stargirl-designs.com Blog

I thought this article, the 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time, from PC World was pretty funny. Number one is AOL. I never lowered myself to using their service, thankfully. Back when I was on dial-up I used Earthlink. My sister still has AOL, I’ve told her for years to get rid of them but I don’t think she ever has completely. Now, I don’t have personal experience with most of the things on the list, fortunately. But I have used RealPlayer, IE 6 (hate, hate, hate!) and Zip drives. Yep, nothing good to say about any of them.

Flickr is a big thing now. It’s an online photo sharing website. (You get an account and upload your photos for the world to see) I have my photo album on my netfirms account at the moment. I’m thinking of migrating them all over to Flickr. It’s actually similar to del.icio.us, in that whatever you save there you tag with categories and that’s how they can be seen by other people who are interested in that category.

A magazine for people who make websites: A List Apart. Hmmm, right up my alley.

I attended a very interesting seminar last night. “Emerging Standards in Web Design,” given by a web design and training firm called Antharia. The instructor, Jordan Dossett,talked about lots of great stuff. Keeping important stuff on your site “above the fold,” designing for the lowest common denominator user resolution (800×600), browser limitations, navigation, and, of course, the fact that web standards always changing.

I personally (as a user) hate Flash and have always refused to use or learn how to use it. She said a big thing now is using what’s called a “random rotate script” to create a Flash-like image that changes everytime the user changes or reload pages on a site. Which is EXACTLY what we made for the MIT CSR EPO website several years ago: two pics from Chandra in the top banner that changed with each reload. Guess I was ahead of the times on that one , although I must admit the javascript for it was implemented by one of my Harvard Extension classmates.

Funnily, Jordan turned out to be one of my sister’s pet sitting clients. She had talked to them at Antharia about doing the Pet Companions website, but it didn’t work out and I ended up taking it over. Ha! Nepotism beats talent every time! (Antharia is REALLY good)

I discovered something new yesterday. Del.icio.us It’s a “social bookmarking” site (and just about the coolest URL ever!). You register, list your favorite website, and anyone else can see your list. I like it because you can have your favorite websites at your fingertips anywhere you go, even if you don’t have your own computer with you. Now, for the social aspect, if I can just get some of my friends into it too…

I love my job. It’s not earth-shatteringly exciting but I feel like I’m learning so much! I just signed up for an XML class through HWG. I really know little about the subject (it stands for eXtensible Markup Language) but it’s supposed to be the next step in the evolution of web markup languages, past HTML and XHTML. I know ALOT about HTML and a little XHTML, which is really just the bridge between the two other languages. Apparently XML lets you write your own markup tags, if I understand it correctly. (I said I know little!)

I also want to convert all my websites to PHP, like we are doing at work to our site. It gives you lots more possibilities than just straight HTML. And of course, I’m done with tables for layout! Gots to put my CSS skills into full effect…

I started writing at work today what I want to call a “validation/accessibility manifesto” (my supervisor may object to that term, though!). There’s a lot of stuff we need to correct during our PHP conversion and since I’m the one who seems to know the most (or maybe that’s CARE the most!) about it in the department, it’s up to me to come up with guidelines for everyone else. I don’t know, it may turn into a rant about “what the hell is the point of coverting to PHP if we are going to have font tags everywhere”…we’ll see.

Ok, like my friend Keith says, dumb title, but it fits. There is currently legislation before Congress that could change the internet as we know it in rather disturbing ways. Telecom companies (which already control our broadband access) would have the power to control what we have access to on the web. That is SO SO VERY WRONG. It would give them the power to censor whatever they feel like. What’s great about the internet right now is that anyone can have a website or a blog…you have things like Wikipedia, free to everyone to use. That could all go away if the telecoms have their way. To anyone who reads this, don’t let this happen.

I can’t really do the topic justice here but this website pretty much covers it.

I recently become aware of a new kind of web advertising practice. I’ve only seen it on one site, although I’m sure others use it. And it is positively VILE. The person who thought it up should burn in hell. The site I’ve seen it on is ScienceDaily. For example a story on Neptune’s moon Triton has green underlined links in the text. These are NOT links to related stories keyed on the highlighted word, but instead rolling your mouse over them brings a pseudo-popup window that contains a link to a site wanting to sell you something that has perhaps a most tenuous connection or association with the underlined word. I can tolerate ads before, after, on sides of, or even as floating images in the article. But sneaking them into the text itself? That is so many forms of disgusting…

Thankfully, if you have the Adblock and Adblock Filterset.G extensions for Firefox (no one should use any other browser), this stuff gets blocked automatically.

The CSS class (CSS 2.1 in Depth) I have been taking through the HWG is over.  I am a big fan of CSS (cascading style sheets) and the final project we did for the class is a great demonstration of why.  We were given the html for a webpage with the instruction that we were not allowed to alter the html in any way.  We could only create a style sheet to meet the requirements the instructor set forth.  My version is here.  I chose the bright colors on purpose, to set the various section apart.  I know, it’s a little over the top!   A classmate’s version is here.  Now THAT is a real work of art!  AND IT’S THE SAME WEBPAGE!  (Or rather, the same html code)  It is our style sheets that make all the differences.

The idea is that html should only be used to give your content basic structure.  Everything else should be done with CSS: colors, fonts, sizes, margins, everything that gives the page its “look.”   A big advantage of CSS is that it makes it easy to give your entire site of many individual pages a consistent look.  And if you want to change that look?  You only have to edit the style sheet, not all the separate pages.

What can I say…CSS is just fun!

Never title a post “RSS”.  That was what I had used for the previous post and it screwed up the permalink, making it look for an rss file instead of showing the post.  Dang it!  Changing the title didn’t fix it, because it still keeps the original title in the link path.  I suppose I could have just deleted the post and posted again with a new title but for some reason Wordpress will not let me cut-and-paste text into the editor.  Hmm, now I see there is a file upload option but I’m too lazy to figure out if that would do the trick.