Having printed business cards at MOO I can assure you they are great people to work with. Not only were the cards delivered on time but the quality of work was good too. So there you have it, MOO is having a January promotion and if you’re interested to put an order in let me know and I’ll forward you a discount code. …
Archive for the 'Web' Category
Being a blazing fast browser and scalable I have long since made Firefox my default. I admit it wasn’t easy giving up the luscious goodness of Safari but Firefox does take things to the next level if you constantly write HTML and CSS and use Flickr or like Photography⌘ !
There are numerous posts about Firefox Add-ons so why make yet another one? Well, I’d like to make one for the ones I frequently use. They are productivity orientated and work for me and am happy to share it with you.
Go get your copy, Firefox 3.5 is out. 
And if you have a couple extra minutes have a quick view of Mike Beltzner’s preview of what’s new and exciting in Firefox 3.5.
First noticeable difference for me has been its speed. It rocks — blazing fast.
Its not much of an original post when you copy paste information, but sometimes you *have to* remind giants that sleep at the wheels inconveniencing and killing healthy competition and growth in the IT industry. Yes you guessed it I’m talking about Microsoft. Minutes ago I got an email from Campaign Monitor and The Email Standards Project. And soon I post the message you’ll know what I mean. I quote:
Microsoft have just confirmed they plan on using the crippled Word rendering engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010.
This means for the next 5 years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position and no background images. Not to mention the long list of bugs and quirks that break the simplest of layouts.
I am not exactly sure how long Trippermap has been in existance but I came across it today and it blew my socks away. Love the simple and clever and very importantly ‘down to earth’ realistic idea of showing map alongside geotagged photos. Brilliant!!
Since I am using a demo account It will scan through only 200 geotagged photo and 50 unique locations only. 
But it still shows you the potential of this wonderful awesome tool and how very effective this is in showing casing travel or galleries for the visual mind. I love it.
If you are a Camino user chances are you would have noticed at some point surely that photos on Camino look a little less flattering or dull when you use Camino as opposed to Firefox 3 or Safari or Omniweb. This is because the default colour enabling module built in Camino is by default turned off.
Here is a simple thing you can do to enable it and you’d notice a world of difference.
UPDATE: There is a ‘Do more with Labels” link as you log in on the top of your Gmail page that tell you about Auto-complete, move to Fast PDF previews, Tasks(new), Text messaging in Chat and Gmail on Android. So do check it out.
Hmmm, I remember checking my Gmail before I went to bed last night and deleted what I didn’t need in my account. And if you’re like me you’d like keeping your Inbox, Sent, Spam and Trash box squeaky clean. This ofcourse means you select your messages and then go to the drop down on top and select Delete….a bit of a round about way to delete mail… but to my surprise I saw Google had replaced the unfriendly drop-down with Buttons this morning. Nice! Here is a little write up about it by Gmail engineer, Emil A Eklund.
I tried it with Mailplane too and I can still see those quick buttons. Nice one Google. Doug Bowman wrote about the process on his blog. And as Google says:
If you use WordPress for maintaining your blog(s) you’d be logging into the admin console often, also known as the WordPress Dashboard. While its functional and has lots of related news I often find the page a little too busy and the heading fonts a bit too large! A small tweak to the wp-admin.css in your /wp-admin/ folder can make this a much more pleasant experience. Here’s how:
Its far from complete but its good to see I have started to put my photos together… Adobe Lightroom does make the job half as simple with cataloguing and sifting good from bad ones but still putting up a gallery from thousands of photos is a mammoth task. I am glad the process has started and look forward to posting more as time goes by. Hope you enjoy seeing some of the things I enjoy doing most. Enjoy!
Think I just had a brilliant idea! I have them every now and then 
. The aim of this little mini tutorial is to show how to create an Archives page in Regulus as shown in the image below.
