Post Archive

› December 31, 2002

Prizes!

Happy New Year!
Prizes have been announced for the WThRemix contest.

› December 30, 2002

Show Divs

A while back I had put together a little "show divs" bookmarklet for the purpose of quickly viewing the divs and spans in a page layout. The bookmarklet simply gave all divs and spans borders on the fly using javascript and CSS. It was based on a popular and very handy "show tables" bookmarklet created by sam-i-am. I just discovered when looking up my show divs bookmarklet that it no longer works (because I didn't account for some after effects of a recent smarty pants install). So I'll need to go back and edit the post and comments to take this into account, but in the meantime here is an alternate solution that I think is more useful than my original bookmarklet:
You can use Phalen's bookmarklet maker to create your own personalized CSS tool. The bookmarklet maker simply creates a link which includes the required javascript to reference a local file that can temporarily overwrite the page's style with whatever CSS is most useful for your style diagnosing needs. For instance, you can create a mimic of the original show divs bookmarklet by simply using an element (DIV and SPAN) selector in your local stylesheet and giving them 1 pixel dashed borders. You could take it a step further and render each level of nesting divs a different color using child (div>div) selectors.
For those of us using OS X, the file reference should look like the following - depending on where you'd like to store the CSS file (in this case I'm storing it within the documents folder for my user login): 

file:///Users/YourName/Documents

So this is obviously quite nice because you have a whole CSS document to work with and refine for testing, and of course because testing is still only a single bookmarklet click away.
Personal aside:
This post was created as a undeserved distraction from a large amount of work which needs to be completed before the new year begins, for those interested in the w3mix contest: we have all the exciting prize information and will be posting it on Jan 1st.

› December 23, 2002

smokinggun in flash

I missed it, but some time in the not too distant past smokinggun redesigned with an all flash interface. Lots of interesting and good looking work here, and thankfully the slick code snippets are still posted.

› December 21, 2002

Apostrophes are hard

Daliel Leite has a laundry list of grammatical errors involving our little friend the apostrophe: ‘Postrophe’s Rule! Each entry includes the suggested correction, and a number code for errors. Perhaps if I dedicate some time to studying this, I'll have a better grasp of how to use apostrophes properly? I can only hope.

› December 18, 2002

WThRemix

Flex your design and coding skills in our new contest:WThRemix is a contest to re-design the W3C homepage.

› December 14, 2002

Textile

In the last post, I mentioned having just integrated Smartypants; while we are on the subject - Dean of Textism has released yet another excellent tool he calls Textile. In a nutshell - it replaces stuff you type into a text field with stuff you would have typed in if you had a lot of entities memorized, plus it'll let you do lots of usefull text structuring without having to understand HTML. In and of itself, a very slick tool, as part of the upcoming TextPattern CMS - watch out. Thanks to a reader for emailing the url and suggesting the post

› December 13, 2002

Tweakings on this site

Just decided to spend a little time changing the fonts here, I've added a few Mac OS X specific system fonts to the font-family list in our css file, messed about with the navigation, it's all experimentation that will require some more tweaking for other browsers (mostly nip and tucking spacings I think), but should be very readable. I've also added smartypants so that the character encoding for quotes and dashes happens when the pages are published - this is also a difference in how the comment box works. I've flipped the MovableType switch for line break conversion in the comment box, so leaving comments should be a simpler matter... maybe. As always, XHTML is accepted in comments, but please mind your syntax. More tweaking in the next few days, but please let me know if you see problems, or any other comment you may wish to make.

Zope and Plone for OS X

After seeing Tom Smith point out that there is an OS X beta installer of Plone, I had to check it out to see what I was missing. In short, this is perhaps one of the most powerful web server/cms packages you can get for free. Plone is a multi-user content management system that runs on top of the Zope server. The OS X package installs Zope and Plone and gives you an icon in your Apps/Zope/ folder to start up zope with a click. To get started, you'll have to change the "server" user and may want to add a new user as well.

Upon using it for an hour, I have to say that the CMS is very easy to use and the interface is nice to work with.

› December 12, 2002

New Version of MT-RefSearch

"MT-RefSearch (a PHP script for Movable Type + MySQL users) helps travellers from search engines by finding related content on your blog. When a searcher clicks your blog from Google, Yahoo!, or any of the other 243 supported engines, MT-RefSearch does a query on the Movable Type database and outputs links that are of interest to the traveller. Besides having numerous improvements for error correction and configuration, the latest version also includes JavaScript to highlight the search terms on the page the visitor is looking at. Be nice to your visitors and help them find the content they are looking for."

Very Nice Job.

› December 11, 2002

Boxes and Arrows Updates

Get em hot and fresh.

Making the Web Work: Designing Effective Web Applications
by Jeff Lash
“Making the Web Work: Designing Effective Web Applications” is a well-written, meaty book on the entire process of designing interactive websites from a user interface perspective. Those new to the field of user-centered design will find it most useful; intermediate or advanced practitioners looking for in-depth information specific to web applications may want to look elsewhere.

All About Facets & Controlled Vocabularies
by Karl Fast, Fred Leise and Mike Steckel
Information architects are fascinated with faceted classification and its application to information architecture problems. Our three authors present a series of in-depth articles covering faceted classification and controlled vocabularies and their practical application.

