octoberland — Work
NetNewsWire Style template
Written by craig coffman
Just created a style template for those of you using NetNewsWire (NNW). It is based off of the look / feel of this site. It ought to be fine with NNW 2.x. If you do download it, I would be interested in your thoughts as this is the first News Reader Style I have ever created. My template can be downloaded here. Thanks for your interest!
Add a commentFree xHTML / CSS / Flash Web Site Base Template
Written by craig coffman
For the past several months, I have been working on a development time saving template for standard web pages. As a working developer, I find that I am constantly doing the same initial steps on every project when it begins. This is my attempt at putting those things in place from the get go. I have pulled in xhtml, css with several work-arounds for styling, and Flash.
Add a commentThe Beez-Knees of Joomla 1.5
Written by craig coffman
If you develop in Joomla, you no doubt are aware of how important and relatively easy it is to create a template. However, once you have pain-stakeingly crafted a glorious xhtml/css layout, you get it trampled on be the code from the beloved CMS. Or at least you used to.
Add a commentHow to Remove the Yellow Background From Forms in IE
Written by craig coffman
Are you tired of having your forms appear with colored background when you know you did not code it? Wonder why it is only in IE? Well, as many of you already know, the Google bar in the IE browser has an option to auto complete form fields. While this is definitely a handy thing, it is probably not how you pain-stakingly designed the page. As well, it does not even do it to all of the fields so the style is not even consistent. Good news, there is a fix!
Since it is not always a reality that your visitors will know to go up and disable the functionality of the Google toolbar, CSS will have to save the day. Here is all you need to add to your style sheet:
input { background-color: white ! important}
Viola! Now your page appears as desired. Thanks to this article from html dog. In particular to Chris Weber who chimed in on comment numbers 32 and 33.
Add a commentMultiple Versions of IE on your PC
Written by craig coffman
If you are a developer, then you know the pain associated with testing your pages within Internet Explorer. To make things worse, the IE Team’s 'fixing' existing problems removes the workarounds implimented on thousands of sites (sorry for the old link). For example, the * hack (which has a new workaround). Well, now you can easily test all of your pages in multiple versions of IE. Your code can now be simply tested in versions from 3 - 7. All with a free application.
Add a commentCSS: A New Star-HTML hack
Written by craig coffman
Perhaps you already know of this article: #IEroot — Targeting IE Using Conditional Comments and Just One Stylesheet. If so, you should have told more people. I have been using the Star-HTML hack for some time as it was an easy way to serve my CSS to IE or non-IE browsers. Well, IE 7 fixed their code and killed the use of it to serve specific styles. This new fix, apparently posted by Hiroki Chalfant uses IE’s Conditional Comments to serve a bit of additional mark-up to the page. While this does add unnecessary mark-up, you would still need to do something to serve different styles. The main advantage to this is you can still write everything in a single style sheet. Very cool.
Add a commentCan You Build a Web Page?
Written by craig coffman
It seems like everyone and their brother is a web designer / developer these days. While I am glad that more people are interested in the web and the technologies which drive it, this influx sort of pisses me off. Not only because it makes it harder to get a fair rate, but because it makes it harder to have a company trust I know what I am doing.
Add a commentLocalConnection: Hot Flash-on-Flash Communication
Written by craig coffman
How many of you Flash developers out there have had two separate movies in an HTML file and wished they could talk to each other? I know I have. On several occasions. I know that you can go the JavaScript route and use fscommands. But, frankly, to me they are hassles to put in place. If for no other reason because you have to use an entirely different scripting language. Wouldn't it be nice if this could all be done in lovely actionscript? Well, in some cases at least, it can.
Add a commentRead more: LocalConnection: Hot Flash-on-Flash Communication
Cutting Edge Creative
Written by craig coffman
I am wondering if people really know what cutting edge is? I do not profess to have the answer, but I can certainly see what is not. That is, there are many people making a living off the concept of being 'forward thinking' and such. In my opinion, all they are really doing is finding a bit of clever design, or a style, and lifting it. Sure, sure, sure. All things have been done before and nothing is new and blah blah blah. However, that does not mean that someone is cutting edge simply because they mimmic another style. They are cutting craftsmen, perhaps.
Add a commentMisteps on the path toward web standards?
Written by craig coffman
I have been told by friends about the typo in the title. It is intended. Just a small (unfunny, apparently) joke. I am keeping it
This article points out some interesting ideas of how we are, perhaps, not helping the web by following standards. Now, this is not to say that standards should be avoided, but that we are possibly not implementing them in the best fashion. More correctly, by simply hearing the W3C, or some other Web Standards group say what we should be doing, we need to do more than just listen. We need to pay more attention.
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