· A manifest for a new form style (April 2005 )

So I was looking at the site for the new offering from 37Signals, and noticed their HUGE signup field to be notified upon its release. And I thought to myself, why not use this for other things, like breaking up forms?...

· Bandwidth thief! (April 2004 )

Steal my bandiwdth will you? Well, I'll just steal your traffic, then!

· Jeffrey Veen: I don't care about accessibility (March 2004 )

Yes. Oh God, Yes.

· RSS question... (January 2004 )

Should I include Atom?

· For Wim & Brian... (July 2003 )

Yesterday, I installed a wiki on my machine at work, for the documentation squad to use. Today, I have a blinding headache. Coincidence? I think not....

· RIP Netscape (July 2003 )

AOL has let its Mozilla staff go. All of them. They've also dismantled the Netscape division, to the point of "pulling the logos off the buildings". But not to fear... Many Mozilla hackers have banded together to form the mozillafoundation, which strives to continue development of Mozilla. It looks to me like Netscape (the brand) will be around for quite awhile yet... AOL would be fools to drop something with that name recognition... but I think what will happen is they'll gear it more towards the content-providing side of things, and Netscape (the browser) will disappear. It's already hard to find a link to download the browser from the Netscape site. It just makes sense, given their deal with Microsoft. But funnily enough, they're not really the bad guys in this scenario. They've given the Mozilla Foundation a $2 million donation to help get them going, and handed them all the trademarks and logos for the project. With this sort of head-start, the Mozilla Foundation can really go places - places they probably never could have gone while still under the AOL umbrella. So it'll be an interesting period over the next year for web browsers, and the web in general, since we'll have a 'new' growing browser maker, and an established browser that isn't updating....

· damn. (June 2003 )

IE for Mac is dead. Long live Safari & Mozilla....

· validlicious! (December 2002 )

I got tired of doing the validation thing manually every time I wanted to check my site, so I added the ol' W3C "Html 4.01 valid" icon on the page... ;)...

· we're slowly taking over the world... (December 2002 )

The W3C has gone table-less (link goes to their HOWTO and FAQ)...

· new article... (November 2002 )

I've got a new article up on Cramsession: Cramsession.com - CSS for Managers. It took a little longer to get this one up, because some data gremlins stole it out of my editor's inbox... Go take a look!...

· what d'ya think? (October 2002 )

There's a heated debate going on in Webdesign-L right now about the Wayback Machine (http://web.archive.org), and whether it's a good thing, or a complete and total copyright violation. What do you guys think?...

· Gettin' with the times... (October 2002 )

Wired News has jumped on the CSS/XHTML bandwagon... and has replaced Table layout with CSS Layout. Score our team!...

· ht://dig (September 2002 )

Anyone know if there's an IIS equivalent to ht://dig? I'd use ht://dig & Cygwin, but I can't....

· new article up... (September 2002 )

Feeling Included: Using SSI and ASP to manage your website. Go take a gander!...

· Thank GOD. (September 2002 )

Netscape's page, as seen by 4.0 browsers...

· ever wonder... (August 2002 )

Ever wonder why the uptake on using W3C compliant code, such as CSS and valid HTML seems to be so slow? Wonder no longer! Marko Karppinen has published his test of all the W3C members' compliancy to their own standards. It appears that only 4.6%, or 21 of the 454 members with websites, actually adhere to their own guidelines....

· neat CSS trick (August 2002 )

Have you ever wanted to have your site automatically display a URL in brackets next to what it's linked to? (for example: link (http://staticred.net) ) Now you can, at least in Opera and Mozilla. In your stylesheet, add the following ruleset: a:after {     content: " (" attrib(href) ")" ; } That'll do it! Content - Cascading Style Sheets Properties...

· CSS 2.1 Recommendation out (August 2002 )

Cascading Style Sheets, Level 2 revision 1 have been released - there's been a lot of trimming, so it's worth your while to take a read through. 'cause we all know how stimulating and captivating W3 Recommendations can be....

· guh! (July 2002 )

You know, once you figure it out, PHP and SQL aren't all that bad a combination. Of course, until you figure it out, they're demons from the great depths of hell. (I had to rework a PHP script today that was written by one of my developers... it turned out he had forgotten to put in proper error checking, so the script would give an error message, then go right ahead and write the database record anyway. ;) )...

· RFH: Upload script (July 2002 )

Anyone have a good file upload script that can tie into a database? (most likely Interbase, but any SQL-based DB is fine) The script will need to work with IIS (sadly), and I haven't yet found anything decent....

