« January 2004 Entries »

Notes From All Over Part IV

The 2004 SXSW awards finalists were announced this morning. The Zen Garden is up for ‘Developer’s Resource’, with stiff competition from D. Keith Robinson’s Asterisk, James Craig’s Accessibility Internet Rally, Ian Lloyd et. al’s Tools and Wizards at Accessify, and a new one to me, Jim Armstrong’s 3D News and Tips.

Good luck to everyone nominated, and a huge, giant thanks to all who have participated in the Zen Garden. Be it with a design, translation, or even just good old link lovin’, the Zen Garden wouldn’t be what it is without everyone else’s participation. This nomination is for all of us. §

Continue Reading… | comments off | posted to Reflective

Friday Challenge

Whether it’s a deceptively simple problem or a case of being too close to the code to see the easy answer, I’ve been struggling with this one problem on and off for months now:

Is it possible to use floats to position a fixed-width sidebar on the right of a page, with a liquid content area, if the content comes before the sidebar in the markup?

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (68) | posted to CSS

Digital Web Interview

A new Digital Web Interview with yours truly is now live, conducted by Craig Saila. Plenty of thoughts await on time management, design influences, WaSP efforts, and more on that Garden thing. And so as not to leave anyone hanging, I briefly tell the story I’ve always wanted to.

Comments open. Feel free to continue the interview here, if you’ve got any further questions.

Comments Closed (17) | posted to mezzoblue

Business Loss

Call me cruel (just call me!), but if the dotcom bust and the general recession mean that a 22-year-old can no longer collect eighty large for Instant Messaging his drinking buddies all day long, I don’t consider that a profound national tragedy. — Jeffrey Zeldman for ALA, Jan. 2002

The dot-com boom, and bust, in a nutshell. Today we’re back to the dollars and the cents, the business goals weighed against financial decisions, and the cold reality of making money.

Continue Reading… | comments off | posted to Reflective

Notes From All Over Part III

Fresh Monday links to enjoy while sipping your morning java. On CSS Hacks, XHTML Validation errors, Haughey and Zeldman under the iron, logo trends, security holes, anything-but-IE, video ads, ad agencies vs. the web, 404’s, the Bloggies, and HTML rendering.

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Type: the Extra Mile

A few typographic terms before we get started. Kerning is the process of optically adjusting the spacing between letters, by hand in most cases, to produce a more even end result. Hinting is the adjustment of type outlines, a willful distortion of the letterforms to help them fit the pixel grid. The difference is that you will most likely never need to hint (it’s done by the designer/foundry before font distribution) but kerning is an essential monkeywrench for your toolbox. And finally, anti-aliasing is the softening of jagged pixellated curves through interpolation.

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Press Photos

Because it’s getting to the point where I’m beginning to need these, April and I took a walk today armed with my Canon and grabbed a bunch of vanity shots for miscellaneous press purposes. A big nod to Anil Dash for inspiring me to get outside for this.

Continue Reading… | comments off | posted to mezzoblue

Mac Gamma

One thing I’m noticing is that colour profiles are crucial when working in Mac Photoshop, even if the final product is meant for on-screen display.

A long-time trick/crutch of mine on Windows was the screen capture. Alt + PrntScrn grabs a shot of the active window to the clipboard, which is easily pastable to a Photoshop canvas. I never even thought about it, I just did, and I did a lot.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (22) | posted to Design

MT Comment Spam

So let’s say you run a reasonably popular weblog that’s open to comments from anyone and everyone. Let’s also say in the same breath that you don’t necessarily believe that turning off comments on older entries is a good way of squashing the comment spam problem, though it is terribly effective. For the sake of completeness, let’s also say that you’ve bought into the idea that blacklists are inherently flawed, a losing proposition, and so you haven’t bothered using them.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (57) | posted to Server-Side

Wanted: CMS

Wanted: recommendations for a proven, but simple open source CMS that’s web-standards friendly.

The ideal candidate will work with LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL [or PostgreSQL in this case] /PHP). Function-wise, it should just be bare-bones, and usable through a browser. It will allow editing of multiple chunks of content that can be chained into a single page, although the chunks themselves will probably be pretty simple (a few headers and paragraphs, the odd list, nothing much more). At the same time, I’d like it to auto-generate things like site-wide nav and breadcrumbs and the like. No problem scripting those, as long as they’re in some way possible. Free as in beer is a luxury, but not necessary.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (90) | posted to Server-Side

whois

Well call me just plain out of it. Or blame it on my complete lack of Unix chops. Either may be accurate.

Until now I’ve been bouncing off of NetSol and putting up with the ridiculous (and highly inaccessible) image-based security widget every time I’ve run a whois search on an existing domain.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (21) | posted to Server-Side

Abstracting CSS

The further you abstract the structure of your markup, the weightier your CSS file becomes. It’s inevitable, and by all indications, the way things are meant to go for two important reasons: it fulfills the complete separation of structure and presentation, and CSS is cachable — each new page load pulls new content alone, without pulling new presentation.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (73) | posted to CSS

Standards

Support the standards and nothing but the standards, regardless of whether or not browsers get them right?

— or —

Support what standards are available given today’s browser support, and kludge together markup/script/CSS hacks to overcome deficiencies in implementations?

Oh sure, ‘use the best choice for your audience’. That goes without saying. But there’s an underlying philosophy that drives your decision-making process, and I know there are people who fall into each camp.

Discuss.

Comments Closed (54) | posted to Browsers

This is Progress?

From an iBook on my lap, wirelessly connected to a router plugged into a cable modem connected to my service provider, wired into the internet backbone with countless hops between here and Nasa’s web servers, which dish up live video feeds from inside their terminal, panning shots of live data feeds [time-shifted, of course] direct from Mars, and the only thing I could think to myself was “boy is this low quality.”

One can only dream of the things we’ll take for granted tomorrow.

Spirit has landed.

comments off | posted to Technology

acronym vs. abbr

Pedantry aside, I’m going to be kicking myself in a few years when I have to strip all the incorrect <acronym> tags that litter my code today.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (10) | posted to Accessibility

A Third Strike for Apple

Let’s review:

• I bought my G3 iBook in September. My first Mac purchase ever.
• One week after, Panther’s release date was announced. I’m still on Jaguar.
• Two weeks after, Apple announced an upgrade to the G3 iBook line: G4s for the same price.
• Now it’s coming out that the logic board on my particular model is flawed, to the point where there are rumblings about a class action lawsuit.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (48) | posted to Technology

Happy New Year

There is a story I’ve always wanted to tell you. This is not it.

I can’t say everything, in fact I shouldn’t yet say anything. But I can refer you to the fact the Zen Garden’s special notice has been down for some time now. I can tell you that a certain consulate in Buffalo has been moving in its mysterious ways.

Continue Reading… | comments off | posted to Reflective