Earlier today I clicked on a link to go to some intranet app.  I forgot about it and came back later.  I filled in my user ID and password then clicked login.  Here’s the message I received:

HTTP Status 408 – The time allowed for the login process has been exceeded. If you wish to continue you must either click back twice and re-click the link you requested or close and re-open your browser

I’m sorry, but that’s about the dumbest thing I’ve seen in a couple of weeks.  Please, people!  If you have to instruct your users to “click back twice” or “close and re-open your browser”, then you are doing it wrong!  Computers are supposed to work for us, not the other way around.

Jeez!

Stuff I agree with:
* ajax
* mobile
* fluid layouts
* dom scripting

I do not agree where he states that the “Fisher Price look” is going away. Sometimes you just gotta aim a website at AOL users.

Bold predictions for the savvy designer, 2006 edition ~ Authentic Boredom
Bold predictions for the savvy designer, 2006 edition

I’m so late on this article but hey, if I don’t write about it I’ll forget it.

Global White Space Reset | Left Justified

This is a CSS design techinque whereby you start with “* {padding: 0; margin: 0;}”. This will reset all browsers back to the basics. Then you add some margin and padding back in. The end result should be more consistent appearance of pages across browsers with less reliance on hacks.

If you look to your right (if you are on my site. If you are reading this via a news aggregator, you probably don’t have anything of mine to the right), you will see a couple of new lists. I’ve added a WordPress plugins WP-scrobbler which displays the music I’ve played recently, and a few books dislayed from my Reader2 library. Hope you find it interesting.

I haven’t had much time for web design theory lately, but I have great respect for A List Apart. When I do make time for it, this is one of my must-reads. ALA put an article up on Sep 26th titled Introducing the CSS3 Multi-Column Module. It deals with a proposed solution to the difficulty of flowing text into multiple horizontal columns. Here’s a great picture from the article that explains it very well:

This is all fine and good, but I disagree with the introduction to the article where it states:

While most computer screens are wider than tall, most websites are the exact opposite: longer than wide [...] Horizontal space, on the other hand, is quite cheap; we often don’t even know what to do with it.

Wanna konw why I disagree? This totally leaves out small form-factor devices such as PDAs. And I have a perfect example for you. In fact, the PIErony is exquisite. (As in Pocket Internet Explorer.)

Here we have PIE with the “Fit to screen” option disabled:

It doesn’t look all that bad really, however you must scroll left and right to read it, which is HORRIBLE enough on a desktop monitor, but its ten times worse on a 240px wide LCD.

Here the same page with the “fit to screen” option enabled. This is PIE trying its best to fit everything in so that you can read a page without having to scroll sideways. The images are scaled down which helps a lot. Many websites, notably the flexible-layout ones do GREAT with this. Check out ALA:

I scoff at thee, ALA! In case you are curious, here’s a screenshot of my site, not that I wrote the theme myself (it’s a tweaked almost spring). Enjoy:

<angelschanting>

</angelschanting>

Just to show you its not just me:

Amen.

Disclaimer: I think Pocket IE is pretty lame in most respects, simply because its a lowest-common-denominator kind of application. No frills.

### update 2005-08-01 fixed link ###

http://www.relativelyabsolute.com/articles/focus/

Thank you waybackmachine! Fixed link

An excellent and very elegant hack that allows you to use the :focus pseudo-element in CSS2 for any selector, in MSIE. Right now IE only supports :focus on anchors. The article shows some good examples for styling focused form fields. Also included in the hack is the whatever:hover behaviour since IE has a similar deficiency with this pseudo-element.

Someday I need to use some of these cool techniques on my site.

(like me) See the slashdot story.

Ok, I’ve spent about 30 min driving IE7 beta 1 around. Did the Acid2 test and browsed through a whole lot of Quirksmode stuff. My conclusion?

It has tabs.

Woo hoo. As far as I can tell they haven’t fixed much with regards to standards compliance. It still fails the Complex Spiral demo for example. To be fair, it is fast. It has popup blocking.

