Fleeting Epiphanies

The New, Confusing, Online Social World

Tue, 13 May 2008 03:36:14 GMT

I'm not one to put a lot of personal information on my blog. I don't have problem with people that do it, it's just not my personal style. When I was first on the web, it took about 3 or 4 years before you could find a picture of me anywhere (as a woman, I needed brain respect first). I was one of the last people I know to join Facebook (never have had a Myspace page). Don't get me wrong, I love the web, but I've just never found the need to expose a lot of personal information there. Enter our new, confusing age I've posted here about Twitter. And I do love it for a variety of reasons. I post more information there than I do in other places. Oddly, it feels like I'm talking to my friends--in some giant, controlled IM. Of course, I know that since I don't protect my tweets, anyone that follows me, google, and the world can read them. Still... Facebook however, has turned out to be another animal entirely. After joining for an orchestrated birthday prank on a friend, I stayed and connected with a lot of folks--from real life friends to web friends I've not yet met in real life (IRL). In the past few months in fact, I've connected with several old friends, from grade school to co....Read more at Community MX

Web Design World

Mon, 05 May 2008 07:55:12 GMT

Tomorrow, I get on a plane to Web Design World Chicago. It looks like it's going to be a great conference. If you're in the area, come on over and join in the geek fun. Jeff Veen, Jared Spool, Dan Rubin, Joe Marini, Greg Rewis and more! Then it's on to HOW Design in Boston followed by Multi-Mania in Brussels, Belgium, TODCon in Orlando and finally Web Down Under in Sydney. The organizers have worked hard, and done a great job on all these conferences so be sure to come to the one closest to you. You will not regret it. Promise! Grab me in the hall if you're there. I love to meet people. :)....Read more at Community MX

Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS3

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 17:10:57 GMT

Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS3, the book I co-wrote with Greg Rewis, is finally out. Yes, I know, it was long overdue. I took a picture of it when I finally got to see it at Greg's house (no, my copies haven't arrived yet), so if you'll excuse the exhausted, traipsing around Phoenix all day look on my face, you can see me with the book on Flickr. Greg and I didn't want to create the same CSS or Dreamweaver book that others have written. Those books are published, are very useful, and if that's what you need buy the appropriate book. Our goal instead was to show how to create standards-based, accessible web layouts using Dreamweaver. It's a myth that you have to hand code to be a real web developer. Is it best to know how to semantically mark up your page? Yes, absolutely. This is a craft and you should know as much as you can about it. Can you hand code within the Dreamweaver environment? Of course you can -- I do it all the time. Do you have to? Absolutely not. There are tools within Dreamweaver that make your work faster, and more effective whether you're working in code or design view. If you haven't looked at Dreamweaver since about MX or so, it's come a long way baby! Ch....Read more at Community MX

An Event Apart, SXSWi, NAB, Web Design World, HOW Design, and more...

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 03:28:28 GMT

Coming up in the next couple months, I'll be at several conferences where I'd love to meet you! This week, Austin beckons! At South by Southwest Interactive, I'll be doing three panels. On Saturday, What Women Need to Succeed will explore women in technology--what it takes to make your mark and succeed in the tech world we love. Are women really different? On Sunday, I'll do a panel with Greg Rewis of Adobe on Responsible Web Design. And finally, on Monday afternoon, we'll discuss where WaSP has been and where it's going in Don't Break the Web. On April 14th, I'll be presenting a three hour session at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) in Las Vegas, In-Depth: Using New Media with Adobe Dreamweaver. On April 25th, In the great city of New Orleans (right before the first weekend of the Jazz Fest!), An Event Apart will take place. Jeffery Zeldman and Eric Meyer invite you to come join us. I'll be presenting Design Challenges, Standards Solutions. Practical, real-world solutions to common problems. If you mention my code -AEASULL- you'll get a $50 discount. Go for it, it will be a great conference! And plan to stay for JazzFest on the weekend. On May 5-7, Web Design World....Read more at Community MX