· I thought they were smarter than this... (June 2002 )

Isn't it quite stupid when people think they require permission to link to them or their content? NPR seems not to get the concept of the Internet, or hypertext, which is all about linking to things. Don't they remember the whole KPMG thing? (I actually did fill out their form, with the above entry)...

· new article posted... (June 2002 )

Cramsession.com - CSS for Boneheads: Printer Perfect Pages Go take a look, vote me up. ;)...

· personal reference... (June 2002 )

[brad choate dot com] Paged content using Movable Type!...

· the future looks bright... (June 2002 )

Digital Web has a great article on the promise & reality of using CSS....

· articles update (May 2002 )

My first article for Cramsession just hit 1000 page views! Thanks to the poor lonely soul who must have sat reloading the page over and over again... In other news, the following was overheard about my upcoming Linux articles: "De showed me your Linux articles. My compliments on some very good work."...

· articles update... (May 2002 )

My CSS for Boneheads article seems to be doing pretty well for itself... it's garnered over 750 page views, and reveived a rating of 4.8/5... If you haven't gone to read it yet, please do... and let me know what you think of it! I've now submitted both the Linux for Webheads articles, and I'm just waiting to hear back on when they're being published. As soon as I know, I'll pop the URLs up on the site for you. As for future articles, I'm waiting to hear back. The next one will likely be creating Printer-perfect pages with CSS, followed by either an SSI tutorial or a tutorial on using ASP to include files... I was pondering a Guide to understanding W3C Validation, but haven't received a heck of a lot of response to that idea......

· Article Suggestions (May 2002 )

I'm still taking suggestions for my upcoming artices.. Fred suggested doing Print Pages and Validating... do I hear seconds? Leave your suggestions in the comments......

· Look ma! I done be a writer! (May 2002 )

As you may have noticed, the "articles" section above has changed. I just got an email from the lovely Debaucherina, who informs me that my articles can be found here: » CSS for Boneheads » Zen Web: Converting your site from Tables to CSS Go check 'em out, and feel free to rate those puppies as high as you want. ;)...

· The best explanation ever. (May 2002 )

The best explanation I've ever seen for using CSS positioning instead of table layout: In my reply, below, I'm going to use the word "gizzle" whenever I mean "markup", and the word "runchunky" whenever I mean "Web designer", and the word "rhinoceros" wherever I mean "tag" or "element", and the phrase "coca-cola dynamic ribbon device" wherever I mean "table". I do hope you won't find this difficult to follow. After all, it's clear that using the right name for something isn't important, eh? There's a reason why gizzle rhinoceroses have the names they have: to reflect a specific semantic value, or meaning, for their contents. HTML has six levels of headings, H1 through H6, not because HTML's designers wanted runchunkys to be able to pick and choose from six different pre-fab font sizes, but because they needed to mark up documents that had six levels of headings, such as you'd find in a scientific report. Follow the logic through to other rhinoceroses, and you'll find that there's an <address> rhinoceros because the designers of HTML wanted to be able to identify addresses in a document, there's a <title> rhinoceros because they wanted to be able to specify a page's title, and there's a <caption> rhinoceros because they wanted to be able to provide captions. Coca-Cola Dynamic Ribbon Devices were introduced by Mosaic and Netscape in order to allow for the presentation of tabular data, period. The HTML coca-cola dynamic ribbon device spec is based on the CALS coca-cola dynamic ribbon device model, with a few differences. CALS (an acronym for Computer-Aided Acquisition and Logistics Support) was designed solely for the standard exchange of data between military suppliers. That by turning borders off and using coca-cola dynamic ribbon devices as a layout mechanism runchunkys achieved something otherwise impossible at the time, namely box and columnar layouts, is irrelevant. -- Steven Champeon, WebDesign-l Listmom...

· Why not use CSS? (April 2002 )

Why Use CSS? - good point-form sheet to use with clients....

· A Matrix moment... (April 2002 )

<p style="voice-family: 'Keanu Reeves';">     I know ASP! </p> (Feeling a little kooky this morning; I had to sit down and figure out how to use ASP, so I could get something at work going. It's pretty easy by the looks of it [at least for what I need it to do right now] and I was able to get what I needed done fairly quickly.)...

· New things everyday... (April 2002 )

According to this page on blooberry.com, you can specify multiple classes within a single class statement. An example where this came up is at work; I needed to have a common element use two separate classes, "selected" and "navoption". I wasn't looking forward to creating a special class for every single element I wanted to use the effect on... It's basically a space-delimited list. The format is as follows:<span class="class1 class2 class3 etc">Pretty neat, eh?...

· Attention netdiver visitors... ()

You can access the Menulicious script here (right/option click and save the file), without having to go through iStock....