As a visitor of my site you’d probably be well aware that I change look and feel of my site occasionally. These are called themes within WordPress the engine that runs this site. There are many free and paid WordPress themes floating on the internet but it isn’t always easy to find one that suits ones every need. And among a select one that I like Regulus from Binary moon has a rather soft spot for me. Why Regulus you ask? Its squeaky clean, really simple and conforms to a Strict DTD. But it does lacks an in-built archives page option. After leaving a comment for Ben I decided to have a crack at it and it took me less than 5 minutes to have this up and running. So if you’re using Regulus and want an archive Page get ready. I promise it’ll be less than 5 minutes to get you going.
England, 1935. A hot sultry day in the huge Victorian gothic mansion of the relatively wealthy and privileged Tallis. Briony the younger sister in the family has a talent for writing. But for some unfortunate reason her talent doesn’t just stop there. She is also gifted with a rather vivid imaginative mind. A keen observer that sees the world through intense scrutiny every passing moment. She notices Robbie — the house-keepers sons undying consumed and amorous love for her older sister Cecilia and is perhaps insecure and grudgingly resentful and desirous or even a little remorse of what she cannot have.
Pink for October is an annual initiative to get people to learn more about and create and spread awareness on breast cancer. Show your support by using badges or changing your site theme for a month. And if you do turn your site pink with a theme or button do inform the pinklist for october.
The ultimate goal of the National Breast Cancer Foundation (NBCF) is to raise enough money to fund a cure for breast cancer. As Australia’s leading national not-for profit organisation established to fund all forms of research into the prevention and cure of breast cancer, we have a responsibility to ensure that the funds you work so hard to raise are used in the best possible way as we move towards making our goal a reality.
Thanks for the reminder Russ.
My friend and colleague John, has for sometime now been wanting to put his dad’s paintings online. John’s dad John as well, now lives in Queensland and has been painting for a few decades and has achieved some local Australian and international recognition for his work of art. His work has been held in private and company collections throughout Australia, New Zealand, United Stated of America, England and Switzerland. You can read more about John’s achievements and accolades on his exhibitions page.
Five reasons why I blog you ask? There are many. Most of all is the joy it brings me to write and share photos with friends and family. Others are off-shoots of this very special one.
I really enjoy blogging though not near enough as much as I did before, partly because of time constraints and I find it more fulfilling to write something personal rather than being a pedestrian messenger broadcasting the same topic like a few thousand else on the internet. Really, do we need that many copies? Good composition generally take a bit more time to assimilate and present but when catered for usually make for an interesting read. Well, in most cases.
This is something I’ve wanted WordPress to do right out of the box, and now that they have it sorted, its definitely worth a mention. Well done Matt and team. I can already see Harvard and Edublog has already take up the offer. Visit the links and have a look at the FAQ’s. This is a big blow to the already dying Movable Type.
Web Directions ‘06 is almost here. Last year was a lot of fun indeed and here’s hoping it’ll again surpass my expectations. Keep your eyes peeled on all official photo-streams at the following urls and if you take photos during the event add them to Web Directions 06 Group Pool. Please tag all your Web directions photos in flickr with the following generic tags and of course you can add your own.
Continue reading ‘Web Directions 06′
As much as it is important to have a good site(content, design) with clean valid links, it is also to have a sitemap that is UP-TO-DATE. Generally speaking when we talk about Sitemaps for a website, what comes to mind is a page, mostly static, where you’d have the sitemap laid out like a tree unfolding all the different parts of the website. Continue reading ‘Notify Google with your XML Sitemap’
We all love transformation, and at Amarello Photography that’s what we do best. Our team of talented make-up artist, hairstylist, and photographer will assist you to be transformed to your wildest fantasies. Recreate a celebrity look, morph into a glamorous goddess, or just to look beautifully natural…
Nothing like living on the bleeding edge! I have yet again decided to do a live redesign of my site. Apologies if the presentation goes awry at times. And while that happens in the background… check out Amarello — my latest work. Grab the colour combination and vote for it if you like.
I’ve been among the lucky few to test Wufoo when it was in beta and I was very impressed indeed at all the functionality and swish ajax driven interface all forms had. Wufoo lauched on the 5th July and it has been a great success since. Here’s wishing Chris, Kevin and Ryan for their hard work and also giving me a beta account. If you havent been to the site yet I strongly recommend you do.