Twitter - A New User's Guide

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 18:59:23 GMT

So maybe you've never heard of twitter, or maybe it's old news but you thought it seemed silly. That's what happened to me at first as well. A friend told me to check it out (with no instructions), I took a look at the home page, wondered why I cared what all those people I didn't know were doing right now, and closed it. For those that haven't heard of it, twitter is a social networking tool that requires you to answer one simple question - "What are you doing?" - in 140 characters or less. And I agree, it does sound rather silly every time I try to explain it. However, I've found Twitter to be my favorite social tool. I've basically turned off IM (which can be an extreme time sink for me when friends need CSS help!), but I can still keep up with people I care about. In light of the confusion of new people looking at the app, I thought I'd write a few tips I've found along the way that make it work for me. A Quick Twitter Primer Your initial job is to find people you want to follow. You follow them by viewing their profile page and clicking "Follow" under their main icon. These are your friends. (They're called "Following" in your Stats sidebar and their icon will now appear ....Read more at Community MX

Scaling Fonts using em units

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:05:33 GMT

As I train all over the world, one of the issues I try to spend a good deal of time on is helping people to understand the malleable em unit. And how to utilize it for good and not evil. :) Anyone who knows me knows my burden for accessibility and the em unit is one of the most accessible ways to design. In fact, Greg and I spend a chapter on it in our upcoming book, so I won't go into a lot of detail here. But today, I stumbled upon a really great font-size calculator created by James Whittaker. If you'd rather keep it handy on your desktop, he also created it as an Adobe AIR application. In reading the comments of his blog post, I saw a couple people questioning the reasoning behind decreasing the default text size of a user at all. And I began to answer those questions with my own opinions. About three paragraphs into my reply, it occurred to me that I was monopolizing James' comments and it was best done as a blog post of my own (please read James' post for the full story). For the quick back story - the default text size of modern browsers is 16px (that would equal 1em). It's quite common to choose a 12px font-size which is 75% of the default sizing (.75em), as the ....Read more at Community MX

Zooming Backgrounds in Internet Explorer 7

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 07:47:24 GMT

Recently, I did a presentation at Webmaster Jam Session in Dallas. In my session, one of the things I showed were some faux column techniques. During the QA at the end, a problem was brought up that I hadn't run into. The statement/question was that, evidently, there's a reported bug in Internet Explorer 7 (OMG, imagine!) where background images are not zoomed with the rest of the page when the Page > zoom accessibility feature is used. So when you use a faux column technique on your web page to create the illusion of equal columns, your text can end up not being on top of the column color you want. In some cases, this can lead to some pretty major legibility problems. The attendee stated they had given up faux columns due to this issue. Talk about depressing! I use faux columns so regularly -- I just couldn't imagine I had to give them up! I talked to a couple Microsoft people and yes, they said it was a known bug, but I couldn't get any information about a possible fix time frame. Now that I have IE7 on my computer (yay, VMWare!), I had some time to have a look (well, I didn't really have time, but due to something I was working on and with my curiosity piqued, I did some....Read more at Community MX

Blue Beanie Day - A Day for Web Standards

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 02:56:05 GMT

Yes, it's rather embarrassing, but I admit it. I have a Facebook account. Though I resisted for a long time, I was recently convinced to join Facebook to participate in a birthday prank for a friend. Oh well, another social time sink. On Facebook today, I was invited to join a group called "Blue Beanie Day." November 26th has been named Blue Beanie Day, in honor of Jeffrey Zeldman's photo, donned in a blue beanie, on the cover of his book, "Designing with Web Standards." It's a day to stand up and show our solidarity around accessible web development using Web Standards. And besides that, it'll just be plain fun! Here's how it works: Buy, beg, or borrow a Blue Beanie and take a photo in it. Heck, you can even take a picture with your camera phone at the mall trying one on if you don't want to buy it. Maybe you'll put a beanie on your head or change a black beanie to blue with Photoshop. Be imaginative. Take a cool group photo of you and your friends wearing Blue Beanies. The possibilities are limitless. Show your beanie creativity. Post your photo, or photos to Facebook, the Flickr pool, and other social networks on November 26th, 2007. Remember to switch your....Read more at Community MX

