Post Archive

› May 31, 2004

Lorem Ipsum with other charsets

There are a number of Lorem Ipsum generators, each of them shovels out paragraphs of gibberish (also known as "greeking") that designers can use to simulate blocks of text for layout comps. Marek writes in to let us know about his latest effort on just such a web app. His version is especially notable for it's ability to deliver it's results with non-english charsets. I prefer the simple interface, but there's more explanation on the full page version.

› May 28, 2004

Budget Design

Go quick and grab "Budget Design: Increase Profit by Improving Process" from sinelogic aka Didier Hilhorst and Dan Rubin. They are offering this publication in PDF format for free for 7 days, afterwards it's $9. Dan explains over at his post: SuperfluousBanter: First Publication.

Disappearing Images

Here's a really weird scenario to watch out for. Not really a new problem, but certainly new to me when I ran into it recently. Let's say you've setup an image gallery system for a client, perhaps that client posts images received from a variety of sources. In a seemingly random fashion, the gallery seems to break down for windows users. The problem rears itself by showing the oft feared white box with little red x, an icon which is supposed to indicate that the intended image was not loaded. The problem worsens as soon as the first page with such an image is loaded, more images start showing the same problem - even on entirely other websites! Closing all IE windows clears the problem, at least until another one of these nefarious missing images is browsed again. At this point, you might think yourself to be going a little loony. But don't start doubting your sanity, don't start trying to figure out what's wrong with your gallery system, do read Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 817177 which shows a bizzare bug with IE 6 sp1 and some images. >This problem may occur if you view a Web page that references an image that was saved from Adobe Photoshop 7.0 on Macintosh OS 10. Simply re-save the image in a newer or other version of Photoshop to clear the problem.

› May 25, 2004

Towel day

Today is Towel Day, in memory of Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001), author of the funniest book to ever see the light of the day. Carry your towel with you today, and remember, Don't Panic, it's not Thursday yet.

› May 24, 2004

Jason's grey box methodology

Jason Santa Maria outlines an interesting "beginning process for websites".

Ten questions for Patrick Griffiths

Patrick Griffiths talks about HTML Dog, AAA compliance, the HR element, Elastic Design and web standards. Read more:

Ten questions for Patrick Griffiths

Syndication, the web, the future, XML and flying pigs

Well, in a break from my tradition of posting browser news, I'll turn to the topic of the various syndication formats; web applications; XML based formats in general; where the world is heading; and flying pigs. Well, not so many flying pigs, really, though I can point you to p0nju - PiggyHunter! if you want to read more on that topic.

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› May 21, 2004

Advertising

A new marker has been met, webgraphics has received it's first request for advertising. Now, as a rule, we aren't doing advertising - but since it's our first request, I couldn't help but at least mark the occasion. Thanks to Kurt at tutorialized.com for the request.

› May 20, 2004

3D CSS Box Model

A brilliant way to envision how backgrounds, margins, padding and borders interact in CSS. Hicksdesign's: 3D CSS Box Model. Out of context it looks like a snapshot from what would be a superb interactive CSS tutorial.

› May 19, 2004

Creating colour palettes

Stuff and Nonsense, the newly launched blog of Andy Clarke, explains an easy to follow method for creating web colour palettes.

Andy is responsible for some excellent standards-based sites like Status Mortgages and Goppa Fireplaces.

› May 17, 2004

Ten questions for Andy Budd

Andy talks about web design, web standards, the Web Standards Awards and Skillswap. Read more:

Ten questions for Andy Budd

› May 16, 2004

Clearing floats without structural markup

How many times have you messed around with special clearing divs and worrying about additional markup? Tony Alsett came up with an interesting solution which he presented it at a recent Brisbane Web Standards Group meeting. His method is detailed at Position is Everything and his own site. You can also check out the forum discussion and his presentation notes (powerpoint) from the meeting.

› May 13, 2004

Slick new Digital Web!

Congratulations to Nick Finck and the team of designers and developers who created the wonderfully redesigned Digital Web Magazine. The huge library of valuable information that Digital Web has become is all the more impressive with the clean, clear, and open feel of the new design. Great job!

MovableType 3 Developer Edition

Congrats to Sixapart on their release of MT3 - developer edition. The idea with this release (as outlined by Mena) is to support and encourage the development of 3rd party plugins - even before the system itself includes any significant feature updates. A new contest with cool prizes encourages plug-in development.

Will we be trying MT3 here? I'd certainly like to. I'd even invest some dollars into it, as I'm glad to pay for software put to such good use (I donated way back when as a show of support). Unfortunately the new pricing schema is based on the number of blogs and authors you need to setup. We have only 2 blogs (one for main site, the other for the resources page) but there are 32 authors. That's not even an option in the current pricing tables.

Perhaps more versions will be offered for oddball situations like the one we have here, but meanwhile here's what we face:

  1. Stay with the current install of MT (not too shabby, but I'd like to move on)
  2. Upgrade to MT3 but limit and rotate authors
  3. Upgrade to another system such as Textpattern or WordPress or something else
  4. Make our own homebrew CMS

So anyways, it will probably be a week or two (or more) before I have the time for a complete overhaul, so now is a good time to consider options. Any thoughts, recommendations, opinions, or suggestions are very welcome. Thanks to Bump for the info.