· Survey says... (April 2002 )

Anyone using Radio Userland? I'm comparing CMS systems, and need to get some input on that system (as I haven't run it myself). Please leave your comments as to pros/cons in the comments....

· Printing web pages... (March 2002 )

NUblog: A better printable page I followed the advice in this article for the Merilus website, before the article was even published!...

· neat things in HTML (March 2002 )

Foz sent me this tidbit: Blockquote has an optional attribute: cite="url". Usage would look like this: <blockquote cite="http://staticred.net/speakeasy"> Blockquote has an additional attribute: cite="url". </blockquote> Great thing to have, but it doesn't render in any of the current web browsers. foz does have a point, however, that it would be quite useful for word processors....

· ALT= ? (March 2002 )

Don't use ALT= for your images according to this bug on Mozilla.org. I came across this 'bug' in Mozilla a few weeks ago, when I was coding the new work website. If you specify ALT text for your images, it will not display as a tooltip. This was a conscious decision on the Mozilla dev team, to interpret the W3C recommendation very strictly. If you want alternate text to display as a tooltip for the image, you must now use the TITLE= attribute. There's a downside to this, of course; TITLE is not supported by Netscape 4.x. Of course, since all good web developers adhere to HTML/CSS standards anyways, this isn't a problem, right? :)...

· how to select a CSS element by context (February 2002 )

Cascading Style Sheets, level 1: Contextual Selectors Came across this working on a personal project. I was looking for a way to change the nature of anchors within a specific <div>, but I didn't want to set up a special class for them within the stylesheet, so I wouldn't have to edit the main source. This entry in the W3C recommendation showed me exactly how to do that. A,A.visited { color: white; } .light A,A.visited { color:black; } The above will render all anchor tags on the page in white, with the exception of anchor tags within a <div class="light"> -- these will render in black... Very simple, when all is said and done. Works in IE & Mozilla (tested). Should work in Opera too....

· multiple pages with MT (February 2002 )

[brad choate dot com] Paged content using Movable Type! - for later reference....

· the best 404 page I've ever seen. (February 2002 )

... 404 Error: Now what??? ... Lovers of zork will really like this one......

· menulicious! ()

Menubar script has been udated to version 1.2... now with support for Opera and Netscape Navigator! If you use this script, please let me know and I'll link to your site....

· how to 'disable' a CSS element (January 2002 )

Learnt something today, when playing around with a new theme - if you want to clear the contents of an active style element in an alternate stylesheet, simply use null as your value. For example, with the 'flower' stylsheet, I needed to change the #title ID... the base stylesheet specifies a right-hand positioning of the title element... and I wanted to move it to a left-hand positioning. In order to do this, I had to enter the following: #title {   right: null;   left: 10px; }...

· JS RSS Parser (January 2002 )

this is aaronland | toys | weblog-updates | changes-rss...

· Damn that netscape!! (January 2002 )

The reason why Netscape 4.x doesn't play well with CSS isexplained here. It turns out Netscape 4.x had proposed a Javascript Style Sheet system to the W3C, and went ahead and implemented it before getting their reply. The W3C rejected it, in favour of CSS1 and the rest is, as they say, the reason most web designers want Marc Andreeson drawn and quartered....

· using RSS news feeds (January 2002 )

Using RSS News Feeds - Webreference.com for later reference...

· update to the menubar (January 2002 )

finally got the menubar to work in Opera and NS... view more for source & implementation. I'll implement it on this site over the next couple of days... If you use this script, please let me know. ;)...

· embedded perl (January 2002 )

update: Talked with Brian about it a bit more, and he managed to clear up some of the issues I had below. I'm going to give it the old college try, and see what happens. OK, so I've been researching Embedded Perl, and for the life of me I can't see a reason for me to move over to it. Here are first blush impressions... From a perl coder's point of view, I can see how it would be a great thing -- you can embed your code directly in the document to increase performance as well as 'hide' your code from the general populace (a great thing from a security perspective, as they now don't know what language you've developed your app in). From a programmer's point of view, embedded perl is likely a very good thing. The point of view of a content manager is another beast entirely, however. Perl code in my content is the last thing I want to see. The beauty of SSI and CSS is that I can totally seperate my content from any form of presentation. From my perspective, that's a very good thing ™. The way it's set up seems to separate content in the same way as SSI, so no worries there From the looks of it (and with some explanation by Alan), you set up a single base.epl file, which contains both your header and footer information, seperated by a [- Execute ('*') -]. Conceptually, I can see how this works -->the server wraps the base.epl around whatever file is currently being requested, filling in whatever needs to be filled in... I'm not yet sure how embperl deals with multiple footer files. For example, on my work site I have different footer files for different sections of the site -- products, support, etc. Instead of doing the very very simple #include virtual='/ssi/sectionfooter.shtml' it sounds as though the base.epl will have to have a set of if/then conditions to deal with this -- which is a hell of a lot more complicated than I need it to be. Though I don't like the organization method much, you can place 'replacement' footer files (or header files) in the directory you want affected, and it'll replace the 'stock' files with those. The only thing i can't see yet is how to do multiple footer files in the same directory. But I'm still checking it out, and playing with it myself, so I may have a change of mind...