When the Legend Won't Wrap - One Solution

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 18:28:37 GMT

I've just returned from over six weeks on the road (12 locations all over the globe). Needless to say, I've been scarce around these parts of late. I'm hoping to start remedying that. While attending one of the conferences, I was discussing creative, problem-solving techniques with an attendee, and mentioned a method I'd recently employed for legends that won't wrap in some browsers. They mentioned that these types of creative tips should be blogged and, well, I'd truly intended to blog it here for others who run into the same problem. I found precious little written on it when I was searching for a solution. I figure it's better late than never. :) Many of you understand the accessibility and organizational reasons for using the fieldset and legend elements. I was recently coding a site that had a large number of forms. I was using fieldset and legend to organize and group the information. The copy written was very off-the-cuff, conversational and fresh. I liked it. But occasionally, the amount written (and used as the legend) needed to wrap to a second line. Enter the problem. I found that the wrapping behavior varies from browser to browser. On a Mac, legends wrap au....Read more at Community MX

Meet Me in the Wild--Upcoming Conferences

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 02:28:30 GMT

Come out and meet me! There are some upcoming events in September and October where I'll be speaking and I'd love for you to come say hi. On September 21 and 22, I'll be at Web Master Jam Session in Dallas, TX. I'm speaking on semantic HTML and CSS--the building blocks of a site. Jonathon Snook will follow my session with a "creative positioning" session. There are some great sessions including the keynote by Jared Spool. Check it out! On September 30 - October 3, I'll be at Adobe MAX in Chicago doing a hands-on session on the new CSS layouts I created for Dreamweaver CS3. There's at least a session a day, so you should be able to get in before they fill up. Also, October 15-18, I'll be doing the same session at Adobe MAX in Barcelona, Spain. October 22-25 takes me to San Fransico, California. There I'll be speaking at Pearson's first Voices that Matter conference on Mastering Perfect CSS Layouts. When registering, if you enter Priority code: WD-SULL -- you'll receive $100.00 off your registration fee. So find an event near you and let's meet face to face! ....Read more at Community MX

New Guillotine case in Internet Explorer (IE7)... Or not!

Sat, 07 Jul 2007 01:03:38 GMT

Yes, it's a fact that Internet Explorer 7 is better than Internet Explorer 6. But not all squashed bugs were completely killed. Like the little gopher game you play at the fair, sometimes when you bang one on the head and it goes underground, it simply pops back out in a different place. Enter the Guillotine Bug. Yes, we all hoped it was dead and gone. But by finally supporting some of the previously unsupported properties, new cases have evolved. I had one on my own, freshly launched site recently. Today, I took the time to figure out what was going on. Since it was a bit odd, I thought I'd share it here in hopes of helping someone else since I found nothing in Google exactly the same. Since IE7 now supports the :hover pseudo class on non-anchor elements, I decided it would be nice if the whole list item in my sidebar changed background color on hover. I placed a different background color and a completely different border effect on the li:hover selector. Within this list element was a left-floated icon and static h3 and h4 elements (which are links). It worked perfectly in IE6 and earlier, Firefox, Safari, etc. But IE7 decided to hack a hairball. When you hovered over either ....Read more at Community MX

reCAPTCHA - Simple and Accessible

Sat, 16 Jun 2007 15:50:13 GMT

For anyone who knows me well, the most shocking part of this post is that I actually, finally, put my own web site up. Yes, after 2 years of "Coming Soon," I've actually launched my site focued on training, speaking and coding. One of the things I learned (which I knew, taught, but obviously wasn't practicing) is--let the content dictate the design. Oh my word--I had three designers work on the site over the past two years before I realized I should practice what I preach and let the content, semantically marked up, determine the design. So much better than trying to force the content into your preconceived design notion--at least when you'd like to accomplish something. Special thanks to Carolyn Wood (editor-in-chief of Digital Web and owner of Pixelingo) for all her hard work with me on this (and for continually kicking my butt)! Meanwhile, something I found in the process of creating this site, I wanted to share with you guys. Due to the spam I receive on my blog and the form on my old site, I really wanted to make it more difficult for the bots. However, I'm also very concerned about accessibility with the current CAPTCHA products I'm aware of. Enter reCAPTCHA. This one act....Read more at Community MX

TODCon Schedule Online!

Tue, 08 May 2007 08:33:50 GMT

We've finally got the TODCon Vegas 2007 schedule and speaker list up. Check it out. Lots of excellent sessions about the new Adobe products, running your web business, usability, CSS and more. There's still time to register for the best little conference in Vegas! Come play on the strip with the rest of us geeks. You know you wanna... :)....Read more at Community MX

Custom CS3 Icons - Free!