WordPress undoubtedly is one of the most loved Opensource personal Content Management Systems for running a site but like any software its not without its share of much needed improvements. I’m also aware that die hard WordPress enthusiasts are burning the midnight oil to take it to the next level of finesse at Shuttle which encompasses a whole range of changes in terms of user-interface, design, code. I am listing down a a few things that in my opinion could make WordPress go a step further, Feel free to add yours. Some of the points mentioned may have been discussed elsewhere.
The Home of the Mustangs, the lovely Maysville Elementary folks have had a rejig of their website. I had designed their site about two and a half years back. Though the design essentially remains the same I’ve added some functionality and removed parts of the website that had becomes obsolete. Not only does Maysville as an Elementary school stand out of the crowd, they are backed by people who are passionate, teachers who go beyond their call of duty, students and patrons that blog and podcast and their thirst for knowledge! Though my visit to North Carolina last month was only for one short week, it was the one that made me feel at home and in the company of lovely friends and warm hearted people.
When I had hand rolled my entire design for Karmakars.com, though simple sans flickr, del.icio.us and all those moronic buzz, it was nice and I was proud of it. I really was. No matter what one may think and how much ease a blog/website template or theme may provide, it is one sure way to kill originality. It lacks one big thing. It lacks you. Look around the web-o-sphere, notice how many people use K2 and Hemingway, and many such similar derivations of these themes. And nothing wrong with that, BUT this in my opinion probably isn’t the best choice for a professional web-designer, developer.
Creativity has many wild forms and all of them are mostly unique… here is Yasuhisa Hasegawa’s quick reaction to say Cheese, whats yours?
The flight from Raleigh Durham North Carolina was nice. It was sad to leave Nan. We have had a great week indeed and good length of travelling too. Hopefully there will be more of it. This afternoon I boarded the narrowest plane ever known to man (no thats not a complaint). If I stood in the aisle and stretched my hands I would be able to touch the sides of the plane no kidding. It was an American Eagle an alliance of American Airlines.
Tim Lucas along with fellow Sydney Rail enthusiast Hunter Nield is conducting an Introduction to Ruby on Rails Development half–day workshop as part of this year’s webDU which is targetted at developer interested in learning how to rapidly create quality web applications. This is the first of its kind in Sydney. Further details here.
Join the fun at their Flickr group where most of their session photos and feedback from the day would be posted.
And so the story goes…. MeasureMap was bought over by Google. As Jeff wrote here and here….
Thanks Russ for pointing this amazing tool out. coComment is a neat way of keeping abreast of comments in the blogosphere through RSS or even your browser. It captures shares and alerts as your comments grow in the blogosphere. You would be INFORMED when someone responds to your comments. You can SHARE YOUR COMMENTS on other’s blogs with your own readers? And keep all your comments without LOSING TRACK of your discussions. All in the one place! Neat!
What is the difference between Localization and Internationalization in the world wide web context? What are they and why do we designers and developers need to know?
The Lead of W3C Internationalisation — Richard Ishida (blog) during his visit to Australia conducted seminars in Melbourne and Canberra asking developers to think futuristically to allow for greater localisation of Websites and Web applications.
Russ, Lisa, Ajay and I are off to Canberra for the day to attend Web Standards Group meeting on Internationalization tomorrow. Russ has already blogged it so here goes! Can’t wait the drive will be fun. Canberra here we come. A small road trip before the big one 
A great new addition to WebKit—the Web Inspector. It lets you browse the live DOM hierarchy in a compact HUD style window, catering to the needs of web developers. The Web Inspector highlights the node on the page as it is selected in the hierarchy. Search for nodes by node name, id and CSS class name is also possible within the same window! Whoa!! I like it already!
Download the nightly build from http://webkit.opendarwin.org/blog/?p=41 and run the followinf in Terminal.
defaults write com.apple.Safari \
WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true
And you should be set to go. You’ll then see a new “Inspect Element” contextual menu item on any web page. This will open up the Web Inspector and refocus to the node under your cursor.
Lisa, Congratulations!! I have been looking forward to redQueen, since the evening you told me!! The design is simple and very sauve! Great colours! Awesome job!
