HTML

MTV completely redesigned their site. They switched from all-Flash to (gasp!) all-HTML. Brilliant.

Use Eric’s Popup window Generator to easily add popup windows to your site! The windows are activated by clicking on a link, and can be fine tuned in every aspect, such as dimensions, scrollbars, toolbar etc. Awesome tool.

Jason @ JPlay has written a great tutorial on how to add a user comment to the pop-up send-link hack. I’ve gotten multiple requests for this, so I’m sure it will interest many readers. Thanks, Jason!

Want to spice up your web site with some easy JavaScript tricks? I’m going to show you how to make your buttons, text boxes, and textareas change their colors. All you need are four attributes and some additional functions in your javascript file. (If you want to learn about adding a javascript file to your site, read this.)
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The Additional Entry Text of this entry contains the complete contents of my MovableType Main Index Template for this blog. It might be interesting to you if you’re trying to learn how to do something I’ve done here. (Note that it is my ugliest template; I tend to do lots of testing and futzing with this blog, so it gets the most code bloat. The templates for the other six or ten blogs I’m running are much cleaner.) Click “read more” to see.
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From Son of Web Pages That Suck:

If you’ve got a “real” Web site, and by real I mean a site that gets real traffic, then you don’t need a counter on each page. Counters are not only unimpressive, they make you look like an amateur. Do you see a counter on any page at Microsoft, IBM, or General Motors? Counters appear on sites like Larry The Locksmith (apologies in advance to all locksmiths named Larry). If you can’t afford log file software, then you’re not a real site. Sorry. Most hosting services will provide you with log software. Some of the programs are probably good and some are probably bad.

“I’d love a proportional-width relative-positioning design for my weblog, but I’m too afraid of cross-browser compatability issues. I don’t want to spend more than a weekend figuring out how to get two columns to work in three browsers.” - Dan Sanderson

I have to agree with Dan’s sentiment here. It’s a bear to get relative positioning to work. I’ve got a two-column layout on my main site and a three-column layout here. I know that things look great at 1024×768 on IE6/PC, but I’m not so sure about other browser/OS configurations. My pages should be CSS and (x)HTML compliant, but does that really mean they render nicely? I doubt it. I’d love to please everyone, but I just don’t know if it’s possible without spending hours (days?) making hacks for every browser/OS combination out there. My stats tell me that almost all my visitors are using IE5 or better on a PC. Is it really worth the effort to try to be Netscape / Mac-friendly? I’d like to know. Are any of my visitors using Macs or Netscape? How do my pages look to you?

[The girlie matters] has a cool collection of MovableType tips and tricks.

Sadly, she is another blogger that for some reason doesn’t ping weblogs.com when she updates. I wish *everyone* with a blog would ping … it would make using blogTracker so much simpler …

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!

The HTML 4.0 Entities™ reference page is very handy.

You† can® do° all¶ kindsº of£ nifty€ thingsŸ withÖ it¿.

The webbedENVIRONMENTS site, from the author of DHTML and CSS for the World Wide Web: 2nd ed has been in my link list for years. There are some terrific essays here, including a good frames / no frames argument.

I found a script at Dreamhost to make it snow on the page. Let’s see if it works.
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Way cool: I found an article at 4GuysFromRolla.com that describes how to use Microsoft’s XMLHTTP object to get data from other web pages. You can create a custom Internet Movie Database search machine with this information … very interesting …

If you visit http://www.davidgagne.net/ you’ll see a period - . - before each link to an entry’s comments. That period is a link to the editing window for that particular entry. As long as I am logged in to MovableType, I can click on that link and immediately begin editing the post. Here’s the link to add to your main index template:

<a target=”_blank” title=”admin” onmouseover=”window.status=’edit this entry’; return true;” onmouseout=”window.status=’ ‘; return true;” href=”<$MTCGIPath$>mt.cgi?__mode=view &_type=entry&id=<$MTEntryID$> &blog_id=<$MTBlogID$>”>.</a>

Note that you should use &amp; instead of & to make sure your page is (x)html compliant.