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Previewing Pages in Textpattern

Sunday November 12, 2006

This is a handy Textpattern tip if you want to test a post before making it live on the front page. I’d forgotten all about this one.

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jurassic Graff

Saturday November 4, 2006

A sequence of images drawn on a wall at Etterbeek train station in Brussels.

Via Wooster Collective.

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Firefox 2

Saturday October 21, 2006

I’ve been using the Firefox 2 release candidates as my default browser for a while now. On the whole I've been pretty impressed. Performance has been improved, launch time is much faster and even with twenty + tabs open things remain stable. There are also a few nice new features.

Most of the essential extensions have now been upgraded to work with Firefox 2, although you may find there are a few straglers. If your favorite extension has not yet been updated to work with Firefox 2 check out Nightly Tester Tools. Once installed this will add a “Make all compatible” button to the extensions window.

Note: in Firefox 2 extensions have been renamed “Add-ons” and are accessed via Tools > Add-ons.

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CSS - Cross Browser coding tip

Friday September 22, 2006

I discovered this CSS coding tip a while back but forgot about it and hadn’t used it until recently. Temporarily add a meta refresh to your page while you’re working: 

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="7;url=http://localhost/">

You no longer need to constantly refresh the page to see your changes. Dead simple and can save you time and frustration.

I imagine this is a fairly common scenario; this has happened to me more than a couple of times. Your working on some CSS and everything is going great in Firefox, Safari or Opera. Then you remember you haven’t hit refresh in IE for a while. Shit, there are some layout bugs to fix.

It’s much easier to catch the IE bugs and squash them as and when they occur. If you wait until the end you may find there are multiple issues and inter related problems. This makes debugging more difficult and often leads to the temptation to use browser specific hacks or filters. Its better to determine the root cause of the problem and correct or work around it.

Screen real estate is pretty cheap nowadays and many people work with a dual monitor setup. Its fairly easy to keep a few browser windows open and visible as you work.

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Simplicity, Organisations and Navigation

Thursday September 21, 2006

Interesting interview with John Maeda and Diego Rodriguez on Signal vs. Noise. The discussion is centered around the new book The Laws of Simplicity. It’s well worth a look, especially if your a simplicity fan.

There are also some great observations about IA and navigation on corporate website’s:

you can often look at a company’s website and see the organizational structure represented in the navigation instead of what’s most logical for the CUSTOMER.

Corporate website = Org. chart but not embodying their model of doing business.

I’ve recently spent some time working on an intranet, the first thing that I wanted to improve was the IA. It seams to be common practice that many intranet designs take an organisation chart or departmental structure and render that with drop down menu’s. No wonder people don’t want to use these things.

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Focus on the Details

Monday September 18, 2006

I first heard this quote a few years back while watching the movie Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai:

Among the maxims on Lord Naoshige’s wall, there was this one: Matters of great concern should be treated lightly. Master Ittei commented, Matters of small concern should be treated seriously.

I recently read the book (Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai) that is the source of the quotations throughout the film. The book contains many inspirational quotes but this is one of my favorites.

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Internet Explorer 7 CSS Changes

Thursday August 24, 2006

The final list of CSS changes in IE7 that will make it to the release. All are very welcome updates.

There are reports of what may be a few new CSS problems in IE7. In the current beta there may be some regression that causes problems with the overflow:auto method of float clearing.

Swift — WebKit on Windows

Tuesday August 15, 2006

The Swift browser could come in very useful if you’re stuck on a Windows box all day. Although no substitute for testing on a Mac it’s nice to have a WebKit rendering engine that’s easily available to the PC.

Be warned that this is an alpha release and lots of things aren’t working yet. You will probably need to apply this patch before you install.

ListZilla

Sunday April 2, 2006

Another Firefox Extension related post, ListZilla output’s a list of installed extensions to a text or HTML file. The list includes a brief descriptoin and link to the extensions homepage.

My current list:

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