Its already the 17th of January 2006! And it wouldn’t be long before we board the plane to head all the way over the Pacific onto Austin Texas for South By South West 2006. There will be lots happening and if all goes to plan I’d be off to North Carolina for about a week to meet my dear dear friend Nancy before heading down to Austin where we all would catch up again. We also have a few exciting plans post SXSW2006 more to be revealed soon. Don’t forget to tag all your posts (photos and blog entries) South By South West posts by sxsw2006.
Russ posted an article on “Nested lists used to create a simple folder metaphore“. Thought I’d apply the same mark-up and change the CSS to create Left-hand navigation to re-purpose and re-use the same code. So here goes. ‘Course, I’d expect you’d change the pixel sizes to em and make it all relative. The CSScan also be streamlined a bit further.
Continue reading ‘Nested list to create ‘n’-levels of Left Hand Navigation’
A good time was had by all! We were 13 +2! and we had a blast! Visit the links below for some flickr lovin’
Event: Sydney Web Standards Group Xmas drinks
Date: Friday 16th of December
Venue: Bungalow 8
Map: http://www.bungalow8sydney.com/sections/map/map.html
Time: 6 pm onwards…
URI: http://www.bungalow8sydney.com.
See you there!!
As some of you might know John Allsopp is already organising this (Good on you John) to get together the best Aussie contingent for South by South West(SXSW) Interactive 2006. SXSW undoubtedly is one of the #1 interactive conference/get together in the World. And even if you are in no way associated with web, music or interactive design and still would love to come along… even better! Please get in touch. All going well you’d see me there too (Molly, we’ll have to do more photo shoots ). Allow me to echo a few lines from Johns and here are some photos from last years.
More Measuremap tease is underway. Bright red signifies active visitors (right Jeff?). The scary bit… I think I know who is visiting from Iceland and Peru. Okie for the rest of you do flick in a comment so I know you hate my blog Until the next tease!
Thanks Jeremy for installing RoundCube. At Segpub you are not only looked after but you are spoilt!!
I have been experiementing with it for the last week and its growing on me! Not convinced about this AJAX goodie? Check out Mark Boulton’s review or if you like to sink your teeth in it here’s a little lovin’.
UPDATE: My brut-forced blog that I wouldn’t have otherwise had.
Matt Mullenweg introduced Akismet just a few days back. It’s a comment-spam defense system for WordPress. Only a few days back I had installed dr Dave’s brilliant SpamKarma v2 which seems to work very well (thanks Ruth). So my question here is: Which of the 2 is better and why?
Thank you Jeff. I am totally delighted to have received this little surprise email just about five minutes back YAY! Since I’ve only just set it up it wouldn’t show much stats to start with. I am looking forward to have a play with it. The entire Measuremap user-interface is AJAX driven. Sweet as! Wow! And it loads very fast! I hope to have a few screensgrabs up for you here.
Flock Developer Preview is now available. Go on give it a whirl. I love it already. Yes well I’m easy pleased BUT if you are anything like me and like technology ( I think ‘geek’ is over-rated) you’d know what I mean. Head on over and have a muck around.
Continue reading ‘Get Flock!’
Live redesign of my site site is underway. To be honest with you this is partly Cameron’s fault Apparently he’d seen me playing around with K2 and noticed some changes I had made. Since reading his email yesterday I said to myself: Well it was ’bout time to take a headlong plunge. Few hours later here we are: Brace yourself for bad links, content falling out of boxes, image not found extra borders paddings funnies anything that doesn’t look right or is not legible! Change is always good. If you come back visiting with IE I’ll hit you with a nasty scraggy broomstick and if you wanna be a smartass and complaint and show-off your CSS prudence – watch out! I’d let off my German Rottweiler to get even!
