Previously in the ‘Web development’ Category…
Cross-Browser CSS3 Rule Generator
- March
- 26th
- 2010
CSS3 Please! The Cross-Browser CSS3 Rule Generator.
This is a brilliant tool for those hard to remember CSS3 rules – AND it also generates the appropriate filters for Internet Explorer.
- Rounded corners
- Box shadow
- Box gradient
- Box rotate (I didn’t even know this was possible – no more jQuery for this)
- @Font-face (not really CSS3 as IE has supported it since 5.5)
Idiotic web solutions
- December
- 10th
- 2009
I have noticed a trend, of putting printed documents on the web.
Some marketing genius have started selling in the concept of publishing printed documents straight on the web.
This is a bad idea.
Why? To put it as simply as possible: your screen is not made of paper.
To quote IQ Pager, who seem to be a major player in this:
“1. Readability.
The user feels more at home in a traditionally printed format.
First off – that is a lie! A printed A4 does not equal the height of most monitors. As the matter of fact, with the increasing use of widescreen monitors this becomes even more appearant.
2. Faster and easier with no download
You must always download a PDF and open it in Acrobat. It takes time and you save the file on your machine whether you want to or not
Once again – lies. PDF files can open inside the browser, and does not need to be downloaded as a whole for that to happen. But PDF besides the point: A good web based version using the screen medium, whether it be through Flash, HTML, etc will always be way more user friendly – and no downloads. For printing a good CSS file can format the printed document no matter if the user has A4, A3 or letter format paper.
3. Weighs nothing
If you send out a newsletter, a PDF is very heavy…
Wait a minute Shirley! Are you fucking nuts, dude? If you send out a PDF as your newsletter then you are doing it completely wrong. People want to read their emails, then discard them. Getting people to click a link in an email is HARD. They must really want to read the content. Emails are not supposed to be printed in the first place. E-L-E-C-T-R-O-N-I-C communication, people! IQ Pager uses a flash solution to read PDFs, nothing more. It is overkill.
The sales pitch continues, and it is clear that besides outright lying, they really have no business selling a shitty solution in the first place.
I have worked in the web business for over 11 years, and I come from a background in print design before then. You cannot mix your mediums like this. It is the equivalent of broadcasting an image on the radio – cumbersome and stupid.
For good marketing to work, you need to work with the medium you have chosen. You can not have a film playing in a newspaper (yet), and people accept this. You can not change the size of the paper once printed, nor can you change the size of peoples screens to fit a portrait A4,A3 or billboard in readable size.
Is this point clear? Jeesus F. Christ in a tutu on a pogostick! I can’t believe I have to get pissed off at this crap.
Here is my open letter to all web companies with similar solutions to this:
“Dear flash based PDF reading companies.
Stop. Just please stop. Do not encourage our clients to embrace stupidity. If you have a crappy product, then do not sell it. Just because you could sell the idea it doesn’t mean that you should. Sure, you sell the point of that they don’t have to put the extra effort of making a good presentation on the web of their printed information. That only cheapens what they are trying to communicate. Learn the basics: Print and Web are two different mediums. They should be separate. The key value is always communication. One way, two way, three way communication, it doesn’t matter. Ask yourself: If this solution is so fantastic, then why isn’t it used all over the web instead of HTML? It would save time! “
Gotta love the spam
- October
- 21st
- 2009
I love the variations of the standard Nigerian spam letters. You know the kind. Where a long lost princess need someone help her get a Scrooge McDuck amount of money out of their war torn country.
I have decided to publish all that I receive here, because I find them amusing and would probably make a good book.
Here is my first entry in this category. I shall call this “The russian library doesn’t burn books”. I received it from two addresses, which in my book indicate that the spammer found my email address in two seperate address books.
elenaga@zymail.ru
elenaga@lapost.ru
”
Hi,
My name is Elena, I have 32 years and I write you from Russian province. I work in library and I can use computer after my work when possible. I finded your address in internet while visited some sites and decided to write you this desperate letter.
I have daughter Angelina, she is 8 years, her father abandoned us and we live with my mother.
Due to financial crisis my mother recently lost job and our situation became very difficult.
The prices for gas and electricity is very high in our region and we cannot use it to heating our home anymore.
The winter is coming and weather becoming colder each day. We very afraid and we don’t know what to do.
The only accessible way for us to heat our home is to use portable oven which work with burning wood. We have enough wood in our region and this oven will heat our home all winter for minimal charges.
Unfortunately, we cannot buy such oven in our city because it price equivalent of 191 Euro and very expensive for us.
If you have any old portable oven and in case you don’t use it anymore, we will be very grateful to you if you can donate it to us and organize transport of this oven to our address (200km from Moscow). This ovens are different, usually they made from cast iron.
I will be waiting your answer.
Elena and my family. ”
Russia.
Now doesn’t that bring a tear to your eyes? Don’t you want to immediately send this poor family a cast iron stove that is portable? Because clearly, the ground is too bloody good for these people to burn wood on. I think that we really should pinpoint where this email came from and then dive bomb the place with cast iron stoves.
IETester – the end of Internet Explorer woes?