Sat, 21 Apr 2007 17:52:46 GMT

There's been a wide range of reaction to Adobe's new CS3 icons. Admittedly, when I first saw the single Dreamweaver icon, I was taken aback -- "Is this thing finished?" But after seeing the whole suite, especially on the color wheel, I thought they were nicely done and easy to differentiate as I got a few in my dock. There were many who thought differently though. It was a love it or hate it kind of thing. For those of you in the hate camp, there's an option. Adam Betts, a very talented designer, has created his own set of CS3 icons -- and released them, free, to the public. He based them on the box design and they look quite lovely. He's even made a new set of document icons if the plain ones don't quite do it for you. What they'll look like at the smaller sizes, I can't say. There are no instructions included for where to install them, and at this point I haven't a clue. (Feel free to point me in the right direction if you know. :)) There are a few other sets I've run into if Adam's aren't your favorite. Mac Themes is similar to Adam's, Louie Mantia has a set that blend the old icons with the new box look, and if you like the new ones from Adobe but would rather have them a li....Read more at Community MX

Adobe MAX 2007 Announced - Chicago Baby

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 23:58:40 GMT

In case you missed it -- the announcement has been made and the blogosphere is abuzz - Adobe MAX 2007 will be in Chicago from September 30 to Oct 3 2007. Mark your calendars and corner the boss - it's time to make plans!Ben Forta has worldwide MAX dates/events in today's blog post. ....Read more at Community MX

CSS and Design Resources

Fri, 05 Jan 2007 14:20:40 GMT

Sometimes I get a bit behind on my Community MX reading and have to catch up in one fell swoop. This morning, I was having a look at the past few articles and found a most awesome resource that Sheri German put together. Though we're in the midst of a site redesign (yes, we know it's sometimes tough to find the exact article you want as CMX approaches 1950 articles!) it's not done yet. In the interim, Sheri has compiled the CSS section of the site into a great learning guide that you'll want to keep nearby. It's free, for those that aren't members, and groups articles by subject and gives you an idea of their levels and what to tackle first. I had to share this one! Design Your Own Custom CMX CSS Course -- a learning resource guide. Also, in case you missed it, over the holidays Adobe launched a CSS-related beta of their own - CSS Advisor. CSS Advisor is a resource where information on CSS bugs will be compiled by the community with links to their originators and other resources where possible. A kind of all-in-one-place starting point to pinpoint what your bugs might be and find solutions. Design Resources Finally, more related to design than CSS, Adobe has another beta you ma....Read more at Community MX

CSS, AJAX, Mashups, Microformats, Standards and Broken Bones

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 16:44:19 GMT

If you get the CMX newsletter, you may have read the blurb about the upcoming Web Directions North conference. This is the sister conference to the awesome Web Essentials/Web Directions conference that has happened down under for the past few years -- the one that I've been so jealous not to be able to attend. If you felt the same way, now's your chance! Canada is a lot closer than Australia for many of us. :) Here's the coolest part to me. Not only are the speakers world-class and the topics current to today's web, but you can ski! That's right -- if you're a geek that loves the cold, white, powdery stuff, there are two days of speakers, and then, two optional days of skiing (or snow boarding, of course) at Whistler-Blackcomb in British Columbia. How close to heaven is that? Even if you've never skiied before, there are plenty of easy runs -- and lessons. Don't be shy -- we're geeks -- we're supposed to make fools of ourselves. And anyway, no one will laugh -- for long (except, perhaps, at my 15 year old ski outfit... heh). I've got several conferences to go to this year, and South by Southwest (one I'm already registered for) is very close to these dates. Conference money can c....Read more at Community MX

