Hi! My name is Nils, welcome to my personal website. Here is what you will find within this domain:
Tuesday, November 25, 2003
links
I've got too many browser tabs open and not enough time to do anything with them, so here are notes to my future self:
- David Shea's CSS Crib Sheet
- there must be something to add from my recent re-design, I make the same stupid mistakes every time I do a CSS layout, now what were they? Don't forget z-index...
- Nice titles
- yes! That's what I was trying to do on my links page last night, have to borrow it and apply my styles. Wonder if I can grab the accesskey too?
- Unobtrusive DHTML unordered list dropdown
- I've been using Dave Linguist's version and it's clunky as all hell, especially since I maintain my links page by hand, updating at least weekly. It's time for something cleaner.
- Revised Image Replacement
- Caught up on my FIR variant reading. Unfortunately my professional portfolio uses transparent images, so I'll stick with image tags there. Otherwise I think the Gilder/Levin Method is the best option (best meaning accommodates the most users), and I'll have to add Shea's enhancement (title attribute on the header tag) on my H1 here. Today I almost had a solution to the text resize problem (the remaining problem with using images of text), but 1em is not the same size cross-browser, so there went that idea.
- Labels.js
- I'm thinking this would be really cool layered on top of pixy's fieldset and label formatting, so you've got a foundation of solid XHTML, with CSS enhancing the layout, and JS taking the interactivity up a notch. To test it out I'm thinking this site could use a contact form. Hmmm, where to put a link to that? Maybe top left across from the skip to text link?
posted by Nils T. Devine # 9:02 PM 0 Comments
pixy
ok, so I knew this guy kicked ass, what with his color scheme picker, and FIR varient that I'm using here (not sure if he is original creator of that one) but man, take a look at his css work here: Pixy's English Homepage.
There's a super clean 3 column header, footer layout with no positioning, no hacks, and all columns full height. Side columns are floated, center has left + right margins to make space on the sides.
The fieldset and label formatting is also pretty killer for simple forms.
ok, so maybe none of that is as cool as the color picker, but what a body of work. impressive collection of favelets as well.
posted by Nils T. Devine # 9:48 AM 0 Comments
Monday, November 24, 2003
"mind's eye"
posted by Nils T. Devine # 8:35 PM 0 Comments
Sunday, November 23, 2003
oA - Goldilocks
"Holy crap! Come and look at this! There's some skanky bitch lying in our bed!"
"Maybe we should eat her." Said one of the large carnivorous mammals.
"Are you kidding? Have you seen the state of her crotch?"
from orange Afro
posted by Nils T. Devine # 10:05 PM 0 Comments
heads up!
Of blogging and unemployment
Well now. Time to give the photos page a little cleanup, and maybe even a recent post. Certainly not going to dial down the obscenity, maybe just go a little more anonymous when talking about work.
posted by Nils T. Devine # 6:18 PM 0 Comments
re-launch
Here we have it. And with the re-launch i've just noticed that blogger finally let's you make permanent link to posts, so I've wrapped an anchor around the timestamps and called it good. Yes, I still use blogger because I'm too cheap to pay more than $5 a month for my basic ftp hosting.
posted by Nils T. Devine # 5:47 PM 0 Comments
drop-up
I just have to say that my new Drop-Up Menu kicks a fair amount of ass. This is why:
- you can Tab to all the links
- fully accessible with or without JS
- doesn't freakin' disappear if your cursor slips off
- it pulls up not down :-)
The only thing that's really bugging me is getting the subnav gradient background to work like in the mockup. The bottom corner backgrounds from the nav anchors need to be over-ruled, but I want to see through to the subnav list background. Playing with transparent.gif :-/ UDATE: no yuckiness necessary, had just forgotten background-color: transparent; on the anchors.
posted by Nils T. Devine # 1:45 PM 0 Comments
enlarged text, fixed layout
check out the nav on my New Design Prototype. To see something pretty sexy (though it would never survive translation into another language) watch the nav while you enlarge the text in your browser (Ctrl + for Moz users, View > Text Size > Larger in Internet Explorer). It expands up, but not horizontally or down.