Overwhelmed by the amazing response to WE05. I don’t know where to start. Despite being a fortnight late in publishing this I seem to be still reeling from the effect of a total WE05 utopia! It was definitely an amazing conference. Let me take that back it was not only a conference that stood out as being unique but this was backed up with amazing friendly people from many walks of life and many continents around the globe. Rare! A collaboration of this nature can only come to pass where people think beyond their own thirst for knowledge, and not just the organisers and speakers but also the delegates… I, for one, saw the conference from a very different standpoint as compared to last years. Continue reading ‘WE05 from my perspective’
Just so you know…. a lof of the photos from the amazing, exciting, futuristic, open-minded, inspiring, most-friendly, most enjoyable ever Web conference Web Essentials 2005 is now up. There are a few more to go to complete the entire set, so thank you for your patience. The photos include pre WE05 yak yak fun booze dance goss ummm what did I miss? Well… yes, I’ve been working my fingers to the bone but still its taking a long time isn’t it? Slow lazy me! Is this where I say… ‘Ain’t no spring chicken no more’… so, pardon my speed! Am a slow release fertiliser, gosh! did I just say that.
Please tell me I’m not the first person in Sydney to sign up with plaze. Not again! I know am not. C’mon people sign up already! On that note can I also suggest you add the GeoURL tag to your site if its not in place? This greatly enhances statistical data and aids reporting demographic information more accurately. Onto Plazes now. What is Plazes? Its a service that enables you to be location aware? Why do I recommend it? Because, its a cool new way of interacting/ discovering people, sharing your location, you can automagically geotag your pictures and even your blog posts, enriching the things you create with location. When you need privacy it offers you the magic portion and makes you pseudonymous and totally invisible! In a nut shell Plaze = Location + Context! How cool. Thanks Doug for introducing this in your presentation.![](http://karmakars.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif" alt= "Plaze me! Photo"){kind=icon}
There’s stacks to write about and there are heaps and heaps of photos to be put up. I AM SAD WE05 is over. I AM REALLY SAD its over so soon. Promise to have something exciting up here soon… Am off to the post WE05 party tonight at Darling Harbour. So expect more photos too if I’m not too drunk look I wont make a promise am sitting here all decked up in smart-casuals and lugging my camera bag around seems like a chore now…. hmmm lets see… well theres only one way to find out.. you will just have to visit my flickr and blog. And look if I really don’t take any photos and post nothing at all.. I really never said a thing. It was all a figment of your imagination! Oh! by the way if you haven’t seen the sexy, gorgeous and intelligent duo here’s to Molly and Maxine. Purrrrrr!
Check out the latest happenings at WE05 on our flickr group.
Listen to podCasts of each session soon after they are done at WE05 website or Odeo
Track what blogs are saying about WE05 via technorati, and make sure you tag your blog posts like this
WE05.
What is Mint?
Mint is a concise, flexible, dripping with AJAX RSS and deliciously bundled wuth PHP, MySQL and referrer-spam-proof stats generator created by Shaun Inman. In other words Mint is ShortStat reborn. It keeps both current and historical data about each visit and presents it in a neatly organized fashion. And to say the least when I had problems getting it to work Shaun helped me troubleshoot. Thanks again Shaun. I’m a mint freak now
BetterSearch: An extension for Firefox which enhances Google (all international flavours, too), MSN Search, Yahoo Search, A9, Answers.com (web results), AllTheWeb, del.icio.us and Simpy.com by adding previews (thumbnails) and Amazon product images and info (type, price, rating for US/DE/UK/CA/FR products), a quick preview feature as well as “Open in New Window”, “Site Info” and “Wayback Machine” links to the search results.
A Firefox Extension For Enhancing Search Engines with some raving testimonials and screenshots for your consumption. If you like BetterSearch, please rate it at Addons.Mozilla.Org! My Question though: Why is Technorati missing?
I’d have to admit — nothing beats Inquisitor on Safari though. Live, predictive search extension for safari ~ visit developers blog. Although you require Mac OS X 10.4 tiger.
If you have a flickr account you can make your own flickr galley to bring in a pool of images from your flickr.com account to a totally unrelated page on a different server(other than flickr). This will save you having to make many gallery pages. All you need is a populated flickr account. Some rudimentary HTML and CSS skills!
Karmakars.com is going through some changes as you might have figured. I’m kinda out with MT! It took me a while to make the decision but I think I’m better off with WP. Well for now anyway!
Note: You may find broken links. Your patience is appreciated.