› May 12, 2004

Ten questions for Nick Finck

Nick talks about Digital Web, structure, web standards, liquid layouts and blogging. Read more:
Ten questions for Nick Finck

› May 11, 2004

And the audience falls quiet as the curtains are drawn back

And the Opera starts. Opera 7.50, that is. Opera 7.50 Final is out now, on all desktop platforms. Go take it for a test ride - it's slimmer, faster, more usable, less cluttered, and more standards compliant than ever before. It's Mac version is in the process of getting that distinct Macintosh feeling while the Windows version should make every Windows XP user feel at home. With Google textual ads instead of those oh-so-large graphical ads the UI is close to as clean as it's opponents. Even if you're dead set on using Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, OmniWeb, Konqueror or Mozilla; take Opera on a testride before you close the door and lock behind you - you might take a liking for it.

A few resources that might be of service to you:

When? Where?

Rachel McAlpine discusses problems of time and place in her article Say when and where in web content.

Certain expressions in web content get users all discombobulated. Relative expressions of time and place need an anchor, a key, right there in the text.

"Special offer, this month only!" Which month? … Absolute location can also be a mystery on the Web. Expressions like "here", "in this country", "north", west", "in the city centre" only make sense when there is a point of reference.

Web Essentials 04

Web Essentials '04 is a two day conference to be held in Sydney on September 30 and October 1, 2004. The conference will focus on key aspects of web standards including accessibility, markup (HTML/XHTML) and presentation (CSS).

The keynote speaker will be Dave Shea (CSS Zen Garden). Other presenters include Doug Bowman (Stop Design), Joe Clark (author of "Building Accessible Websites") and a range of Sydney-based presenters such as John Allsopp (Westciv) and myself (css.maxdesign).

It should be an exciting event. Hope you can make it!

By Default

*drool* Everything made by Default is astounding. Completely inspirational, beautiful design work. Link swiped right from Newstoday®, and QBN certified.

› May 10, 2004

Mini Survey - Photography

What are your favorite websites for photography related information? I have a bookmark folder with some good ones I've found, including one of my favorites DPReview, but I'd really like to see where other folks are going for their info. Leave a comment with your best photo links.

› May 6, 2004

Opacity support in Mozilla 1.7

Mozilla 1.7 RC1 supports the CSS3 opacity property. From the CSS3 color module:

Opacity can be thought of conceptually as a postprocessing operation. Conceptually, after the element (including its children) is rendered into an RGBA offscreen image, the opacity setting specifies how to blend the offscreen rendering into the current composite rendering.

In other words, the opacity property allows you to set a sort of seethrough value for any element on the page. One interesting application of this principle is e.g. an on :hover lightup effect for images. No need for creating faded versions of the original images, and no image replacement techniques around - img tags and CSS3 do the job.

› May 4, 2004

One image to rule them.

Didier Hihorst, over at Superfluousbanter, has posted a very good walkthrough on how to create a navigational matrix. What's a navigational matrix you ask? It's using a single image for your navigation, and then shifting the images via CSS.

Ten questions for Anne van Kesteren

Anne talks about serving correct mime types, XHTML vs HTML and the pursuit of perfect markup. Read more:
Ten questions for Anne van Kesteren

› May 3, 2004

Something is Brewing

Arturo, myself, and others are working on a new online store for SDWindham, providers of fine tea, and we just posted a splash page announcement. I bring this up here for a specific reason: after reading the 37 Signals book Defensive Design for the Web, I became anxious to apply the useful techniques therein. The suggestions are very well thought out and presented in a handy-for-reference manner. Collectively these tips show how we can provide a more pleasant website interaction experience through a little attention to detail and and a lot of common sense.

Even though the SDWindham site is just a splash page at the moment, you'll see a little mailing list signup form on the left - and hence a good reason to start applying these principles. If you put a non-email address into the form (e.x. "blah"), you'll see what I came up with for a friendly, clear and specific error result. For the final site we will be expanding the error reporting with additional features such as field by field specificity, and a more global application that can be used with complex forms.

Yes the website is XHTML with CSS for layout, yes the website validates, but frankly there's something much more gratifying with paying attention to the details of contingency - namely, knowing that the "when things go wrong" instances are covered, and the experience of interacting with the website is better for everyone.

Getting all this stuff correct isn't easy though, there's quite a bit to keep track of. Even for just a splash page, for instance, I'll still need to make an informative 404 page for the site very soon. Thankfully I can refer to the 37 Signals book as a sort of crib sheet of good and bad practices.

Welcome Miraz

Our newest author is Miraz Jordan. She hails from New Zealand. Miraz likes both Macs and web standards so even if I wasn't a regular reader of her weblog, she'd be a natural fit for web-graphics authorship.

Welcome aboard Miraz, and thanks for being willing to join the crew here.