Sunday, August 29, 2004

So I got bored with my old blog and decided to jump on the latest design bandwagon and gave my site that aged look. Sufficiently different enough from the old design to keep me from tampering too much for a while, although there is a background on the way, should be up Tuesday or Wednesday!

I forgot to mention apart from the obvious use off css for layout and xhtml 1.0 transitional I am also using Shaun Inman's Inman Flash Replacement technique for the post headings. Cheers Shaun!

Jon 2:31 PM Permalink

Friday, August 27, 2004

Until recently forms were a no-brainer for me, 2 column table each label and input field in its own row. Simple. As I have previously mentioned I am currently building a site at FPC using xhtml 1 transitional and css layout. I have created one page using forms in the admin section but it is the a huuuuge form which to be honest I had to knock out fast.

So then I am asked to include a form in a previously designed page which is a major part of the site. I struggled all day yesterday to get my form looking like it would in a table but with little success. Finally this morning I resorted to using a table which took me a very small amount of time and left me feeling a little disheartened, after all, I have put 6 weeks into this site the last thing I wanted to do was de-value my coding abilities at this point. Then I remembered an article I read a little while ago and hit google for some answers and sure enough I found it. Fun with forms by Picment.com which I think was featured on A List Apart.

In my 5 years coding html I have never once used a fieldset to define a structural container in a form or a label tag to define descriptive information to form elements like input fields, I can't believe it!

Anyway, the Fun with forms by Picment.com creates a perfect 2 column form which even looks good with styles disabled so thanks Søren Madsen for saving my site!

Jon 10:19 AM Permalink

Thursday, August 26, 2004

The Web Standards Project launched on Friday a new campaign dubbed Browse Happpy a site dedicated to informing users how they can benefit from using standards compliant browsers and how to go about installing one.

Jon 9:11 AM Permalink

Tuesday, August 24, 2004

Robert Lindstrom launches the Blau Gallery Online Artshop a really nice use of Flash and some excellent artwork! (via K10K)

And while I'm posting links to nice Flash sites, this is also pretty cool too! www.hybridworks.jp/

Jon 5:18 PM Permalink

Thursday, August 19, 2004

I mentioned last week that I was using the maxdesign Floatutorial to help me layout a 3 column site and 3 column containers within my main content div. Well I came across something strange and have just solved the problem. The bug was that IE 5 on OS X (and I dare say OS 9 versions would behave the same) was extending my center container's h1 past the specified width, this did not happen in any other browser I tested on. At first I thought it was due to a couple of form tags being placed within a container rather than outside as it fixed the problem at first. Then I added content to the right hand column of the site and the problem reccured. I went back to the Floatutorial and went through step by step examining my code, well lo and behold I had not specified the right margin on the central container, I foolishly presumed that setting the left margin would be more than enough information for Mac IE given that I had set the width. You live and learn!

Jon 4:30 PM Permalink

If anyone can help shed any light on this area for me I would be most grateful. I was introduced to the wonderful world of CVS whilst working at Daemon and now they are going to implement a system at my current company. The question is, what is the best route to take for web development. The CVS with winCVS or tortoise client or subVersion? Can Dreamweaver MX 2004 hook up to subVersion via webDAV as the designers and developers are already familiar with the Dreamweaver's site management interface? Are there any GUI's available for subVersion?

Jon 9:26 AM Permalink

Friday, August 13, 2004

Okay as predicted there were a few problems when live data was fed into my templates and I have been furiously flying through the list of bugs (mainly IE5 Mac and validation issues) fixing them. I have reverted to xhtml 1.0 transitional as we have so thousands of links to outside sources but everything is still valid xhtml so I am happy, everything is almost ready for launch. The one thing I wanted to put in my blog for future reference and as a helper to anyone who is currently experiencing similar problems are a few hacks.

Firstly one that I have used again and again is a hack which only lets IE see the css:

* html #idname { property:value }

The second is the display for IE5 Mac only:

/* IE5/Mac only */
*>html>body #myID h1 {
color:#000;
}
/* end IE5/Mac only */

The next one is for fixing Safari's (until very recent) lack of min-height attribute:

.psfooter {
display:table;
height:25px;
}

This sets the display type to table which IE reads as Block and treats height as min-height.

Jon 2:33 PM Permalink

Wednesday, August 11, 2004

My old boss at Daemon talks about their continuing success and which technologies are important to developers at the moment. Daemon's early adoptation of emerging technologies and showcasing these development avenues to clients in a way that entices them to think of possible uses and realise the benefits of using these new development tools are what makes the company stand out so much...oh and the fact that I used to be a Flash developer there :P

For those of you who don't already know about Web Essentials 04 Daemon's Ben Bishop will be presenting a session on 'Markup - valid, semantic and structural XHTML and HTML' and believe me the guy knows his onions!

via JD on MX

Jon 9:59 AM Permalink

Tuesday, August 10, 2004

For anyone who is interested, I ran in the Sydney City 2 Surf on Sunday and today the results were published. I was a little dissapointed but I did start in the 3rd group (Smart Back of the pack) with 30,000 people in front of me and no timing chip so once the gun goes off the clock is ticking regardless of how long it takes to cross the start line. Anyway enough excuses, I finished in 83:01, 11,937th. Oh well, the 10km Bridge Run is next month and there will be no excuses for that one as you do get a personal timing chip!!!

