Category: web design
Accessible CAPTCHAs?
Donimo says:
I have two arts-based disability blogs and I was unaware of the problem with captchas. So many people use them to avoid spam comments. How do you avoid this? Can you recommend any sites for guidelines for making an accessible web site?
My personal response, before I go googling, is to say don’t use CAPTCHA. [...]
Getting a website under control
I spent the day getting RMVR under control. Specifically, under version control.
Since I first took responsibility for the site, I’ve been using CVS for some subdirectories, primarily all the club forms/documents, and the club’s constitution, rules, and exceptions to the General Competition Rules, an arcane set of criteria that had barely been maintained in the [...]
Is Opera on the way out?
I really love the Opera browser, and would hate to give it up. But stuff is starting to not work - Airset’s CSS doesn’t render properly, and hides vast quantities of information. Fastmail has redesigned some of its pages, and they’re not being styled right either. I’d rather see an open field of browsers rather [...]
Spiffing the place up a little
It was time to update the place a little. My webhost, DreamHost, provides a spiffy install/upgrade utility for WordPress, but it’s no good if you installed WordPress yourself back in the Dark Ages.
I had been upgrading manually, but was a couple of revs behind. My old theme, based on Sub:Lemon, was written for WP 1.5 [...]
WordPress category trick
I use WordPress to manage several non-blog sites, and I tend to make heavy use of categories in order to organize posts properly. If it’s important that every post have a category, it’s helpful to rename the default category something like _uncategorized. This way it’s at the top of the category list, and you’ll see [...]
WordPress 2.0
I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.0. Things look pretty happy. I’m still using Spam Karma on comments. Please let me know if you see anything wacky.
Web Forms
Via 486 Berea Street, A List Apart’s article Sensible Forms: A Form Usability Checklist.
WordPress - display contents of child pages in parent page
Woo-hoo! Solved one of the items below.
I have a parent page (Current Season), with three children. I created a custom template for Current Season using the information provided in this support thread, and I now have a beautiful page which lists all the concerts, rather than just links to each concert’s own page.
Fun with del.icio.us
As always, way behind the rest of the world.
I got frustrated maintaining bookmarks on multiple computers, and trying to keep track of my blogroll. del.icio.us to the rescue.
It also prodded me to finally incorporate my static pages into WordPress. I had been resisting because I really didn’t want to update the pages. A lot of [...]
WordPress as lightweight CMS
On a different note, I’ve redone the Cantabile Singers website using WordPress. It was originally hand-coded php.
Now it’s all WordPress static pages.
Features that would really be nice:
Some way to reference sibling or adjacent pages
The ability to mark a page as Draft. It turns out that as far as the database is concerned, everything is [...]
Contributing
This is cryptic to protect the guilty (not that the guilty in question would ever read this).
Sometimes you try to contribute to an organization, and it’s like nobody even notices. I told my daughter I felt like I was standing at the door knocking, and the people on the other side don’t hear it.
She said, [...]
Right Column in IE
I just noticed that in Internet Explorer, the right hand column (starting with the Search box) is not next to the main content, but below it. Has it always been that way? Or just since I upgraded WordPress?
Turns out my stylesheet (based on Sub:Lemon) uses the underscore hack. Not sure why it’s behaving this way. [...]
Aww
From a user of a website I maintain:
You put out a nice product with lots of attention to detail. I’ve never ‘clicked’ on anything that did not function or sent me to oblivion or somewhere else than what I was aiming for. I have complete faith in you.
Now I’m going to feel warm and fuzzy [...]
Admin fieldset fix for Opera
Here’s the fix for the goofy looking WordPress 1.5 admin interface in Opera.
CSS find of the week
page-break-before:always;
Forces a page break in the printed page before the element it’s on. Works in IE!
Time flies …
I’d always planned to re-do the RMVR website using PHP or something one of these days, maybe add a search function. Then the administrative address and phone number changed (it’s on every page! sometimes twice!), and I got a couple of complaints about finding things, and lo, the time was right.
I spent a couple of [...]
She lives!
I’m back after a week spent helping fix up mswheelchairamerica.org, trying to learn my part for Quilters and working too much, including another trip to Albuquerque. I have seriously got to find something interesting to do there, since it looks like I’m going to be there a bunch for the next year.
