The Low Carb Luxury Online Magazine: No Excuses

No Excuses: nothing should stop you from exercising... by Cybil Solyn. Cybil got an article published! It's just an online magizine at the moment, but they're getting bought out by a publisher. Oh, and her article made the cover.

Pushing the CSS Envelope

My latest photoshop design has me doing some Viewport experiments and pushing some elements around based on Viewport properties. I'm anticipating it being completely broken in Mac IE, and also anticipating myself not caring. If I do decide to give a shit I'll just have to use that Mac IE hack to select the offending elements and set them to display: none;

Details on my rather heinous hacking coming soon...

CSS minimum and maximum sizes

going to experiment with using min-height and max-width in my latest freelance project.

Fritz Stuck in a Box

This is Fritz,

he got stuck in a box today,

and Cybil took a picture while he pleaded to be freed.

Serenity

Rock! There's such a cult following for this show that the movie will do well. Then we can all hope it gets picked up again.

Behr.com Explore Color

some fun color pickers

Die Wagenschenke - Das Partyzelt am Albanifest in Winterthur.

Drunk walk. move your mouse side to side.

hollywood.com redesign

The hollywood.com redesign is so abhorent, not to mention broken to the point of unusability in Firefox, that I refuse to use it anymore. I would rather not go to the movies.

But that's not going to happen. And now that the Movie View (advanced screenings) execs are getting all pissy about us going all the time (it's not our fault they let MTV totally fuck up the Spiderman 2 screening) we're not going to as many free screenings for a little while. So with this new resolution to boycott hollywood.com I needed to find alternatives for basic movie info and reviews. Google to the rescue, easily turning up losangelesmovietimes.com for showtimes and rottentomatoes has a page with all the Kit Bowen Reviews, the reviewer we trust most of the time.

Now I've gotta remember to see if anyone wants to catch Fahrenheit 9/11 after work on Friday.

Boxes and Arrows Redesign

this here be the most challenging re-design content i've seen. the bar starts out really high, and the audience is the elite of the User Experience field. i have some things that i would personally like to improve on the home page, mostly having to with link clarity and content freshness.

Skin Deep, A safety assesment of ingredients in personal care products

so this application is perhaps the slowest I have ever encountered (they must have their time out settings cranked), but has some good information if you're willing to wait.

Import Your Mbox or Maildir Files into GMail

This is a note to myself on the off chance that I decide to do something with my old email backup. I haven't even opened up outlook and imported my old email since I reformatted a couple weekends ago. Have moved all conversations to webmail (gmail and my old college account) and have had no need for pop. In fact, since me email isn't tied to a particular computer anymore I've been able to leave my laptop home.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in Fifteen Minutes

THE KIDS:

*hug threesomely*

ALFONSO CUARÓN:

I think I directed a porno like this once.

First private astronaut reaches space

Woohoo!

KindGirls. Clean pictures galleries of nude girls

Free Met-Art galleries. More tasteful than my usual fair, but hot nonetheless.

Exercise in Customer Experience

customer satisfaction vs. branding

Helping a client choose between web standards and backwards compatibility

I was presented with a challenge last weekend while working on project specs for a freelance client. She is a extraordinarily talented and multi-faceted person (award winning novelist, once ranked 10th in the nation at racquetball), but technical requirements are just not her thing. I had a long list of technical questions that I needed her feedback on, and one of them was browser support. Instead of taking the technologies approach and talk about web standards by tossing around acronyms, I chose to talk about benefits and audiences.

Web Standards

Browser Support:

• Internet Explorer 5.5+
• Netscape 6+
• Mozilla/Firebird
• Opera

These are the "modern browsers." The vast majority of users will have them. The focus of this method is providing code that is fast to download, easy to maintain (you could learn to edit the code yourself), and easy to make site-wide design/layout changes.

The audiences that benefit most from Web Standards are disabled people (blind, visually impaired, mobility impaired) and Search Engines. Search Engines such as Google are for all practical purposes a blind visitor. They look at the code of the site in the same way that a screen reading program does for a blind person. Good search engine optimization pretty much requires Web Standards.

Backwards Compatible

Browsers supported include the four listed about plus these:

• Internet Explorer 5.0
• Netscape 4

By coding in such a way that our layout is maintained in these old browsers we basically have to compromise each of the benefits listed above to some degree.

The audiences that benefit most from Backwards Compatibility are people using really old computers, most often found in schools and libraries.