Usability: Designing and Sorting Information

Mon, 13 Nov 2006 03:37:59 GMT

Usability has become quite the hot topic. Seems it's on everyone's lips of late. If it interests you, I'd like to bring a couple things to your attention. First, Tuesday, November 14th is Worldwide Usability Day. There are 206 events in 39 countries this year. That's pretty impressive. Find a usability event near you. One of the interesting activities you can participate in no matter where you live is card sorting. From their site: "Card sorting is a technique used to help identify how users organize, and expect to find, information on a website. The way the cards are sorted, and the labels the users give the cards are often used (along with other methods) to create the global and local navigation on a website." Participants will take about 20 minutes to go through the card sorting exercise and demographic survey. The information will then be analyzed to look at regional, cultural, and other demographic differences, and shared with the usability community. You need to RSVP by Monday, November 13th to have the information emailed to you about participating. The second bit of usability info that you may find interesting is related to a new, excellent book. It's written by Robert....Read more at Community MX

In the Aftermath of Adobe MAX

Wed, 08 Nov 2006 16:52:55 GMT

It's been a full week since returning from Adobe's MAX conference and I think I've finally recovered. Adobe did a nice job taking it over and things were pretty similar to previous years. The venue was beautiful and the evening events were well done. I got to see lots of old friends and made a great deal of new ones. My only real complaint was doing all of my speaking on the final day. I hurriedly talked to a few of you while running from floor to floor, and I have your business cards. But usually I quickly write something on the cards to remember who's who. I didn't have time to do that -- apologies if you asked me to contact you. Please email me a reminder. I couldn't keep up. :) In my sessions, I promised to put my final MAX sessions up on my site (if you downloaded them from the Adobe attendee resource site, they're markedly different from what I presented). I finally got them online a couple days ago. Download my CSS Session files (as soon as I get my own site completed and changed, the additional demos will be available). Also, if anyone has any pictures from MiniMAX, will you please email me? I haven't been able to locate any from that night yet. Next year, if you get the....Read more at Community MX

It's He-ere - Internet Explorer 7 - Final Release Version

Thu, 19 Oct 2006 02:13:46 GMT

I will reserve final judgement until I can properly view all my sites (I'm on a Mac and BrowserCam does not yet have the final version available), but for those waiting in anticipation, Internet Explorer 7 has arrived. An 8 pound-10 ounce bouncing bundle of joy -- or so we hope. Call me naive, but for the most part, I'm actually looking forward to it. Many of the rendering bugs in IE6 are reported fixed. Most of my sites have held together pretty well through the beta versions I could test on. I don't code using a lot of hacks for older versions of Internet Explorer, and many of the bugs I was squashing with the "* html #selectorName" trick have been fixed. So even though IE7 won't see those separate IE-specific values, it shouldn't need them too often either. I have been looking at Internet Explorer 7 a great deal over the past two days. Partly because I'm preparing to present two of the more advanced CSS sessions at Adobe MAX and wanted to be sure I had the latest available info to share, and partly because some of our subscribers have started to ask questions about IE7 in our Community MX forums. In light of that, today I ran all our JumpStarts through the IE7 beta3 ....Read more at Community MX

Safari Bug - Red Links Galore!

Wed, 20 Sep 2006 17:03:38 GMT

In light of sharing this information quickly, I'm going to tell you the story of a little bug without a demo. (The site I'm working on is still NDA, so I can't illustrate it with that either.) I'll try to get one up soon. The Backstory This site is using the new version of Nifty Corners (Nifty Corners Cube). It's a simple little javascript solution to rounded corners. You write the CSS selectors for the various elements, add a bit of javascript in the head of the document, and you have rounded corners. If javascript is disabled, you have square corners. Graceful degradation. I had worked most bugs out of the site and started testing outside Firefox (which I develop in) and IE PC (which typically has the most bugs). When I opened one of the pages in Safari, I was met with quite a surprise. Nearly all the links on the page were glowing a bright red. Perhaps it didn't actually glow, but when you're expecting a deep blue, it seems so. Well, what the heck!? The Search Obviously, my first thought was that I had something funky going on in the cascade. (There are some admin-only links in this site that are red.) In Dreamweaver, I clicked into one of the link headings. Using the Ru....Read more at Community MX

Zabasearch - Great new tool or invasion of privacy?