I'm constantly amazed at the ammount of content Boxes produces.

› December 10, 2002

Google Viewer

Via Archipelago: An interesting experiment over at Google Labs: Google Viewer makes a scrolling slideshow of your search results. Strangely, it seems to attempt rendering each search result in it's own way (rather than through an iframe or something), I'm guessing this is what's happening because it seems to be stripping out external stylesheet data. Interestingly Andy developed something similar a while back that uses dual floating windows.

Stay up to date with Milo's Forum

From Milo's site:

“The forum now has its own rss-feed, showing the 10 latest forum posts from all boards combined.”

Now you can plug this rss feed url into your rss reader of choice to keep easy tabs on the posts within. I wish more resources on the web which contain regularly updating content would provide rss feeds.

PocketMac syncs PocketPCs to OSX apps

I've mentioned this before, but it's worth reblogging because now PocketMac (Pocket PC to Mac Sync Software) supports iCal and Address Book synchronizing. From the announcement email:

“...on a more personal note, this software is now much closer to what we'd envisioned all along. I'm very pleased with the new look, smoother operation and improved synching.”

If you're like me and you jumped on the iPaq bandwagon before you jumped on the Apple switch bandwagon, this will probably make you feel better.

Making prototypes for testing

Sometimes you find just what you need at the moment, and you're pleased, so you decide to share the link, even though it's from July. Such is the case with What an IA Should Know About Prototypes for User Testing over at boxes and arrows.

› December 8, 2002

Phoenix 0.5 Released

Phoenix 0.5 is now out! Faster, better support for my 5-button mouse and a ton of skins make this an attractive package.

Flash Accessibility

A nice collection of tips and info for using the Flash MX accessability features to make your Flash work more accessible, at the Macromedia site. I don't think this is a brand new page or anything, just seems useful to note.

› December 7, 2002

W3C, XHTML.. but should it be more?

mschmidt from k10k says:

“...So, here's my plea to the W3C - try getting a designer involved with your next re-design, and try creating a site that actually shows the nice & beautiful things you can do with standards-compatible code.”

Agreed here (at least by me) - at the very least incorporate a design that is sharp, professional and dignified enough to reflect the nature of the W3C group, as it stands (in graphical browsers) the site seems to advertise the limitations that folks assume is part and parcell of strict standards adherence. I'm opening up the idea of a W3C homepage redesign challenge, more on this soon.

› December 6, 2002

Beandizzy bookmarklets

This may be the single most useful list of bookmarklets for web design/devlopers I've found: Beandizzy's "bookmarklets i can't do without". I've added it to our list of bookmarklet resources (bottom of right column for those viewing the webgraphics homepage with a semi-recent graphical browser).

Word HTML Cleaner

The Textism Tools just keep on coming: Dean updated the Word HTML Cleaner. He says "It should run faster, accept larger files, and retain a wider range of structure tags."

› December 5, 2002

Flash information resource

A flash based front end searching interface to "flashcoders", a mailing list that serves the flash development community (via flashguru).

Loving the Web

Christina Wodtke recently posted one of the reasons she loves the internet. Cute, but incorrect. The correct answer can be found here.

Tantek's Log

There are a slew (how many make up a slew? the dictionary is no help) of sites I've collected which need adding to the blog roll, one of which is Tantek Çelik's weblog, note the slick "hear ye, hear ye" CSS styling. On an unrelated note, I've decided that my writing style on this site would be best served by emulating the dyslexic spontaneity of larry king, something to aim for.

› December 4, 2002

Pretty Icons for OS X and Win XP

Check out the Snow.E2 set of 222 icons for OS X (also available for Win XP) find this goodness, plus a fantastic set of breakfast related icons (I may have linked these before), plus more at rad-e8 [flash site that I didn't see a direct link into, go to the design section in the menubar]. Some folks take aversion to the bold gaudyness that the newer generation of icons tend to feel like, perhaps it's a result of icon designer backlash against the insanely tight restrictions of traditional smaller 32 x 32 (and smaller) fixed bitmaps, regardless - when you see the yummy goodness of these rad-e8 icons it's harder to argue. If you're new to OS X, you'll want to download candybar from panic to easily put those new icons to use.

MovableType Plugin Directory

So you got yourself all setup with MovableType and have a spiffy weblog. Now you want to do some special stuff, maybe something that isn't documented, or for a unique purpose. Lots of folks have been kind enough to create MovableType Plugins for various purposes, and now there is a MovableType Plugin Directory to locate what you need. This is brought to us by Kristine one of the scriptgoddesses.

congrats to shiftyeye

Congrats to my friend Clay, for taking shiftyeye.com to the land of tableless xhtml validity.

Flash Code Depot - ASDG

Moock's "Action Script, the Difinitive Guide" book as a corresponding website which Colin is updating (you can subscribe for email notifications). I didn't notice the extensive code depot before.

› December 3, 2002

XFML as explained by DIM

Dive into Mark explains XFML in the clear, cohesive manner that makes his site one of the best.

› December 1, 2002

Google Hilite

Dean Allen recently made Google Hilite. After arriving at a site via Google, this bit of PHP highlights the terms in the Google search where they appear on the page. Great work, Dean!

Those who wanted the functionality of searchii, but didn't want to use JavaScript should definitely take a look.