:: Personal website of a Toronto web designer
Archive, September 2001
Sunday, 30. September 2001
ImageReady Easter Egg
[12:00 am]
Did you know this one?
Fire up ImageReady, create a New Document [Ctrl+N], make sure that the Background is set to Transparent. Type "duckerboard". See Ducks?
Tip: To see the ducks better, increase your Grid Size to large.
Saturday, 29. September 2001
Shorten my URL
[12:00 am]
What do you usually do when you wish to send a URL to a friend, but the URL is soooooo long that the friend's email program inevitably breaks it into two or three lines?
On many message boards out there you can see:
"If the above URL breaks into two lines, you may have to reassemble it in the location window of your browser. Sorry."
TinyURL is a great service that will, as they say, "shorten that long URL into a Tiny URL".
Please note: I updated this old post. Previously it was pointing to another service Make A Shorter Link, which, meanwhile, doesn't accept new links anymore, due to abuse by spammers.
Friday, 28. September 2001
Linkdump
[12:00 am]
My favorite Web Site SpeechTherapy has gone fishin'? Sad :-(
Anyway, some links for today. Enjoy!
Design Magazins:
Media Inspiration
Communication Arts
Digital Web
Design Interact
NetDiver
HowDesign
Computer Arts
Core77
Web Techniques
Adobe Magazin
Thursday, 27. September 2001
Flash
[12:00 am]
I haven't touched Flash since one month or so, is it bad?
Tuesday, 25. September 2001
Digital Web Magazine
[12:00 am]
New issue of Digital Web Magazine is online. I like the article "Measuring User Experience" and of course Stephen's The Ozone Asylum review.
Do I have to mention here that I am honoured to be a part of the Ring around The Asylum?
Monday, 24. September 2001
Adobe llustrator 10
[12:00 am]
Adobe has launched llustrator 10, with the new version loaded with Web-centric tools and database integration features. The company says it hopes the update will appeal not just to artists and Web designers, but a new market niche for creative tools: Web developers. More »
Sunday, 23. September 2001
Quek chat
[12:00 am]
Very cool chat. [via asylum]
Saturday, 22. September 2001
Strange Sex Facts
[12:00 am]
Here is what I got today in my inbox folder. I'll share it with you.
STRANGE SEX FACTS
Women who read romance novels have sex twice as often as those who don't.
Taco Bell changed the Chilito's name to the Chili Cheese Burrito, only after discovering that "chilito" was a derogatory slang term in Spanish that meant "small penis."
In many cultures, an unmarried woman is considered a virgin, even if she's a prostitute.
It's only after marriage that she loses her virginity.
A law in Fairbanks, Alaska does not allow moose to have sex on city streets.
Studies prove it's harder to tell a convincing lie to someone you find sexually attractive.
66% pet owners claim they allowed their pets to remain in the bedroom during lovemaking.
"Anorgasmy" is the clinical term for the inability to achieve orgasm.
Average number of times a man will ejaculate in his lifetime: 7,200. Average speed of male ejaculation: 28 miles per hour.
About 50% of women have one breast that is larger than the other.
Ancient Greeks admired the small firm penis, and considered the large member aesthetically unappealing.
The word "vanilla" comes from the Latin word for vagina, because of the vanilla pod's resemblance to the female genitalia.
The left testicle usually hangs lower than the right, although the reverse may be true of left-handed men.
Friday, 21. September 2001
Sex not interesting anymore
[12:00 am]
For the first time in the short history of the Internet, popular search engines reported yesterday that "sex" dropped off their lists of top 10 search terms in the days following last week's attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
Thursday, 20. September 2001
Go get the fix if you need it
[12:00 am]
Nimda fix available.
Tuesday, 18. September 2001
Nimda; CSS/Edge; Mozilla 0.9.4
[12:00 am]
Windows users, make sure to download and install the patch that is supposed to protect yourself against the new worm called Nimda (admin backwards).
I just applied the patch, so I am covered. ~cough~
Eric Meyer shows us an impressive example of what can be accomplished using CSS only.
Mozilla 0.9.4 Unleashed.
One of the news in this release is that the user can disable the JavaScript window.open() method during page load and unload events. This should turn off most annoying pop-up and pop-under ads.
Friday, 14. September 2001
Zeldman.com down; Nostradamus; Validator
[12:00 am]
zeldman.com has been down since yesterday night. It doesn't seem to be something extraordinary these days.
Did Nostradamus Predict the Tragedy?
Some useful reading in the time where the internet hoaxes are poping up like mushrooms.
What happened to the validator?
New look, new function?
Thursday, 13. September 2001
Zeitgeist; SVG
[12:00 am]
Google Zeitgeist updated.
Saw this at one forum, makes me really interested.
SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics and is W3C standard. The best way to think about it, is to think about it as Flash, but without the program. Instead you use markup language to define the vectors. You aslo use markup langague to create effects, like opacity, rotation etc.. So lets suppose you define a 3D cube in SVG, then its possible to rotate that cube on any axis, fade it in and out and pretty much anything you can think of that flash can do with vectors. But there are advantages here with SVG, like any markup langague, you can get your scripts really refined hence saving on download times, you also have at your disposal the DOM so you can drive SVG with the DOM, you know add custom attributes and all that sort of stuff So imagine Drop down menus made with SVG graphics that can rotate, flip, blend, fade etc . . . Becuase its XML based we can also add other things to it like SMIL, which then allows us to integrate some mutlimedia with it. To cut a very long story short, there are some exciting times ahead for web developers . . .
Tuesday, 11. September 2001
9/11
[12:00 am]
Nothing much to say. There are no words to describe the sadness of this day. I only hope this won't escalate in something worse.
Monday, 10. September 2001
Dreamweaver and Web Standards
[12:00 am]
If you use Dreamweaver but care about Web Standards there are two things you can do right away to save your precious time.
- to include a document type declaration at the beginning of each new page opened in DW, open a file called default.html that can be found in Templates folder and add DOCTYPE declaration at the beginning of it.
- you can include empty ALT values to image objects using a technique described on Macromedia web site.
Creating Good Web Sites. Very useful lessons that show the importance of design skills rather than technical aspects. Enjoy.
Sunday, 09. September 2001
Source code theif
[12:00 am]
If you cannot accept the fact that The Emperor Truly Has No Clothes on the web, this is not the place for you. I will respect your decision and wish you well in your new career.
I am a source code theif.
I love this article writen by headlemur. I think we all had this experience.
Saturday, 08. September 2001
Pictures of our new office
[12:00 am]
Dragan brought his new digital camera (sweet little thing that I put on my wishlist . . .) today and we took some pictures in our new office.
Friday, 07. September 2001
Traces on the Internet
[12:00 am]
Sometimes I spend time on Google looking for people that I knew once, friends from elementary school or gymnasium, neighbours, (feeling of longing for the past and bygone things?) . . . Most of them are no computer geeks and they don't leave many traces on the Internet but Google is powerful search engine, so I found a web site about my neighbour who is apparently an artist. I have no contact with him and it is cool to see what people are doing in life. I know the web site is hard on your eyes with that green-red animation but make sure to check his works. Pretty cool stuff that makes you think a bit. More about him on this page that looks better too ;-) I also found one of his videos that shows the street where I lived. Yes there is a bit of nostalgia in all of this, I know.
Thursday, 06. September 2001
Getting around "right-click disabled"
[12:00 am]
You would like to view the source code but instead of the code you get an annoying alert that says: "Sorry right-click is disabled" or "Copyright Bla Bla Bla". The easiest workaround for IE Win users I have seen so far:
- right-click on the page, and continue holding down the right mouse button
- left-click on the OK dialogue
- release the right mouse button
Weee ;-)
Wednesday, 05. September 2001
SVG and SMIL
[12:00 am]
The World Wide
Tuesday, 04. September 2001
Horizontal scroll in IE6/Win
[12:00 am]
It has been bugging me for about a week and I think I discovered the reason why I get the horizontal scroll in IE6/Win. To me it looks like a bug. For your convenience I created a page where you can toggle between the page that has the horizontal scroll and the page that hasn't. Notice the difference?
Monday, 03. September 2001
WYSIWYG editors
[12:00 am]
An interesting article. Are WYSIWYG editors really so bad? As sad as it might seem, in near future they will win I guess. Or am I being wrong and pessimistic again? There are many discussions on this topic out there. I still find DW useful for some things but most of the stuff here is being done with UltraEdit lately. I just find it more comfortable to work with. Do you like hand coding or prefer editors like DW? Are you the one who thinks that the hand coders are boasters or are you the one who has no respect for people that use WYSIWYG editors? Or are you the one like me who sits on the fence?
Another thing to mention here is that there are differences between WYSIWYG editors. I can live with DW but hate Front Page.
Saturday, 01. September 2001
Scrolling bug in IE6
[12:00 am]
"Benefits" of using IE6:
I finally understand what Jeff and ALA people meant by scrolling bug in IE6. I encountered it by reading ALA's new interesting article. It is like: "Hey this page needs to be scrolled more vertically!" Simple reload fixes the problem.
My first headaches with IE6 from the web designer's point of view started when viewing this page. First of all, text appeared to be centered at once which I fixed immediately and I realize that it might be me and my bad coding. But the next problem is on the main page (bottom frame). It has that annoying horizontal scroll and I have no idea how to fix it. I tried everything. And again it appears in IE6 only.
There are also some interesting bugs reported by Brian Jar found in the IE 6 beta that haven't been fixed yet.
So, what is the conclusion? Yes, you guess it, we are far far away from the perfect browser.
What is your eXPerience?
What? September already?