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 18:37:48 GMT

I usually keep the personal stuff out of here. But since this rant relates to Zabasearch, a web site, I'm going to spout off for a minute. Please bear with me. Zabasearch is touted as "The #1 Free People Search and Public Information Search Engine." And whether it's number one or not, I can't say, but without a doubt, it is thorough. In fact, I'd say it could very well turn into the number one tool for stalkers and identity theives. It takes a small amount of initial information on a person to pull a whole myriad of info. They've obviously pulled together a large number of databases -- yes, some would argue that those are available other places already -- but I greatly dislike the fact that they've made it so easy for people to find it all in one place. I can't really think of a good, upstanding use for this tool. (Don't say to find long-lost classmates 'cause there's already a site for that!) Go ahead -- enter your name (you may or may not need the state). You'll find your birthdate (month/year), phone number and street address (with the date that particular address was recorded which makes it simple to tell which is your current address), county and zip all in the in....Read more at Community MX

Paid Advertising in the Yahoo! Search Returns?

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 02:57:33 GMT

I have a problem with Yahoo!. Had I not been verbally attacked by a man in a neighboring city, I wouldn't even realize this interesting issue existed. And though it benefits my clients, it really bugs me personally. The back story in a nutshell is -- I have a client in the moving industry. A man in the same industry an hour away was having a fit that our search returns on Yahoo! were coming up at #2. (Nice for my client of course.) This competitor was sure I was cloaking or doing something illegal to get my client to that level (well actually, he accused me of putting text into the meta tags. But anyone that knows anything about SEO knows how far that would get me. And if he could read code he'd know that there are no meta tags on this site. There never have been.) When I looked at the search return he was complaining about, it read more like an ad than text on my client's website. Odd. So I looked at the page. Then I looked at various pages on the site. I also looked all through the way back machine archives. That text has never been on the page Yahoo! is linking to (or the site). Hmmmmm... A mystery. It took, me a couple days to figure out (and some sleuthing from some brillian....Read more at Community MX

Annoying Flash Banner Ads

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 13:46:34 GMT

Good grief. I really don't have a problem with Flash banner ads at all. In fact, many times they're the best way to showcase a product. What I am greatly annoyed by though, and they're starting to pop up everywhere, are the ones that move down over the active part of the page. Sure, they're real sexy and all -- but get off my freakin' links! Last week, I saw one where the guy looked like he was pushing the Flash ad downward and grabbing something from the other advertisment below. Problem is, he has to "traverse" across the top navigation which, when covered by the transparent Flash movie, isn't clickable. You can't activate the buttons or links while he's doing his cute little thing. Well, let me rephrase that -- in IE you can (due to the dangers, errr, beauty of Active X), but not in any other browser. Today, we have a possible tropical depression off my coast. I quickly went to the Yahoo! weather page to find a satellite pic. I didn't find what I wanted, went up to the navigation to click something else and the stupid Flash movie drops down over the buttons. I had to wait while it did it's thing and got off the navigation so I could get off the page. Now, I understand that usa....Read more at Community MX

Update - MAX

Fri, 09 Jun 2006 17:08:24 GMT

Announced just yesterday! MAX details: When: October 23 - 26, 2006 Where: Venetian Resort Hotel, Las Vegas, NV Adobe will have over 90 different hands-on and workshop sessions presented by Adobe experts and other industry leaders on best practices and coming technologies. Currently, there are six tracks: LiveCycle and Acrobat Web Development Rich Internet Applications Mobile and Devices Applications Vertical Market Solutions Web Design It doesn't appear you can register just yet, but you can sign up for email updates to notify you as information is available.....Read more at Community MX

sIFR 3.0 Alpha Released

Tue, 23 May 2006 13:11:31 GMT

For those of you that have been following the development of, or even using sIFR, this post is for you. Mark Wubben has announced the release of the alpha of the next version of sIFR. I just got back from TODCon, so I haven't had time to play with it yet, but the feature list makes it look very promising. Especially the part about the increased simplicity of tuning your fonts. For me that was the only difficult part. Other interesting bits -- Mark is taking advantage of the new Flash 8 filter features, like drop shadows. You'll also get the added benefit of Flash's new anti-aliasing and leading. There's also a fix included for the AdBlock issue. All in all, very promising. If you've got time to test/play/help make this version the best it can be, head over to the sIFR 3 Alpha page and download it now.....Read more at Community MX

