web design

CSS Drop Shadows: A List Apart

Best dropdown menu I’ve seen yet … gazingus.org

Is there really such a thing as a tableless, CSS-based, liquid, three-column layout?!

It just took me two hours of programming and slamming my head against the desk to realize that Cookies get saved according to the exact URL of the site. I kept trying to delete the cookies of domain.com when I needed to delete the cookies of www.domain.com.

That is annoying.

Cascading Style Sheets, Promise vs. Reality, and a Look to the Future
By Mark Newhouse

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are a technology with a lot of promise, but their often-hyped potential leaves some designers feeling blindsided by the 2×4 known as reality. This article sorts out the differences, and makes a case for educating yourself now in preparation for the future.

You’ve heard it in web design forums and on email lists. You’ve read about tossing tables in favor of standards-based CSS layout on sites such as A List Apart and Web Reference. Maybe you’ve visited some sites that offer ready-made, table-free templates. So you dig a little deeper and start discovering little discrepancies in browser implementation. And then you realize that some of the discrepancies aren’t so little.

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.

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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Time for a little poll. Every now and then I upload a mystery song to my Song of the Moment blog. Does anyone ever download it? Should I bother to keep doing that? I never get any feedback, and I’m wondering if it’s worth it. So here’s your chance to make an impact on the content here. Let me know. Should it stay?

Last week I used some SSI and MovableType trickery, by the way, to include the two most recent songs at the bottom of the sidebar over there on the right.

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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Have you ever wanted to format the first letter of a paragraph so that it was larger than the rest of the text in the paragraph? This effect - commonly seen in print - is called the “dropcap”. The easiest way to do this is with a little bit ‘o CSS. It works in most browsers and adds a smidge of flair to your site. You only need to utilize three style attributes to get it to work.
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I finally sat down and worked on The Weblog Dictionary. I added a few new words and updated some links and terms. It’s also now using the same CSS file as most of the rest of the site, and - because I’m that much of a square - it’s now valid XHTML1.0 Transitional, whatever that means. If you know of any items that should be in there, please send them to me.

The Scriptygoddess wrote a terrific little tutorial on protecting your bandwidth from image-link theft by modifying your .htaccess files.

BlogData Tutorial

At the bottom (or top) of each post on this site (and almost all of my MovableType blogs) I present a set of icons which I consider the entry’s “blogdata”. I thought I would share with everyone exactly how I do that. MovableType is excellent for this sort of thing, and Ben and Mena deserve bundles of good karma (and cash, if you have extra).
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<rant>
I could write a book about all the things done horribly, terribly poorly at CNNSI.com. Try to manage your magazine subscription there. Try to edit any of the thirty-eight separate mailing lists to which you can unwittingly find yourself subscribed. Try to find an article! The pages on the site load slightly slower than tectonic plates collide. There are dozens of useless and usability-impinging graphics on every single page. (I can’t even imagine what it would be like to read on a sub-4 browser.) The search functions are next-to-useless. And - can I stress this enough? - the archives are craptacular. You can’t link to an article more than an issue or two in the past, and all that’s archived beyond that are the “teasers” (which is only a bit more annoying than it is pointless).
</rant>