· For work reference... (January 2002 )

Embperl - Building dynamic Websites with Perl Introduction to EmbperlObject...

· j00ve b33n 0wN3d! (January 2002 )

Look! I've hacked your system! Click on more for a .jpg screenshot. (Windows Users Only)...

· extra hoopy funstuff (December 2001 )

I know I posted this locally a few days ago, but the menubar source can be found at istockphoto, by going directly here....

· the first time's free.... ()

Sometimes I like slipping into the TTY scheme..... why don't you give it a try?...

· thanks to zeldman... (December 2001 )

Thanks to Zeldman, there's now a script to change your font size. This script will also set a cookie to save your font size settings so you don't have to do it every time. Eventually, I'll put this stuff into a Preferences section, so I can get it off the main page. I'll probably use the same script to let you guys select from multiple stylesheets as well......

· Menubar source (December 2001 )

I've just uploaded the javascript menubar I'm using above in a compressed zip file. Grab it here and use happily. Let me know how you've used it, and get a free link on the site! ;)...

· menulicious (December 2001 )

Just cobbled together a menu system for work, and decided to implement it here for my navigation......

· excellent article... (December 2001 )

A List Apart: Why Don't You Code For Netscape? Excellent article on why to build your site according to the W3C's recommendations....

· or, how to make it less easy to steal your images... (November 2001 )

Ran across this fix to disable the IE 6.0 image toolbar on your webpages... <META HTTP-EQUIV="imagetoolbar" CONTENT="no">...

· Oh, those wacky Character Entries... (November 2001 )

Index of HTML 4.0 Character Entity References...

· Alternate Style Sheets (November 2001 )

A List Apart: CSS: Making Alternate Style Sheets Work - I'll be adding this to the site over the next couple of days... perhaps bringing back some ancient designs. ;)...

· most wanted browser features (November 2001 )

Most Wanted Browser Features - ChunkySoup.net Opinion...

· MT bookmarklet bug (October 2001 )

If you are using the Movable Type bookmarklet and are having problems with it not loading your blog's categories, check out the discussion here....

· Update to MT bookmarklet (October 2001 )

An update to my earlier post about a context-menu bookmarklet for MT... Here's a new registry key for adding a context menu entry to post to MT. Edit this file before entering into your registry You will need to change the http://path/to/mt/mt.cgi to your proper path. On some systems, you may need to rename this file with a .reg extension in order to import the key. You may also want to edit the &bm_show variable to display the fields you want in your entry form. your options are: category, allow_comments, more_text. As always, your mileage may vary....

· new MT feature (October 2001 )

For those of you being linked off of Weblogs.com, they've changed the way they're doing things. Check out this url for information on how to get MT to send them your RSS feed....

· design for the masses ()

There's currently a debate raging in webdesign-l about how to design for "a general audience." what would your approach be?...

· browser chromes ()

The subject of designing for resolution came up on one of the mailing lists I subscribe to, so I dug these out of the depths of my hard drive... chromes.zip consists of two photoshop files, which contain all the browser chromes for the various browsers at 640x480 and 800x600....

· redesign on a shoestring... (October 2001 )

Zeldman has a decent column about redesigning your corporate site on a shoe-string budget......

· HTML Color table (October 2001 )

HTML Named Colors Table hat tip to foz...

· new version of MT (October 2001 )

There's a new version of Movable Type available on Monday......

· God, this was so boring. ()

Everything you ever wanted to know about punctuation in HTML, and more!...

· Instant-WAP ()

Instant-WAP - for Foz and others who are looking for something along the lines of an on-the-fly WAP converter....

· <table> is dead! long live <div> (April 2001 )

See? I'm not the only one who's killed all their tables....

· new bug bits ()

My friend julie redesigned her journal today. Check it out....

· Mac IE 5 users wanted! (April 2001 )

static|red. the personal web of darren james harknessHey guys... If anyone out there is viewing this site in Mac/IE5.x, please take a screenshot of what you see and email it to me or post a URL for it in the comments... I can't test Mac here, and I'm curious to know if it works or not. ;)...

· New Opera out... (April 2001 )

Opera 5.10 was released today......