Very proud to say the new mycareer site launched today: http://mycareer.com.au. Its the next major site from the Fairfax Digital network to take on css layout as part of a redesign. The site gets hundreds of thousands of visitors a month and is one of Australia’s largest job ad websites.
Did my site header just feature somewhere? I am usually pretty anal about referrer logs and though I noticed http://www.nv30.com I kind of didn’t visit it for a few days. To tell you the truth the past few months have been intenesely unsettled and uprooting. BUT all said and done what have we here?….
SUMMARY: This post discusses some of the the points raised at tonights WebstandardsGroup meeting on “Developing sites for users with cognitive disabilities and learning difficulties“. It also contains links to the presentation material and some related reading.
Just got back from another very interesting WebStandardsGroup meeting. Today’s topic was about helping understand and improve Cognitive disabilities and learning difficulties. Roger Hudson and Russ Weakley made their presentions. Following the very interesting topic that is rather close to my heart… I decided to do some test from todays pearl of wisdom. Here are the results:
Continue reading ‘Developing sites for users with cognitive disabilities and learning difficulties’
Adaptive Path and Different, the Australian interactive agency specialising in human centred design, have teamed up to bring Jesse James Garrett to the all-new Human Centred Design Revolution workshop this May in Sydney. Join Jesse as he gives his full-day presentation on “The Elements of User Experience” and “The Nine Pillars of a Successful Web Team.”
The details are as follows: Locaton: Tuesday, 17th May 2005, Australian Technology Park, Sydney
Jesse runs his own site at http://www.jjg.net. His book: User – Centered Design for the Web — “The Elements of User Experience” has some tremendously positive reviews. You can download a free chapter from here.
Jesse, I am assume will be talking about Ajax too. Ajax is an innovative web application framework.
Its funny thinking of Bay 8 at Australian Technology Park now that our part of the office has moved back to north shore again, I wonder in the Australian Park for about 4 years. That place all too familiar to me.
As you can see I have reproduces the table with the CSS from standards-schmandards. Brilliant use of CSS and Aural text class. Take some time to read through the enrty and the demontration. I think this is a great way to put information up on web where a table is required and the visual representation of data is a must. It is visual, accessible and rich with CSS. Why don’t you try it, go ahead and disable the CSS of this page and you would still see the graph as legibly as it would othwise be with bells on!
Below is an overview of banana imports for top importing countries. Source: Food and Agricultural Organization 1998.
| Country | Millions of US dollars per million people |
|---|---|
| Sweden |  17.12 |
| United Kingdom | 8.88 |
| Germany | 8.36 |
| Italy | 5.96 |
| United States | 4.78 |
| Canada | 4.62 |
| Japan | 4.30 |
| France | 3.33 |
| Russia | 1.04 |
You guessed it, the indibloggies 2005 nominations are up. If you like what I do, do vote for my site. As you’ve heard me say many times before — ‘Content is king‘ and hence my focus on information, usability and again information. Who knows one day all of that might change and I might go foot loose and fancy free.
Update: There wasn’t a very big turn out but all the same it was fun. It poured non-stop. We were at the Opera Bar for a while before proceeding on to Aqua. Thanks to all those that made an effort to turn up and show your support and appreciation to both WSG and Firefox. Head on over to Maxine’s Flickr for the photos from last night.
Just letting you know I may not live up to your expectations today! And if you are wondering why… I got off the bed at 9 this morning! And almost flew to work… totally forgetting that I’d to take my camera along… and right now its raining pretty hard! I am still looking forward to the usual WSG crowd if not more… and yes after I have pinched some photos off Maxine’s camera I will have ‘em here for you to ogle!
And for those interested in yesterday’s meeting at Wellington, NZ, here you go.
TeamSite is a CMS produced by Interwoven Inc. And an approximate listing says about 1000 clients across the globe use it for pushing content both within the local Intranets and different extranets worldwide. Most sites that talk about Content Management process and architecture like CMSwatch.com, www.cmsmatrix.org and Oscom hold TeamSite in high esteem. But I have always been skeptic about it because I haven’t seen a single site deliver clean, valid code! As a website developer, designer and website consultant I am very pedantic about valid, clean and semantically correct code. But my view about TeamSite changed since David, Ruth and I started working on building a Template for a website.
