Hyperlinks
Link Log
Sunday, July 31, 2005
- My Date With Drew - 30 days - $1,100 - 1 date
- This guy is one of Trisha's (Cybil's sister's) co-workers. Trisha has seen the flick but won't tell us if he got the date.
Saturday, July 30, 2005
- IEBlog : Standards and CSS in IE
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this is more encouraging than what i've been hearing about ie7 beta 1. sometimes you start to think since ie has been so static for so long that they must be living in some sort of software development vacume, but then you see PositionIsEverything and Quirksmode mentioned, along with the web developer names for all these delightful bugs (Peekaboo, Guillotine) and you get a glimmer of hope.
One thing though that could become very clear when ie7 comes out with these bugs fixed is that those who haven't been using conditional comments to fix IE problems are going to be sorry. That is, if you use some hacked selector (like * HTML) to serve something to IE, and IE doesn't fix the selector problem but they do fix the CSS rendering problem, pages are going to break.
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
- T-Mobile
- wow, honesty from a cell phone carier. how rare is that? it would kick ass if some other companies did this too, and a third party held them responsible.
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
- Constructing Excellence, A to Z Information: Pareto Voting
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Why the hell am I linking to some random UK construction website? Because I've been dabbling in thoughts of search engine optimization of course. Here follows a number of un-proven (by me) observations about how to achieve good Google ranking, to be concluded with the new idea generated by the above link. Good Google ranking might be obtained via:
- clean code. reduce the signal vs. noise using semantic markup. it will make your keywords a higher percentage of the total contents of the page. for search engines that stop reading a page after a given number of characters it will guarantee that your content is among those characters.
- links. this is why blogs often jump to the top, they link to each other. but more than that, link to each other in a meaningful way, using descriptive link text and often following them up with commentary.
- content freshness. a regularly updated site will do better than a static site, if for no other reason than that a page's value is calculated in the context of the site as a whole, and regular updates means that the site as a whole is generally better fleshed out and more relevant than one that was just built and left to rot.
- focused content. a page devoted to the keywords entered in a search will rank higher than a page that mentions those keywords in passing. this is why i think definition pages like the above link will do so well in Google. a page that can answer, "what the hell is ____?" is a useful page, and therefore deserves high rank.
- New Scientist Breaking News - Why cats prefer meats to sweets
- Scientific proof that Fritz (our younger cat) is a freak cat. He's got a crazy sweet tooth, just last night attacked me for my rootbeer float.
Monday, July 25, 2005
- Lussumo Vanilla - The sweetest forum on the web
- I'll have to play around with this free forum application for than next freelance gig where they've "just gotta have a forum."
Saturday, July 23, 2005
- Behaviour : Using CSS selectors to apply Javascript behaviours
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jfred showed me script.aculo.us, and I was like, that's cool, I'm sure the drag and drop stuff will come in handy at some point, but I'm not sure if I like the animation, it feels too much like the stupid transition effects in windows that are too slow so I turn them off immediately after installing. Now Jon just pointed out one of the libraries used by script.aculo.us, which jfred may have as well, but my attention was obviously elsewhere at the time because this is really cool shit. The DOM can be a pain to traverse just to add your events. It's not actually that hard, but adding events directly is just so easy, when up against a deadline ideals have a way of slipping. But CSS selectors, if not the easiest thing to learn (do you remember the first time you had to wrap your head around precedence?) are used on a more day to day basis (at least at my gig) so they are totally painless. I'd rather use CSS than the DOM to apply events any day.
One last thing. Take a look at the very bottom of behaviour.js, they've actually documented a regular expression using ASCII. Regex is a twistedly powerful tool, but it's such a bitch to reverse engineer, documenting it like this could prove to be a very useful technique.
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
- Line56.com: Death of a Blockbuster
- rock on! only better news would be a walmart closing (but not the one where my brother works).
- kiss my bitter ass
- kottke is right, this is frakin' lame. totally violating to take a person's name off their credit card and post it on the internet. and since when is 15% not the industry standard? it's a minimum mind you, i tip more if the service was good (water remained full), or i was especially cheap ass in what i ordered for a meal (just because i ordered cheap food doesn't mean the waiter should get shafted). but i mean really, isn't this illegal? one step shy of stealing my credit card number and buying something on ebay.
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
- On having layout
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One of the more insightful articles I've read this year, and it's only a working draft. Pre-requisite reading: Explorer Exposed!. link via Anne.
I've been trying to see if setting hasLayout to "true" fixes the non-clickable padding bug in IE5, but for some reason I've been having trouble re-creating the bug.