Jon 9:02 AM Permalink

Thursday, August 05, 2004

There are so many articles on web standards and css layout techniques these days that when it came to me needing help I was almost spoilt for choice!

In my new position (well new about a month ago) at FPC Courier I am in charge of designing and building a site which will be high in profile and high in traffic. The brief was pretty straight forward, it needs to be fast loading and light on graphics to assist the impact on the servers. My first few designs were a little ambitious and then the logo changed colour and the design took a sudden unexpected swerve. However I have built all the templates in xhtml strict 1.0 with css only layout. In fact due to the nature of this site at the moment there is no tabular data and therefore not a single table tag throughout! I had to overcome a few obstacles on the way and I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the sites that helped me out.

First of all Russ Weakley's excellent Float Tutorial which helped me out with 3 column containers.

Next up was positioniseverything which sorted out my IE 3 pixel jog problem!

Finally there was Doug Bowman's filtering CSS article which led me to trim all the box model hacks and 3 pixel jog hacks out of my main css file and into a mid-pass-filter file.

Now everything is in place, I just have to see what happens when pages get rendered with real content...I fear some late nights are on the horizon.

Jon 11:04 AM Permalink

Tuesday, August 03, 2004

I'm excited, you can see from my last post I was catching up on a bit of guitar news, an area of my life that I have neglected over the last few years considering I spent 20 years studying music finishing Uni with a BMus(hons) only to find myself developing websites and getting very excited about learning how to program actionscript/xhtml/css etc. But I have the odd day where I reminisce about what could have been. Today is one of those days and the reason I am excited is that I have just found out about an album which I was unaware of. 'Me & Mr Johnson' is the new album by Eric Clapton in which he pays homage to the creator of modern day blues, Robert Johnson. Eric has also created a new guitar for this album built by Taylor which looks pretty nice and check out his website which is also a nicely designed simple flash site.

Also in the guitar news, Gibson finally unveil their MaGIC Digital Les Paul which, using an ethernet cable gives you the capability of processing each string individually, aparently Gibson did this at NAMM:
"...the signal was sent to six different channels on a computer-based sequencer (Cubase on this occasion) so that each string could be processed separately. Output from the channels was sent to six separate speakers spread across the width of the stage so that the panning posibilities could be fully appreciated. With the strings from low to high spread right across the soundstage the sound was simply huge." - www.guitar-gear.com

And of all the people to release a guitar, DSP company Alesis have released a budget guitar (US$349) called the Xguitar:

"The XGuitar is a full-scale electric guitar that features 80 editable guitar presets in one package, including headphone and line outputs. All of the presets can be user-configured using the 9 effect modules and 8 different signal routing possibilities. Features include 28-bit effects- Delays, amp, and cabinet models, chorus, transposition EQ, Noise reduction, flanger, reverb rotary speaker, a built-in digital tuner, one humbucker and two stacked single-coil pickups, plus a five-position pickup selector switch, master volume and two tone controls. The XGuitar can run up to 30 hours of operation on 4 AA alkaline batteries." - www.guitar-gear.com

Jon 10:32 AM Permalink

As a proud owner of a Patrick Eggle Berlin Pro I like to keep an eye on a company whose days were numbered before a stunning come back with an all new range which I hope has put them in a much more stable position in such a tough market.

"Patrick Eggle Guitars Ltd. has developed the sound that is going to take guitar based music into the 21st century with a bang and a twang! We all know that digital reproduction of music and video is now state-of-the art and improving all the time. Patrick Eggle Guitars Ltd. has now developed a pure 'A' Class Digital Amplifier with no negative feedback to accurately amplify all of our guitar dynamics without all the problems with valve amps.

• NO noise


• NO breakdowns


• NO weight


• NO unreliability - just pure guitar 'A' Class sounds

The system produces no noise beyond what is produced by the guitar woods and strings. Pure harmonics are enhanced, just as the best 'Boutique' amplifiers."

UPDATE: after a recent comment asking me whether I had seen anymore news on this amp I contacted Patrick Eggle who said:
"Thanks for contacting us. Yes the amps are in production, following
extensive trials/show demos etc. You can view the details in our brochure -
see the downloads page on the website."

If you would like to order one contact sales[at]patrickeggleguitars[dot]com for more information.

Jon 10:20 AM Permalink