I am getting fed up of my own blog I need more design elements. But I don’t have the time. I want it too look prettier, but content is King and I know looks make it better sometimes but nowhere near as much as good content!! I want to get rid of the grey and have something fancy. I might too, LOL, too hard on myself as always, too critical of my own site. I want my site to load in less than 6 seconds on a 56KB dial-up line, this one does!! Try it but hey making an arty-farty site will look sauve but will it reach out to that many people? NO. Again content is king. I want to, like the rest of the world design my entire blog in Illustrator and then redev it. But that would be so futile an excercise… I do care about people on slow lines. And I respect their choice for not moving on to broadband — whatever the reason.
If you really, really, really want people to see your great web design, you’re flattering yourself; content is king. If you didn’t believe that the content is the important part of your site, you wouldn’t be providing an RSS feed. Bite the bullet and give us full text.
John has it right. People that dont give full RSS mosly dont believe ‘content is king’ or don’t get off their lazy ass to implement it, or just don’t care enough! Some of the best usability and Accessibility gurus in the Industry have this backwards! I am not surprised.
For those that have noticed my weblog here doesn’t have a link ’skip to content’ instead it says ‘skip to main content‘. A fairly simplistic change one may say. But there is more to this than meets they eye! Blind users use Assistive technology to read pages on the internet. Tools like JAWS would read ‘Skip to Content’ with an accent on the second syllable. That would defeat the reason on having a skip link in the first place. The alternative to this is ‘Skip to Main Content’
Using ‘Skip to Main Content’ at the top of your pages ensures JAWS doesn’t get confussed about the world ‘content’ nor will it read it with the accent.
The first noticable change: reduced spam by about 80%. No operational glitches (which is indicative of a very smooth operation). Everything works just as it was in the previous hosting company. Ditto! I want the world to know what a tremendous helpful person Jeremy Bogan is. Without his very skilled help this move would have been longer and patchy. Thank you again Jeremy and I really appreciate it. I am just blown away from the service Segment Publishing offers. Not just a couple of times but everytime! Just to ease the operation, if I ran into problems, Jeremy even came up on iChat to help me of his own free will. MT, static files, database everything is working fine.
I have been reading a lot of good things about Segment Publishing lately. I got great recommendations from Hicksdesign, Maniacalrage, Zeldman, Waferbaby and then decided to investigate further. I also realised that Waferbaby and Segment are brothers well that would explain Waferbaby’s bandwidth fetish
I had downloaded a copy of CSSEdit software last night and been playing with it a bit. I do like their site — Macrabbit.com. Clean and crisp! But what made me LMAO was the nagscreen. Here is a screengrab! Enjoy. Jan, it works!!
George Chavchanidze a mathematician in Georgia uses XML 1.0 markup to capture basic structure of math expressions and CSS 2.0/2.1 to specify their rendering. What a remarkable use of Technology. George Chavchanidze works in the Department of Theoretical Physics, A. Razmadze Institute of Mathematics, Georgia. CSS has tremendous potential and the future holds a lot of growth in this particular area of expanding CSS to meet custom needs. via John
For some of us this really is not anything new really, but nonetheless I decided to add this feature on my blog. Pretty basic CSS3. It doesn’t work in IE and other buggy browsers, nor should you expect!
Continue reading ‘Using micro icons’
A big thank you to the core members of the Web Essentials ‘04 group(Russ Weakley, Peter Firminger, John Allsopp, Maxine Sherrin) and all those that helped yesterday’s event come together so beautifully. It was a free briefing session for the Government and Education sector about Web Standards, adherence to code semantics and Accessibility(WAI). The Speakers included Russ Weakley, Roger Hudson, Dean Jackson about raising the consciousness in the Government and Education sector with focus on:
Why do we write blogs or journals?
