. Until then, TTFN.

Florida Or Bust

Friday, April 18th, 2003

My dad and I are driving to Florida tommorow and will be gone for about a week. I may try and blog while I’m down there but no promises ;).

The purpose of this trip is to see my ailing grandmother (dad’s mom). Let’s just say she may not recognise me. We also plan to do some fun things while we are there. Possibly vist Cape Kennedy. Maybe even Disney. I look forward to it.

Winners of the WThRemix Announced

Thursday, April 17th, 2003

Via Zeldman, the winners of the WThRemix contest were announced today. The winner, Radu Darvas, gave a very impressive entry. Just looking at it makes me want to redesign even more.

Mini Icons

Tuesday, April 15th, 2003

Inspired by Tamara, I went searching for the origins of her micro icons to indicate external links. My search turned up micro icons at webgraphics. Along with the external links icon, I also grabbed the email icon.

My implementation is a bit different then Tamara’s though. I used a set of CSS3 selectors to select links that are external.

a[href^="mailto:"] {
background: transparent url('/images/aemail.gif') 100% 50% no-repeat;
padding-right: 10px;
}
div.content a[href^="http:"] {
background: transparent url('/images/aoutside.gif') 100% 50% no-repeat;
padding-right: 10px;
}
div.content a[href^="http://my-dimension.com"],
div.content a[href^="http://www.my-dimension.com"] {
background: inherit;
padding-right: 0px;
}

That last selector disables the icon on links to this site but that use a ful URL instead of a relative one. This won’t work in most browsers (not sure which though) but then again this is my persoanl playground. Not to mention it is a feature which is not required to interact with this site.

Update[04/18/2003]: It seems a lot of feedback is being generated by this attribute selector method. Something I need to clarify though, I did not create this method. I found it on as days pass by. I apolgize for not crediting this earlier.

The Object of Discussion

Monday, April 14th, 2003

There is an interesting conversation brewing over on dive into mark about object and Internet Explorer. Mark’s problem comes from IE’s poor support for the object tag. object was added to the HTML 4.0 specification to provide a method of including a wide array of media types into a web document. Unfortunately, Microsoft has been sluggish to provide proper support for this tag.

But the saga doesn’t end there. Other browsers support this tag in different ways. One person noted this issue in Opera:

Opera appears to handle all objects like plugins, even those that are handled internally (and thus cannot be disabled by disabling plugins!).

And, according to an anonymous comment, Mozilla appears to not completely render the object beyond displaying the image:

I’m wondering why I can select the IMG one, but not the OBJECT one (in Mozilla 1.3). If I paste it in Word for example, the Img is pasted as image, the Object is pasted as HTML code. So it’s not quite all right in Mozilla neither I think.

I for one would love to see browsers come out with reliable support for this highly versatile tag. Robin Lionheart has an object test page which also shows some very interesting ways of using the object tag, such as providing layered, alternate content in the case of a lack of support for the primary content. In doing so you can provide varying levels of content and the browser “chooses” which one it can handle.

But alas, developers are hampered by poor browser support and as such are kept from providing, to their readers, a highly usable interface.

Return of the CSS Support Charts

Friday, April 11th, 2003

Eric Meyer has re-released his CSS Support Charts over on DevEdge. He has also taken steps to ensure this information is forever avialable to the web development world by licensing his work under a Creative Commons license. When I get the chance I am going to pour over these charts to see what I can see.

Thanks Eric 🙂 !

Simon Hits the Redesign Tablet

Wednesday, April 9th, 2003

Nothing more refreshing then to see a site redesign itself. Simon went for the orange look today. I like it. Gives site a bit more life.

Point of note for the CSS nay-sayers, Simon did this entire redesign without touching his markup but rather by recreating his style sheet. Something which I plan to do with this site in the near future (/me crosses fingers). Only I want to go for something radically different. Get really crazy. You know? Now all I need is time and some really good inspiration. (Hint Hint 😉 – you know any?)

P|-|34r t3h 600g13

Tuesday, April 8th, 2003

Via More Like This Weblog, Google as put out a |-|4X0r (hacker) style of their search page. Hilarious!

Title translation: Fear The Google

Enjoy.

Godsmack: Faceless

Tuesday, April 8th, 2003

Picked up the new Godsmack CD today. I love it! There is a very melodic sound to it, far different then the hard thrashing sound from their previous albums. But it’s all good.

And while I’m at it, let me tell you about the new CD player I am using to listen to this CD. I recently bought the iRiver SlimX iMP-350. This thing is incredible:

  • MP3/WMA/CD-RW/FM Player
  • up to 3 minutes of anti-shock on audio CDs
  • 8 minutes of anti-shock on compressed audio
  • extremely slim design: Approx. 135×145×16.7mm
  • intuitive remote control

This by far the best portable CD player I have ever owned. Being priced at US$129.99 (Best Buy) might be a slight set back to some but I find it well worth it.