But that’s not what I am interested in. I already have all that. I don’t need another browser, I’m happy with Firefox. What I do want is for the other 90% (and falling) of the world to not drive how the 10% of us idealistic designers create standards-based webpages.

On a related note, the Web Standards Project has an interesting article on the front page talking about their meetings with Microsoft.

Obligatory screenshot:

Got this comment from BartVB on this post:

I think that’s a really small IFRAME

Yeah, I know. When I first posted the entry, the styles on the <pre> tag caused the text to be really tiny, and it still bled off the right. I changed it so that the text would be larger, but of course now the browser window must be maximized to read everything which I hate. This is due in part because I almost never maximize a window and instead browse at about 900px wide. But another important reason is that I browse from my HP iPAQ h4150 PDA with a QVGA 320×240 screen.

So anyway, I decided to add scrolling to blockquotes. Instead of an IFRAME, I actually use a CSS2 property called overflow. My solution is obviously imperfect though. In this case, the preformatted block was taller than your typical browser window. This made horizontal scrolling extremely awkward since you would have to page down to reach the bar, then page up to see the end of the line, then repeat ad naseum. So I set a height on it. I played around with various values, settling on 5em or something like that. But this strategy is bad because well, its too short for a preformatted block and can be too tall for a short quote, like the one at the beginning of this entry. It clearly must be a different way.

That’s about the time when I lost interest in the problem. I just tried using max-height: 75%, but apparently Firefox doesn’t know that one yet. Wonder when they are going full CSS 2.1 compliant?

I am open to suggestions!

### update ###
Oh almost forgot! Kudos to the random reader whose name I have unfortunately forgotten for pointing out to me just how bad the original blockquote looked.

### update 2 ###
Sorry if you had some comments you submitted which went into limbo over the past few weeks. I accidentally had the ‘notify admin on comments that need moderation’ box unchecked. It’s fixed now.

Or, users versus developers. Here’s a long reply to an email thread on the flyspray-devel list where I explain my reasons for liking forums better. What do you think?

On 7/14/05, Mac Newbold wrote:
> The model for mailing lists and forums are fundamentally different. A
> mailing list is a push model, where someone sends something to the list

> A forum, on the other hand is a pull model, where someone puts

I think we have all come to a consensus on the topic, so I don't feel
bad for going off topic.   

I agree with the concepts you outline, Mac, but I disagree in that if
implemented well, a web forum is a much better tool all-around.  Maybe
in some projects a complete implementation would include a full
mailing-list-like interface as you say, but I think that will vary
depending on the project and the people.

There are so many reasons that I like forums better, although
obviously I'm not shy on MLs.

- searchable archives
- threaded discussion
- content 'permalinks'
- rich formatting (PHP syntax highlighting anyone?)
- personalities (avatars, post counts, custom titles, etc)
- forum can mesh with rest of the website
- polls
- access control (ACLs)
- pull notifications (browsing by forum, or read/unread status, RSS)
- push notifications (jabber or other IM, RSS notifiers & bots)

A decent mail client will handle your searching, threading, and
notifications, but thats about it.

Gmane does an excellent job for what it is, but it's really just a
shell to make mailing-lists more usable.  The fact that it exists
supports my reasons for supporting forums above.   

So, I'm not suggesting we change flyspray, I just wanted to rebut your
thoughts.

Incidentally, the forum I have in mind when I cite these features is Unclassified Newsboard.

Hehe, did a wp-1.5 upgrade. haven’t picked a theme yet. this will have to suffice!

Update

I’ve decided to take “Almost Spring” and turn it into “Almost Fall”. It’s a work-in-progress obviously. I think I’ll put a cool picture at the top, probably space-related again, since that seemed to work well.

This is extremely cool. I’m kinda busy so will just paste the header from the author’s site:

TiddlyWiki – a reusable non-linear personal web notebook
TiddlyWiki, an experimental MicroContent WikiWikiWeb built by JeremyRuston. It’s written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript to run on any modern browser without needing any ServerSide logic. It allows anyone to create personal SelfContained hypertext documents that can be posted to any web server, sent by email or kept on a USB thumb drive to make a WikiOnAStick.