Dealing With The Looming Internet Explorer 7 Release

Tue, 25 Apr 2006 13:00:31 GMT

Dave Shea makes some good points in his post at Vitamin about the upcoming IE7 release and browser hacks. I started to weigh in amongst his comments, but I got a little long-winded so I figured it was better written on my own blog instead of using Dave's bandwidth. A question was raised in his comment section -- "Why do developers hack anyway?" However, later, this same person admitted they don't have to code "pixel perfect layouts" -- they are given leeway and control over what's done from a design standpoint. Lucky them. That would certainly make it easier. That's not how a great deal of my jobs work though. I have several web development companies that I do client side development for. I am expected to create pixel perfect layouts based on the comps I'm given. After I slice and dice and reassemble, the company I'm coding for anticipates that they'll see the very same art they handed me, reproduced in code form. All that said, I rarely have to hack. When I do, it's generally something in IE having to do with hasLayout, and I use the star filter to beat it into submission. (On the other side of IE, I do hack to hide things from the Mac flavor. I do not, however, attempt to make....Read more at Community MX

Faulty Trackpad Sensor in PowerBook

Tue, 18 Apr 2006 20:23:10 GMT

I've had my computer back long enough now to reliably report that it's been successfully repaired. Yes, I can conclusively say that replacing the topcase (or is it top case) and logic board has fixed all remants of narcolepsy. It hasn't fallen asleep one single time since I got it back last weekend. For those of you that happen onto this thread (and without a doubt you've got a 1.67GHz PB -- either 15" or 17") and aren't prepared to read the 80 or 90 comments on the previous two threads, here's my recommendation to you: Install the little program called Temperature Monitor (it's freeware) Set it up to keep the trackpad sensor temperature reading in the menu bar where you can see it at a glance. Also, be sure to set the history to record. You can run the hardware test that came on your OSX disk, but it may or may not show anything wrong (if it does, it will likely be related to the logic board) You will likely notice that when the trackpad temperature starts to wildly fluctuate, and then goes up into what is equivalent to the 200-something degree farenheit range, your computer goes to black screen. (Some can get it to wake up by jiggling the space bar or th....Read more at Community MX

GoDaddy - Customer service done right

Mon, 17 Apr 2006 00:33:46 GMT

How many times have I complained, or read the complaints of others, related to various company's poor customer service? If you enjoy that kind of thing, move on. This time, I wanted to take the opportunity to acknowledge some web goodness. The back story is, I've used GoDaddy to purchase domain names for my clients since about 2000. I've never had anything but good things to say about them. They're inexpensive, I rarely have a problem, and when I have one they get it resolved very quickly. Currently, I have no domain issues. So I was surprised to hear from them by phone last week. Thinking there might be something I was unaware of, I returned their call (the woman who called me was Sue, and she specifically asked that I ask for her when I called back). The number rang me in to the "Customer Appreciation" Department. Hmmmm... sounds kinda hokey. Like Newspeak from 1984 or something. Was I ever wrong... If everyone at GoDaddy is as friendly, helpful and personable as Sue, they've got it made. Sue thanked me for my years of being a customer, told me how many domains were in my account and proceeded to tell me about several ways I was unaware of that I could recieve discounts on thi....Read more at Community MX

How to Use an MP3 as a Ringtone on a Nokia 6670 Phone

Thu, 06 Apr 2006 18:14:53 GMT

Out of all my friends, I was one of the very last to get a cell phone. Then, 2 years later, I was one of the last to upgrade (yes, at MAX two years ago, people laughed at my phone openly). Cell phones have always been, to me, a phone. They make and take calls. I'm happy. This year, right before MAX, we reupped our plan and replaced our phones. I wanted one that would go online so I could start checking sites and such. The only one my carrier (SunCom) sold that fit the bill was a Nokia 6670. It's been quite a transition to remember that I can do things other than talk on it. I admit, I've barely tested any web sites on it, but recently, I began to remember occasionally that I could take photos (I even put a few up from my recent ski trip on my Flickr page). Today though, I learned something really useful. I wanted some less boring ringtones, so I went to the Suncom site. They were simply awful. Hokey. I was complaining to my friend, Jesse Rodgers at the University of Waterloo, about it (he has the same phone) and he came back with a profound statement. "Just load an mp3 over to it." Huh? How in the world would I do that? Turns out that with Bluetooth, which I use to get ....Read more at Community MX