- September
- 18th
- 2009
In the wake of RIP IE6 I got a tip about IETester from My Debugbar.
It is in early alpha but can appearantly mimic the rendering of IE from 5.5 all the way through 8.
So far so good, we will see if this will grow to be a useful tool.
Testing a new plugin
- May
- 26th
- 2009
Multilingual plugin for WordPress – because I write so many posts in Swedish.
I figured it was time to get a better way than my current of using a Swedish category, with double posts in each. Lo and behold I found a new plugin which should make this a lot easier.
Joomla vs. WordPress
- March
- 16th
- 2009
OK, so now I am almost done moving my site and portfolio from Joomla to WordPress. It has been an interesting experience, and on the WP side extremely smooth. It has been an eye-opener on how much you can customise this system.
I am still testing things out, so the site will be in flux for at least couple more weeks.
On the upside for Joomla though, is that templating for it is extremely straight forward, and the plug ins are extremely advanced.
WordPress still kicks ass for sheer brilliance and smoothness of plugins and template design. It can be as complex or as simple as you want it to be.
CSS3 for the masses
- January
- 30th
- 2009
IMHO: CSS3 is a brilliant next step for presentational design for the web. And if you have been in the game as long as I have (around 13 years since my first webpage) then you know all about degrading your code so that alpha browsers get a really nice presentation with all bells and whistles (IE8, FF 3+, Opera 9+, Safari 3+), beta browsers get an OK presentation but might miss out on minor things. Gamma browsers (I count IE <= 6, IE for Mac, Netscape <=8, AOL users) well, seriously, just UPGRADE ALREADY.
In my latest project we are using CSS3, which appearantly even IE8 does a pretty good job of presenting.
One hump I got on my back is the implementation of columns in CSS3.
Typical column layout these days is done by floating or positioning div, depending on which school of thought you follow. This page for instance has a two column layout. It works and it is brilliant.
But is there any use for columns for content?
In normal newspaper layout you are used to read text in columns, and even that becomes hard at times, as the user looses track of where they were, especially when spanning several pages, or poor layouts. With the advent of columns for the web – users will not have a reference for dealing with this. Sure it is semantic and it will degrade properly, but my argument is that it will give a poor user experience, as users will have to scroll down for content, and print-designers think that their newspaper layouts automatically can be translated to the web. Bollocks to that. If anyone sees a good example of using multiple columns on a page, please let me know.
SEO for an idiot
- January
- 30th
- 2009
Right, SEO is a really complex subject matter. There are so many different strategies to get your site in that number one spot on Google and yahoo!.
My experiment into SEO is now “Blondy & Blacky – balklänningar, brudklänningar & smokings” and how to get them higher on the search engines rankings. The problem I face is the following:
I redesigned and moved the site from the web-address blondy.nu to blondyblacky.com in early December. At the same time we moved the shop into the textalk.se system – which is on a completely different server. Of course we dropped from the Google results immediately, and now my task is to get us back on the frontpage again. All the while trying to do this without having to fork out for the extra cost of search engine option on textalk.
I will post about my progress in this matter here
About freaking time
- January
- 23rd
- 2009
Just a quick post to let people know that the latest iteration of the popular Joomla CMS has finally reached a stable 1.5.
I am a big fan of the content management system, and have used it almost exclusively for my projects ever since it was just a twinkle in the eye of Mambo .
I skipped fiddling around with the betas last year, so I could focus on this new version instead. Needless to say, I will download immediately, and figured I might as well update my website while I am at it. During this process, I will write a detailed review, as I go along.
Watch this space for full details.
Firefox 3 – A new hope
- June
- 18th
- 2008
I have no doubt that the more tech-savvy of my visitors already know that Firefox 3 is launching on Tuesday 17th June 2008. As the geek and internet-entrapreneur that I am, this exites me a lot. Of course I have already adapted the beta as my main browser, but it has a few things that have bothered me. Most of my major tools work absolutely fine, but I really miss my Google Toolbar (strange but true – I like Googles products as I see them as productivity enhancements).
Anyway, I don’t want to get side-tracked. Firefox 3 is the first of the Alpha browsers latest updates. Internet Explorer 8 will be launched during 3rd quarter of 2008, which I myself find strange, as IE7 still is not widely used, and IE6 users keep on annoying me. Seriously, everyone should take the 5 minutes it takes to keep their browsers updated. Not only because of aestethics but also because of security issues. I know, I know. Mr Joe-Average User does not care about these things – he “just want it to work”. Well, life is not that easy unless you make it so. These days there are automatic updates for almost all major softwares used both in the home and at work. Windows update is probably the one normal users are most familiar with, but unfortunately it still gives normal users too much power – They can still turn down updates if they are connected to the web.
Firefox has so far one of the less intrusive ways of updating, it can be controlled in the options menu. The software will check if there is a new version and either download it for you and inform you when it has installed it, or if you need to download a new version, then it will let you know the steps to get the latest version.
Anyway, if you want to read more about the new features of Firefox three, then I suggest you head over to Mozillas site. I don’t see any reason repeating the functionality here.
Although, the new bookmarking facility makes the download completely worth it.