Next up is the DOM scripted subnav drop-up menu, then I suppose a decision must be made about the box model problem.
posted by Nils T. Devine # 11:25 AM 0 Comments
inductive user interface followed by "talkie" rant
Why technical writers should love Microsoft's Inductive User Interface is an overview and tech writer's take on this longer article from MSDN who on this rare occasion appear to be submitting a good user interface paradigm. The principle behind IUI is that most screens in a given application leave far too much un-stated, forcing new users to figure out what they are supposed to do. With IUI each screen has a purpose which is explicitely stated. So rather than having a page that lists all of one's accounts and the actions that can be performed they split it into two pages. The first page is titled "Pick an account to use", the second page would then let you act on that account. It's the same number of clicks but makes each step completely unambigious. And the reason tech writer circles are psyched is that it involves the writer early in the design process. If a page can't be clearly titled then there's a problem with the page and it gets re-worked. It shifts the writer earlier into the process where their skills might actually make a difference. Pretty cool if you ask me.
I've been trying to slide in a jibe at this chick who attempted to do some tech writing at work whom we have dubbed "Talkie" because she talks to much and won't shut up and is replacing someone who is moving to NY and is her superior in every way possible and the only reason that "Talkie" is still around is because someone has some shady deal going on with a recruiting agency, but I couldn't decide where to slip the jibe in, probably because it is such a long and heart-fealt rant that she who is leaving for NY should be replaced by somebody with the mental capacity to be a part of this high-caliber team, so, well, I guess there it is.
posted by Nils T. Devine # 9:52 AM 0 Comments
Saturday, November 22, 2003
re-code has begun
Rebirth One has begun. Need to wrangle some sliding doors into the admittedly tight frame (which I only get away with by choosing short words).
Then there's the IE5 box model problem, deciding which hack to use being harder than the actual patch (more on that once I choose one).
I also have a problem where when you make the text larger in IE a gap problem (that I had shoved under the rug earlier using a -3px top margin on the content) re-appears. Maybe I should just shove harder with a -.5em top margin *grin*. Ok, so Jon is the only person I can think of that would find that funny, deal. (Update: it worked, disgusting hack though, would like to know what causes the gap in IE)
Oh, and speaking of Jon I'd better do what he said and make it so the very bottom of the page doesn't look chopped off, especially on bigger screens where you can see all the contents at once.
posted by Nils T. Devine # 6:48 PM 0 Comments
subnav design
and with a subnav design something like this (14K Image) I might as well start re-coding this site. yup, the drop down menu will drop up. Here goes nothing.
posted by Nils T. Devine # 1:18 PM 0 Comments
Friday, November 21, 2003
color blindness
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
prior art
After I wrote that last post about clipping the wings in my design on narrower browsers I caught up on my zen garden viewing and found this design: Dune Temple. And guess what? He did exactly that - provided additional design elements at higher resolutions without causing the page to scroll sideways when the window is narrower. It's still a fixed width design, but I like the monochromatic color scheme (so what if those two statements have little to do with eachother).
posted by Nils T. Devine # 3:25 PM 0 Comments
2nd design, flexible/fixed thoughts
Here we have a second take on my new layout (100K Image, 1024x528 pixels). Of course the image is extra wide, when it's an actual page I'll be able to put the wings as a centered background, so they'll get clipped if your browser is narrower, but there's no horizontal scrolling unless you are running at lower than 800x600 or surfing extra narrow.
Might as well weigh in on the whole fixed width vrs. flexible discussion that has resurfaced because of an actual argument on the side of fixed width - that being that full screen width text is hard to read. Yes, full width text is crap typography, but that doesn't rule out the multi-medium accessibility benifits of liquid layout, or mean that liquid layout can't be done well.
The most effective flexible layouts that I have seen (such as douglas bowman's stopdesign) and mimicked in my own work are those that have their body content set to somewhere between 50 and 60 percent of the screen width. That way the content is a good width anywhere between 800 and 1024 pixels wide, and reasonable at other sizes. I think the key part that many flexible layouts lack are good margins. We're not printing out cheap paperback novels with ink to the edge of the page leaving no room for thumbs, let's let our layouts breath a little. I'd also be impressed to see more layouts done with their margins set in em or %.