- The Collection
- ...cards for that other significant other. heard about these a few months ago. thought they would be more playful/cartoony, but looks like they took them seriously. Just don't change them on a credit card, wouldn't want "Secret Lover, Inc." to show up on a statement.
- The Cartoons of Mr. Fish: a Selection (Harpers.org)
- Mr. Fish's political cartoons. Disturbing, and funny, from Jesus to Darth Vadar. via glassdog.
Monday, July 18, 2005
- los angeles bicycles classifieds and want ads - craigslist
- it'll probably be september (birthday) before i can scrape together the cash for a bike, but when I do I'll probably just grab something cheap off craig's list. that way I might be able to get a GPS too.
Friday, July 15, 2005
- History According to Harry
- I think perhaps that Rowling has realized that Those Who Forget History are Doomed to Repeat It, but that future generations are not learning history from school, and so she has injected at least the morals if not the facts into her books to supliment the fact that most kids don't care about history.
- Optimus keyboard
- My next keyboard.
Thursday, July 14, 2005
- lifehack.org >> Over 100 Quick and Easy Healthy Foods
- Since 15 minutes is about the longest I will bother to take to make a meal (and I don't eat out) my meal choices have been rather limited, especially with the new braces. The only thing this collection of recipies is missing is a random recipe selector. Yes, I am so lazy when it comes to food that deciding what to eat is as annoying as taking the time to cook it.
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
- Paper Says Edible Meat Can be Grown in a Lab on Industrial Scale :: University Communications Newsdesk, University of Maryland
- Now my question is, would vegetarians eat it? And what about vegans? via glassdog.
- Google Maps Mania
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"Webmaster shows site visitors on Google Maps"
One of many uses of the google maps API highlighted by this new blog. What I find really exciting are the connections between the real world and computer technology, especially where the technology encourages forays into the woods. Realizing that I've gotta get myself a GPS to take adantage of this new technology, but with our budget as tight as it is right now I'll have to wait a couple months for my birthday. Getting too hot to hike anyway.
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
- Click (2006)
- Filming here at work end of July through the beginning of August.
- The Costco Challenge: An Alternative to Wal-Martization?
- Hmmm, fancy that, by paying their workers a fair living wage Costco actually saves money by retaining more effecient workers, and not having to constantly recruit, interview, test and train new employees. Nice to see some positive numbers behind the benefits of actually conducting business with integrety and some sense of moral good. Or maybe there's no good intent, but they have figured out a more sustainable business model that benefits the employees as a side effect.
Monday, July 11, 2005
- Shirky: Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags
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Here we have another strength of links over categories:
When you go looking for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad. Because of all the things in the world, you're only looking for one of them. When you go looking for anything at all, your chances of finding it are very good. Because of all the things in the world, you're sure to find some of them. - Zero Effect
That is, often when I am looking for something (a movie to watch, design inspiration) I don't actually know what I'm looking for. So if I'm drilling down deeper into categories, if I made a mistake early on I may just be getting further and further from what I'm looking for. But if I'm following links they may take me on a tangent that leads somewhere with little connection to where I started, but it might just be exactly where I didn't know I wanted to be.
- Access Matters - Screen Readers and CSS Layout
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"Today’s screen readers speak the content in the order it is written in the HTML."
It's great to have someone who actually has screen readers available verify this. This also means that fangs will be a reasonable approximation of most screenreaders. So the most important thing to consider with regards to standards based layouts and accessibility is source code order and appropriate use of "skip links". That doesn't sound so hard.
- Type Directors Club : News : TDC2 2005 Results
- While it's true that "Low-density scans cannot do complete justice to the high quality of the printed material." in a few cases they might have tried just a little harder in migrating the material to the web. That aside, what fun to see a fresh new collection of faces, and so varied.
Saturday, July 09, 2005
- Google Toolbar for Firefox
- yup, i couldn't resent using this to blog this. the tabbed browser integration is pretty nice. set the right options and there's no need to hit the new tab button before starting a search (especially since half the time i'm just using google as a spellchecker these days). and speaking of spellchecking, the integrated gmail/blogger style spellchecker is pretty kick ass. cheers. i do believe i'll replace the 3rd party extension with this one.
Friday, July 08, 2005
- Skimboarding International - Source for Skimboarding Videos, Pictures and Related Media
- fun collection of random movie clips. current highlights include boxing cats, banging stuffed anmials and drowning drivers.
- Northern Lite
- them germans, never know what they're gonna cook up next.
Thursday, July 07, 2005
- BBC NEWS | England | London | Eyewitnesses tell of travel hell
- At least 33 people have been killed and hundreds injured after a series of explosions on the London Underground network and a bus in central London.
