Filed under "Coding"
What Web Designers Really Want for Valentine's Day.
.truelove { corners: rounded; corners-radius: 5px; gradient: vertical; gradient-top: #000; gradient-bottom: #555; border: 2px solid #fff; dropshadow: yes; dropshadow-opacity: 50%; dropshadow-color: #000; dropshadow-x-offset: right 5px; dropshadow-y-offset: bottom 5px; } Happy Valentine’s Day. One day we will all find .truelove.
Search Engine Overload
This little spiel is a lengthy commentary on a discussion that has been taking place over at Devil’s Details. What began as an entry about an interesting menu placement choice has turned into a discussion on SEO abuse. The site in question is Servus. While it is reasonably well-designed visually, it is what is under the hood that draws concern. A quick look at the source code reveals an enormous pack of what appear to be keywords, but they’re not contained in the HEAD’s META tags. They’re placed in the BODY …
Seeds of Inspiration.
Anyone whe knows me also knows that I am nearly always up for a good design challenge. At the very beginning of February, I was approached by Cameron Moll and asked if I would be interested in participating in a project for Zaadz, an online business solutions provider. Zaadz had enlisted Cameron’s help in designing and developing website templates and he, in turn, enlisted the likes of Jason Santa Maria, Ryan Sims, Brian Biddle, Bryan Bell and myself to shoulder some of the workload. Zaadz was looking for standards-compliant web templates in order to populate its Biz …
Codex.
In the years I have spent writing code for the web, I have seen thousands of pages of source code. No matter how “advanced” a web author you may be, you know you still do it. Whenever I see a well-crafted website (or, alternately, an abomination dressed in HTML), I just have to right-click and View Source (and usually CSS, too). In doing so, I have been endlessly fascinated by the many variations in code formatting employed by web designers. I’ve been thinking about this more often lately, as I have been working on various projects …
Textpattern: Flexible Article Placement.
This article assumes that the reader has a general understanding of Textpattern semantics and building blocks, such as forms and page templates. Tested only on Textpattern 1.0rc1. See end of article for updates to Textpattern 4.0. I have been wrestling with the implementation of static pages in Textpattern since I began working with it over 3 months ago. I read some tutorials, but they didn’t give me the ammunition I needed to resolve my particular issues. Up until today, my About page was 100% hardcoded; that is, there wasn’t a stitch of Textpattern code …
Textpattern: Building a Better Portfolio.
You may or may not have noticed that the Portfolio has changed a bit. Since I have had a few people inquire as to how I was able to make the Portfolio behave the way it does, using Textpattern, I’ve decided to write up a quick explanation. This article assumes that the reader has a general understanding of Textpattern semantics and building blocks, such as forms and page templates. Tested only on Textpattern 1.0rc1. Before moving this site to Textpattern, my portfolio was set up — well — the way you see it now. Up until a …
Sweet Fancy Moses! I've Become A Web Standards Elitist?
It was such a smooth transition, unlike the rambunctious sneak attack I might have expected. Little did I know, when I dove into the web standards pool, that I would become a nitpicking fault-finder. January 2004: I begin my year like any other, wishing I had a million dollars. Resigning to the fact that I will indeed have to hold down a job for the rest of my life, I head off to work. Once there, I continue designing and developing whatever project I had going on at the time, every once in a while taking a deserved break …
Textpattern: Emails and URLs in Comments.
I’d like to thank Daniel and Nathan for helping me out on a Textpattern issue. By default, when a visitor posts a comment and fills in all the comment fields (name, email, URL, and message), their name becomes a hyperlink to the submutted URL value when the comment is finally published. But if the visitor leaves out the URL value, their name becomes a mailto: email link, and that can be cause for concern. While the emails addresses my be encoded, you may not want your readers to have access to others’ email addresses (especially if you are …
All Puppies Eventually Grow Up.
A recent article by revered Atlanta-based designer Todd Dominey sparked some thoughts that have been sitting on my backburner. When I began my current job here at G2E, we had something to prove. We were an unknown design company in a big city that has, historically, not fostered much growth in the new media field. Although the company had actually been around for a few years, no one really knew about us. With an influx of investor capital came the opportunity to hire new designers (like me, in May 2003), buy new equipment, and make a name for ourselves. …
