Web Design

The Sacramento Bee Story Toolbar
“With browser and internet technologies advancing, Web sites are becoming more like applications. Taking this into account, sacbee.com has developed the Story Toolbar. The idea was to combine several different functions into one compact area that is unobtrusive and easy for users to access.” (Comments: Take a look at this story to see the toolbar in action.)

Teambilly shows you how to send Netscape 4.x users to an alternate page. This is terrific. He even has a nice little message that explains to them what dorks they are.

A few people have asked me how I got that little “eMail this entry” link on my posts. I wrote a little tutorial on my projects blog describing how I did it. Enjoy.

Yowza! MovableType 2.0 was released today. Let’s see how long it takes to upgrade / backup / install / rediscover / redesign / implement / play with my new toy!

If you’re a fan of the weblog Lines & Splines, you’ll enjoy reading Mark Simonson’s articles about fonts and typefaces.

How does one punch out the corner of an element and put something in the space created?

Excellent! I’ve finally found a simple explanation of selector pattern matching - all the > + and * you sometimes see in css - at BrainJar.com. So many things make so much more sense now …

Here are a few more great selections from my research into available domain names:

• asleepbyeleven.com
• tyrannosaurausdave.com
• sugarfreelinks.com
• eatenbyanogre.com
• smellslikechicken.net
• donoteattheyellowsnow.com
• kneedeepintrouble.com

Previous Fun Domain Names: 1, 2

Eliot at Follow Me Here … gave me kudos for helping him reformat his Blogger templates and css so that they would validate. I’m not really *that* altruistic. He was using a table-based design and because of the many images in his sidebar it took forever for me to load his page on my slow 28.8 connection. By redesigning his site using css-based positioning instead of tables, it now loads in a snap and you can begin reading it *before* it loads all the graphics.

I keep trying to convince Robyn at Ain’t Too Proud to Blog to do the same thing …

Yes, I redesigned again. This time I had a good reason though, I promise. Mostly I *really* wanted to make the site validate. It does now. (That means that it’s all standards-compliant code, mom!) And I wanted the CSS to validate, too, so that prompted a new color scheme. Then I found a link at webgraphics to an awesome idea from scottandrew.com: Google-ize your posts. So I had to redesign the individual pages and the “blogdata” bits at the bottom of each post so I could implement that nicely. I also fixed several things that have been bugging me.
<heavy sigh>
I wish I was going to SXSW …

It took some work, but I think that this page and all the individual entries now validate with the w3c for css and html 4.01 (transitional). w00t!

If you have anything at all to do with creating web pages, you should read the article Slash Forward, which includes a quick overview of Your Friend, The Trailing Slash.

The Dastardly “favicon.ico not found” Error

There have been two burning questions among developers recently: “What is that favicon.ico not found error that is filling my Error_log?” and “How do I get a custom icon next to my bookmark link in Internet Explorer?” These may sound like unrelated questions, yet both can be answered at the same time.

If you’re searching for animated graphics for some reason, check out Kimberly’s Kreations. She has a boatload of them. I think that this spatula-flipping-a-hamburger is particularly menacing. Does it frighten you?

The Google image search feature is also very handy. I just discovered it today. What an incredibly useful resource! I didn’t know you could do that with Google. Trés cool.