Archives for March, 2006
Scoble is missing the point
Robert Scoble threw the web community into an uproar with his recent post about “ugly” design. His argument, basically, is that eBay, Amazon, and Craigslist are successful because of their ugly designs, because they’re focused on content delivery instead of design. As virtually everyone in the community has pointed out already, he’s missing the point – [...]
CNN Redesigns
CNN is sporting a clean new style. Looks to me like they’ve been heavily inspired by Macintosh, with all the soft grey gradients and pseudo-metal interface bits. – via Airbag
Absolutely Relative
Just a quick reminder that if you’re having difficulty getting the correct behavior from a float, perhaps absolute positioning will work better for you. Try applying position: relative; to the parent element, and then when you apply position: absolute; to the element you’re working with, it will position from it’s parent element’s 0,0 axis instead [...]
Derek Featherstone Interview
Digital Web Magazine has an interview with Derek Featherstone of Simply Accessible. If you’ve been following accessability for awhile, there’s really nothing new here, but it’s a nice overview, and he does hit on some things that I didn’t know. For instance, Technorati’s tag clouds are created using only nested <em> tags – which is [...]
Validity and Design Discussion
Two interesting articles popped up in the community over the weekend. First of all, Roger Johansson over at 456 Berea St. highlights a common problem in web development: obsession with validation. As he points out (and Dustin Diaz pointed out before him), Validity and Best Practices are not the same thing. Getting your code to validate [...]
DNN Skinning
We’re working on a series of sites that are all based on the same DNN setup. This means that when I create a new site, I first clone the setup from an existing one, and then branch out from there. With the latest site, I thought I would get smart. The previous site had a lot [...]
CSS Coding Standards
In the programming world, fierce debates can arise over the best way to actually code. Should blank lines and whitespace be used? What’s the best indenting format? How should variables be capitalized? What level of commenting is best? …It can get ugly fast. CSS is a newer “language” (I know it’s not technically a language), but [...]
Illustration done entirely in CSS
This illustration of a house done entirely in CSS is sick. Never doubt the power of CSS.
Office 12 Screenshots
It's a rare day that you'll hear me raving about Microsoft, but with the GUI overhaul they're applying to Office 12, they're doing an incredible job. Jensen Harris, who writes a blog about working on the Office User Interface recently posted a bunch of screenshots of the new interface, and they're great. Seriously. He's previously discussed [...]
Airborne Ranger
…and Scott for dropping in like an airborne ranger and getting the job done with a shock and awe assault on all content and formatting inconsistencies. – From a project manager’s email about a site we just finished I like that description! Probably because I just finished watching Band of Brothers, but still…
Be Proactive
In the interest of being proactive rather than just complaining, I’m going to start a list of demands improvements I would like to see us work on for DasBlog. Offer an alternative to this horrible text-editor. Actually, it’s not bad as WYSIWYG editors go, but the code it puts out is horrible. It uses two BR [...]
Sigh
As you can see, I'm working on skinning the blog here. Some things are easier than others, but on the whole, it's a frustratingly limiting experience, especially compared to the incredible flexibility of WordPress. But I will persist, and overcome. I will not have an ugly blog forever!
February Accomplishments
My coworkers have both posted their accomplishments for the month of Febtober, so I'll join the cool kids and try to impress the boss. I got hired at the beginning of the month, and spent my first few weeks getting settled in and finishing up work on Carrier and Bryant, both of which have now gone [...]
Ugly and Inelegant
As the first step in learning more about .NET and presentation-level programming, my boss asked me to watch a training video about ASP.NET development. I was expecting some sort of 101-level intro to ASP.NET thing, but was extremely disappointed with the video. I honestly feel that I learned next to nothing from this, though it [...]