With this site I have gone over to the dark side because, as with the force, power is more easily acheived. I have always had trouble coding layered designs into flexible pages. Part of the reason most of the zen garden designs are fixed width I suspect.
posted by Nils T. Devine # 2:35 PM 0 Comments
Sunday, November 16, 2003
icons
Firewheel Design : Icons just me or is looking at good icons like eating candy? (site pointed out by cssvault)
posted by Nils T. Devine # 8:26 AM 0 Comments
Saturday, November 15, 2003
new layout
i'm considering this new layout (48K image) of my personal site. The current layout doesn't give me enough room for content, has really a really gaudy header that's starting to wear on me (not that the color theme isn't still out there, but i'm happy with that), and has it's navigation haphazardly slapped on the top rather than integrated. Two of the four tabs, Words and Play, will open sub-menus, though I may have them appear above, depends on how the CSS is treating me at the time of coding. I think now there are too many sections to invite exploration, at the time I just needed a single place to gather everything, now it needs some organizing.
posted by Nils T. Devine # 8:58 PM 0 Comments
patterns
don't know if i could bring myself to actually use patterns like this, but it's one of the rare web design trends that i actually appreciate. one of the patterns is made up of roses with a dropshadow on them and reminds me of the Medieval Books that were showing at the Getty (the web page on the exhibit is utter crap compaired to the exhibit itself). Anyway, today's tiled background trend is so much better than that of the 90's, probably because nobody is trying to make us read text on them :-)!
posted by Nils T. Devine # 6:40 AM 0 Comments
Friday, November 14, 2003
TWENTY-THREE STORIES UP AND ALL I could see out the windows was grey smog. They could call it the City of Angels if they wanted to, but if there were any angels out there, they had to be flying blind.That's the opening paragraph from Laurell K. Hamilton's A Kiss of Shadows. Her Anita Blake vampire hunter novels kinda suck (generic paranormal detective stuff), but these faerie novels she puts out every few years kick ass. Lots of sex with biting and stuff. Strange obsession with clothes though, comes from living where we live I suppose.
posted by Nils T. Devine # 9:34 PM 0 Comments
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Thursday, November 13, 2003
posted by Nils T. Devine # 3:58 PM 0 Comments
Wednesday, November 12, 2003
(25KB GIF Image, 634x327 pixels) Check out the amusing note from a weather chopper in the Santa Monica bay.
posted by Nils T. Devine # 7:55 PM 0 Comments
Tuesday, November 11, 2003
posted by Nils T. Devine # 8:36 AM 0 Comments
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Sunday, November 09, 2003
posted by Nils T. Devine # 5:56 PM 0 Comments
delightfully obscene
[regarding mass email] that you send out to every sodding person you?ve ever met but never talk to just to tell them how fucking better your fucking children are than mine! I don?t give a god fucking ass sucking monkey-dick licking sodding piece of gnat-wank pussy shit! SO JUST FUCK OFF!
Now how could I resist quoting that gem from orangeAfro, a british mag of sorts which the author of htmldog.com (though he himself is not quilty of the above quote) contributes to? Actually, orangeAfro is worth a visit for more than just it's insightful news, reviews and letters, their use of block level anchor tags is refreshingly innovative and "very clickable" to quote a friend's old boss whom I never met.
posted by Nils T. Devine # 9:09 AM 0 Comments
Saturday, November 08, 2003
posted by Nils T. Devine # 12:23 PM 0 Comments
Friday, November 07, 2003
posted by Nils T. Devine # 10:17 PM 0 Comments
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Thursday, November 06, 2003
posted by Nils T. Devine # 3:17 PM 0 Comments
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posted by Nils T. Devine # 8:19 AM 0 Comments
Tuesday, November 04, 2003
posted by Nils T. Devine # 3:05 PM 0 Comments
Monday, November 03, 2003
posted by Nils T. Devine # 1:18 PM 0 Comments
window.childWindow = window.open("thechild.html");
window.childWindow.
document.write("i am the child window");
window.childWindow.
window.document.title = "satanic spawn";
unfortunately you can't give the child window an attribute that can be read by that child, but you've always got window.opener, so control can go both ways. My previous problem was not solved by this, you still have to go window.open("","popup"); window.close("popup"); in order to close a popup window when you don't know if it exists.posted by Nils T. Devine # 1:11 PM 0 Comments
Sunday, November 02, 2003
window.globalvar = "Boo!";
wonder if this ugliness could solve a problem i was having losing my reference to a popup window? have to remember exactly what the problem was.posted by Nils T. Devine # 5:28 PM 0 Comments
posted by Nils T. Devine # 4:38 PM 0 Comments
Saturday, November 01, 2003
posted by Nils T. Devine # 10:00 AM 0 Comments
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