Notes:

Let me make it clear that this decision has mostly to do with which audiences will see the intended layout of the site. If you choose Web Standards the Backwards Compatible audience will still be presented with the content of the site (I make it a rule to not excluding anyone), the site would simply look a lot more like a Word document, with it's headers and lists, than a website.

I chose to cover operating system support in another section.

2 Columns, Content First, Floats with Clearing Footer

A brilliant solution in that it uses two innovative techniques combines. First, it uses negative margins on floats. From the article and my reading elsewhere I still don't fully understand the intricacies of floats, especially when it comes to things like their treatment of margins. But it works. Second, it uses nesting rather than wrapping to solve a problem. Most CSS layout solutions involve wrapping two elements within a container, but this solution pulls from an old school table layout set of tools, and nests a copy div within a container.

The only difficulty I had with the article actually was the naming of a div id, and I think came from the way the article was written, by reverse engineering the solution rather than guiding the reader through it. My problem started with the original HTML code example. The main text was wrapped in a div called "container". This is a name usually reserved for divs that hold within them other divs, making the structure of the page. My question was, why isn't it div id="content" or "copy". My question was answered with the solution to the overlapping text problem in example two. We needed another div inside "container" called "copy", to give the text a right margin. Now, the way he explained it did involve less code changing than starting out with a "copy" div and wrapping a "container" div around it, and shifting the CSS around, but personally I find following the complete path to the solution of a problem just as important as learning the answer. By messing with the solution process by basing the initial example on knowledge gained later in the solution it makes following along more difficult.

Innovation Landscapes

3D graphs mapping the innovation efforts in several industries.

Buckling Leather Cock-Ring

Sparing you the details, these are far the most bang for your buck of any sex toy I've encountered thus far.

W3C DOM - Form error messages

This is exactly what I was talking to Jon about the other day. I'd like to use something like this for contextual help as well as error messages. Only problem I see with the way he's doing it is that it inserts text into the flow of the page, which could be awkward if the error message or help text is long.

Styling Form Widgets

Very "clickable". I like this very simple approach. I've seen people bend the CSS&HTML into contortions to get the corners round, but that's just overkill. The one addition that I would make the cursor a hand: style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer;"

Embracing Best Practice

While the language makes me cringe (current employer is all about that best-whatever crap, they've bought the business consultant lingo but not the underlying ideas), but I think this is moving in the right direction. I'd like to see less pontificating about standards and more presenting of new practices, with pros and cons, leaving the determination of what is best for a given project up to the end user. Also, rambling about how it's all a balancing act doesn't do it for me either. I want to hear a strong case for a given solution. I know that there is rarely one standard solution that will work everywhere. Give me an argument for your way, and if you're really good you'll discuss both sides.

Urban (slang) Dictionary

For those of us who were raised in isolation from society and therefore don't know what the fuck people are talking about sometimes. Also just a great place to stop by and learn new ways of saying bad things.

taxonomy of evil

It'll work just like Amway, with a percentage of evil flowing back up the pyramid.

Talk dirty

think i read some great SOE stuff on this site once too. Yes. I did: Help the Googlebot understand your web site

Naked Loft Party

I miss the early days of Nerve.com, before they sold out and the site got to the point where I couldn't stand looking at it anymore. Fleshbot too is wearing thin. Perhaps good writing is what I'm looking for, and, as it is not yet blocked at work by websense, this site might hit the spot (with the right edge of the browser off screen to hide the ads).

Harry Potter: The Prisoner of Azkaban

it successfully transports the audience to a place that is truly magical

Exactly what I've been saying. The new director has created a fantasy world on film that is awe inspiring, not just campy fun.

HBO's Deadwood

There are so few shows worth watching anymore, if it weren't for HBO and HGTV I'd drop cable and go back on Netflix for a while. But HBO continues to come out with weekly shows that are better than most of the movies hollywood keeps pumping out (after dumbing them down to the lowest common denominator).

Nigritude Ultramarine

SEO (in the tricking google sense of the words) is no better than spam. Go Anil! Oh, and to make this text relevant to the words Nigritude and Ultramarine, here are their definitions from dictionary.com:

nigritude

Blackness; the state of being black

ultramarine

A vivid or strong blue to purplish blue.

Yes. DorkBlue should be ashamed of sponsoring such a contest.

Web Standards ROI

Some actual numbers. Granted, it's all anecdotal, but it's great to see a cost/time breakdown.

glassdog

Glassdog is back with a vengeance! Gaudy clashing design, and content to match. Delightfully obscene. Wish more people would run uncensored.

Sparklines (or Worldlines) updated

Tufte has updated his page on "Sparklines: Intense, Simple, Word-Sized Graphics"