It is not because people wish to berate others but merely to express their feelings, thoughts, to share information with the world be it good useful or maybe just a casual banter. People write blogs and journal because that is one way of keeping in touch with their friends and family and loved ones or even strangers. Some write to promote concerns about issues happenings injustice or merely for educational purpose. I strongly believe writing weblog should be fun, should be a feeling expressed right out of the heart without having to worry about ‘Is big brother watching’ — unfortunately he always is… always. In the recent past I have had a few issues and been asked to take down a few entires I had written…sad but thats how the story goes.
Bumped into W3 Complaints sites this morning and on investigation realised this is one of Sean Ho’s brain child. Congrats Sean this is really a great idea! It helps the conscious web designers collate a reference of sites that are truly being complied to by W3 Guidelines of semantic and valid markup along with Accessibility Guidelines and conformations.
Over the last weekend I burnt the midnight oil to give (Nancy) a “little surprise“. She gives herself so selflessly for Rotary and for that matter almost anything that needs a helping hand. In the last few weeks she even took up a Dreamweaver MX course to get up and running with site maintenance/creation. Nan even started on a site up for Maysville Rotary! (I wasn’t aware of this earlier). I really admire her zeal to learn, her thirst for knowledge, there is no stopping when you get her going.
I didn’t know Nan had aready bought a domain, and hosting and even done a good amount of Dreamweaver work in getting a basic site together for her Maysville Rotary Club. She even taught herself a little flash and spent time trying things out and worked out how to create Flash Buttons in Dreamweaver. If this is not giving selflessly what is! She neither needs to do a site for Rotary nor go out of her way to help needy souls — especially when there is so much to be done, pressing needs that screem for attention. But amongst all the hustle and bustle of life she did.
Continue reading ‘Maysville Rotary club is on air’
The same person (probably) has floated another site without my conscent again anguruh.com.br/novakang/kanguruh.htm
Oh how I love the net!
While checking my logs on Sunday I came across a rather unusual incident and no it wasn’t a very pleasant one. http://www.hotbook.com.br had generated some traffic onto my site so I was curious to know what it was that brought people to karmakars.com.
On further investigation I found that someone over in Brazil presumably by the name Marcio Sgreccia> has copied my layout, blog text, graphics, CSS including old banner, well almost everything possible of the front page!!
If you are an author, editor, or administrator of pages where the content change frequently (either daily, or every few days) you need to make sure that you have a few elements set within the of your document in order that your site visitors always get served with the most current version — in other words, your writing either in a blog/site journal/online magazine as your users may or may not always bother to check they are getting the very latest content.
Edited: 7th September 2004: I am happy to say I am a proud owner of this book and it truly is worth every cent. Dan’s writing is simple, short and to the point and with loads of real world examples! If you are serious about your Web Standards approach to the Web, this book is for you!
Dan Cederholm has written a book ‘Web Standards Solution – The Markup and Style Handbook (Pioneering Series)’ — ISBN: 1590593812.
Continue reading ‘Web Standards Solution’
I spend the last two days creating a new design for Maysville Elementary School of North Carolina. Maysville Elementary School had a web presence, however, it needed a fresh look and a more user-friendly navigation. It truly is all about educating our future.
For those who many not know about Maysville — it is a small town in Jones County, North Carolina. If you are from the US of A you probably already know this but I thought a few web links would be nice. Land of the Charlotte, the flight of the Wrights, the mesmerising (we spell that the right way Chapel Hill, the historic Tyrone Palace, Comfort Country and our dearest darling Nancy who we all miss so much down-under, So here goes to North Carolina.
30th October 2003! This will go down in history! I finally got my weblog working! While I burn the midnight oil to re-skin my website do visit my blogs and Photo Gallery feel free to stop by and link mine from yours! Also have booked our tickets to Tasmania, and we we’re quite excited to say the least. Christmas is not all that far away is it? Well, I certainly hope not. More about this when I have completed setting up the weblog fully well. So… stay tuned!
Howdy All, thought this would be a good start to let you all know that the project I have been working on the last few months has gone live yesterday! The URL of the site is http://www.tafeglobal.com.au
TAFE GLOBAL is the international arm of TAFE NSW, parts of the Web Site are in Chinese and Malay other than English. A greek version is also underway. I am really proud to have worked with such a professional team and am surely going to miss them! It was very kind of them to have put me up on their web site.
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