I’m way behind on my website here. Plus, I’m playing with some cool stuff for the Psi project, and I feel like I’m missing out on them by leaving my website stale.

TODO
* Upgrade to

Oh nevermind. Sean stole my post.

(It’s late, my prose may not be up to my usual standards.)

Working on the new Psi website a bit tonight, aka “Psi Website 3.0″. I’m trying to wrap my brain around Drupal, the CMS I have chosen for the project. Anyway, this Drupal is some cool stuff. I’m really getting into it.

There is a module for Drupal called flexinode. It basically lets you create a new type of document (or node in Drupal-speak, and you get to specify the fields in this document. It’s very flexible. The first thing I have thought to do with this is to create a table of contributors to the Psi project, all laid out nice and storing the data in a database. Hand editing HTML is lame, I’m so over that. I ran into a problem pretty quickly though. While there is an email field type, there was no Jabber ID field! Luckily it didn’t prove too hard to whip one up, although I’m kinda slow-going when it comes to PHP.

Crap. I was going to give you a link to the results so that you could see what I’ve done, but then I realized that the new site design is a big secret. Heh. We’ll see how long that lasts.

Quick web design link:

More Nifty Corners | Web Design | PRO.HTML.IT

This is a “nifty” technique to create rounded corners on a webpage without using any images. The tools used are javascript and CSS. What’s the point? Well for one, who wants to create 80 slizes of tiny corners, antialiasing the right colors and so on. It can be very time consuming. But people like rounded corners. So, this is a real time saver.

I don’t get it. My wife’s company
Brindy’s Giftables has been alive for…at least a year now. And it (
Brindy’s Giftables) is not in Google’s index. It’s driving me nuts because I’ve followed all of the hints on their webmaster site. I’ve been linking to it from my own site, which definitely is indexed by Google. I know for a fact that at least 2 or 3 other websites that are indexed, all in my wife’s “industry”, have linked to her site. What gives? I submitted the URL to Google to crawl, but the verbiage on that page is awfully vague. I kinda think that the form does nothing but is there to make you feel better. :/

Brindy’s Giftables! Arrgh! GOOGLE ME

Awesome! Just did a google for ‘wordpress styles’ and I’ve come across a very [CSSZG][]-like treasure trove of new WordPress styles. Stay tuned, I think I’ve picked out one to try, provided the license allows free use of it. Haven’t read that far yet.

### Update

Check out the new style. I made the old default an alternate stylesheet, so if you have a [decent browser][], you can use your stylesheet chooser to see the huge difference.

alexking.org: Software > WordPress Styles

[CSSZG]: http://csszengarden.com
[decent browser]: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

Note to self: do this later.

Dynamic Text Replacement: A List Apart

I’m researching what kind of wiki to put on the [Psi][] website. We (I) have decided that we need one so that the masses can contribute to a [Psi][] documentation project.

Found what seems to be a really comprehensive list of Wiki Engines. I’m going through the PHP ones now.

[Psi]: http://psi.affinix.com

Description: We got our inspiration for this script from Yahoo’s frontpage, which uses something similar to organize its search tools. Tab Content Script is a standards compliant, 2 level content script. Click on a tab, and additional content appears beneath it while contracting any previously open content. The script uses CSS to control all of its appearance, and lets you enter plain HTML for the tab contents, making customization a breeze.

Dynamic Drive DHTML Scripts- Tab Content Script

As seen on: [CSS Vault][]

[CSS Vault]: http://cssvault.com/cssjavascript/tab_content_script.php

Courtesy of e-lusion.com, here are some simple CSS menu designs for you to download and use any way you see fit. Specifically, they are under a Creative Commons – Attribution 2.0 license.

My favorites are at straight-up noon and 3 o’clock.

thx to cssvault