All flights, rental cars [...]
New toys
I installed Apache and PHP on my computer this week. Now I can convert rmvr.com to PHP on my trip to Albuquerque next week (doesn’t everybody need something interesting to do in their hotel room?).
Mastering mod_rewrite
Via DenkZEIT, URL Rewriting Guide.
Re-working the WordPress admin interface for Opera
DenkZEIT :: Umgebautes admin-Interface für Wordpress (Rebuilt administrative interface for WordPress)
Steffan has provided most of the workaround for the messy appearance of the default admin interface for Wordpress.
The problem is that the posting interface uses fieldset to position the page elements, and Opera won’t position fieldsets, just stacks them up one after the other. Steffan’s [...]
The Statistics Defense
Why the ’statistics defence’ doesn’t stand up - so few of my users [use Netscape 4|are visually impaired|browse from a cell phone], why should I make my website accessible to that minority?
Unexpectedly easy
The nameserver change went much better than I expected. The only way it could have been better is if the previous host had allowed me to hang on to the old account for a few days while the nameserver change propagates.
Rearranging, 2
I’ve spent a lot of the weekend getting rmvr.com ready to move to a new host. Two of the reasons I don’t like the current host are 1) no shell access, and 2) no CVS.*
I’ve copied everything to the new host, and have spent a lot of time just cleaning things up - re-validating everything, [...]
Rearranging
I have discovered the joy of subdomains. I’ve been moving everything around, and so it’s probably broken. Mostly, I’ve created a subdomain for things in development, which has really cleaned out my root directory.
Design guru, heal thyself!
I’ve started work on a new website and went searching for articles about choosing fonts, both for conveying a feel and readability. I’m stunned at the number of sites offering advice on usability and readability that are themselves very difficult to read. Offenses include:
using tiny sans-serif fonts for body text
inadequate line spacing (12 point arial [...]
Confused
This site is on a list of Bookmarks for standards testing on one of Joe Clark’s sites (look for “Backgrounds”). I can’t figure out if it’s supposed to be a good or bad example, so that makes me kind of nervous.
Adventures in Markup
Can I just moan here? Most people have absolutely no f**ing clue about semantics. And doing tables in MS Word doesn’t help the situation.
Spread the love
I’m catching up with CavLec, and making a note to be sure and read her regular expressions page (because I can always use a good refresher), and then I scroll down to this. Suddenly, it is a good day. I’ve got the big ol’ goofy grin, too.
Restyling
When you re-do your Movable Type site, how do you do it? Create a duplicate blog to play with until it’s pretty?
So far, I’ve only ever worked on the live site, which can be dangerous (been lucky so far!).
I also got my main website (brokenclay) synched up with the blog, style-wise.
And now for something completely different…
I rolled out (pun intended) a new website last week: Rocky Mountain Vintage Racing. It’s been a lot of fun putting together this site because the organization has people who are really motivated to make it good, and they’ve been providing me with excellent content, information, feedback and enthusiasm.
Yea!
redtails.org is back online! I’m so relieved. Probably nobody noticed but me.
Feeling Stupid, II
Ok, now I’m pissed. Here I am waiting for my nameserver change to propagate, and it turns out that Network Solutions’ fancy new Account Manager website doesn’t work if you’re using Opera! My nameserver change never happened.
So I hauled out Internet Explorer and changed the nameservers again.
Feeling Stupid
The last time I moved a domain to a new host, I changed the nameservers with the registrar, waited a day or two, then went happily to work on the new website. I didn’t notice (until the bill came) that the previous host was still charging me.
So this time, I changed the nameservers and dropped [...]
Movable Type Conversion
I’ve done my first conversion of a non-blog website over to using Movable Type.
First I read up on it:
Beyond the Blog
Doing your whole site with MT
Touch of Hope: A Technical Colophon
Results first:
Previous, non-MT version
New, MT site
What I did:
This is a fairly static website with a flat navigational structure, so I decided to make each page [...]
Cranky about website usability
I’ve just had my semi-annual argument with the author of Colorado Swimming’s website. I primarily use Opera and Netscape on Solaris, and Opera on Windows, and this website is barely useable even with Internet Explorer. I’ve got two separate issues with it - one is the navigation, which gets less intuitive everytime it’s redesigned, and [...]
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