Webkit - and Safari in particular - have been really aggressive in adding support for upcoming CSS 3 features - and some CSS features not yet part of any spec. As much of this is still Webkit-specific it isn’t really…
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I have been preaching the importance of measuring browser width rather than screen width for quite some time now. Unfortunately, people still focus in the size of the users screen when they discuss website design widths. I don’t blame them….
Back when Yahoo! released their YSlow add-on for Firebug, I took it for a spin and optimized biq.dk using it. Google recently released their variant of YSlow called Page Speed. Like YSlow, it’s an add-on for Firebug and it provides…
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Jakob looks at how to use Rails and Litmus to make sure your HTML emails look great to all your users.
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A couple of years ago (wow, has it been that long already?) I posted the results from my research into browser viewport widths, Size Does Matter. Back then, I pointed out that basing your designs on the width of the…
I have been moonlighting as a freelance webdeveloper for the last couple of years. The first year, I was using my spare evenings and weekends until I began having trouble finding enough time to dedicate to new projects. My reaction…
Business, Life, Programming, Projects, Software, Usability, Webdesign , 7 comments
It’s about time we kill the “www”. I don’t mean the World Wide Web, obviously, but the three letters that appear at the beginning of a plethora of website addresses. Seen from a human perspective they serve very little purpose…
According to the HTML 4 specification a definition list can be used to mark up dialogues. Mark Norman Francis objects to this, and in “his article on 24 ways” he goes on to claiming that using definition lists for anything…
Yahoo! has released a great Firefox addon - or rather, an addon for a Firefox addon - called YSlow. YSlow allows you to analyze and suggest improvements to various performance metrics on the website you’re currently visiting. For kicks I…
After 6 months of evangelizing and advocating, followed by 6 more months of rewriting, and then 3 more months of building new features and enhancing existing ones, we have finally launched the new version of BiQ. Going from ASP/VBScript on…
BiQ on Rails, Programming, Projects, Software, Technology, Webdesign , 3 comments
Considering I am a World of Warcraft player and previously pondered applying for a webmaster position at Blizzard Europe but decided against it due to not feeling like moving to Paris, it’s pretty cool to notice that a small part…
The whole issue of browser width vs screen width vs line lenght vs fluid layout vs elastic layout vs fixed layout is getting some airtime once again, this time over at Roger Johansson blog, 456 Berea Street. Roger Johansson mentions…
I just received a cold call job offer caused solely by my LinkedIn profile. Pretty cool. Unfortunately for the effectiveness of this story (and for the caller) I am pretty happy where I am these days and I turned them…
In a recent Jakob Nielsen Alertbox column Jakob Nielsen recommends that you Optimize for 1024×768, which is currently the most widely used screen size. Unfortunately, Mr. Nielsen seems to forget or ignore a very important detail as Jesper points out…
I have published my report and findings on this subject . In his most recent Alertbox, Jakob Nielsen dived into screen resolution and page layout. His summarized findings are: Optimize Web pages for 1024×768, but use a liquid layout that…
Microsoft, a company that proclaims to be devoted to web standards, has updated parts of their MSDN Library VBScript Language Reference. They’ve hidden the most valuable details of each funtion behind some pointless click-to-expand links. Apart from being a usability…
After 24 hours of insane, non-stop coding, designing, talking, and general tom-foolery, Rails Day 2006 is over. Nearly 200 teams competed, committing over 5000 total changesets to the official SVN server. My team Even though I got a team fairly…
In a previous post I took a few easy and cheap shots at some danish web development agencies. I did this since their websites irked a pet peeve of mine. Unfortunatly, in my eagerness to rant I ended up writing…
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This post is inspired by the announcement of the Danish Internet Award 2006, sporting a 1999-style website complete with Flash intro and invalid markup (They do have a weblog, though). I looked at the list of people from the grand…
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An important design element that’s part of the whole AJAX business is somehow letting your user know that stuff is actually happening while the server crunches away. A common way to do so, is to add a little animated GIF…
Before you do anything else, go to fluxiom.com and check out their video. Then realize this; It’s a web application. Holy crap! I can’t wait to see it in action. If indeed the interface and interaction is as the movie…
Today the website for Kameo: Elements of Power was launched. Having played the game a bit, I figured I’d visit and see what it was all about. Here’s the story of my first visit, in the form of a thinking-out-loud…
So you wanna look web2.0? You’ve come to the right place. In this short feature I’ll guide you through creating your very own webdesign template ready to be applied to your web2.0 application or blog or startup or what else…
I recently came across digg and decided to see what it was all about. I figured I’d sign up and discovered their signup process left a little to be desired in regards of user friendliness….
In anticipation of things to come, I’ve redone the style of the site. This isn’t a redesign per se, merely take the old things and restyling them - hopefully adding a bit more style and personality, which the former look…
Whoa, the Ruby on Rails site got featured on Stylegala. That’s pretty cool and the first site of mine (getting ever harder to call it mine, though, read on for more on that) to get featured on any site-gallery. The…
My recent experiment with live comment previews by virtue of AJAX didn’t fly terribly well and I ended up removing them again. They’re back, thanks to a comment by Nick, which led me to a post by Phil Wilson, which…
… Well, not really. The guy behind RailFrog emailed and asked if I was cool with him using the Ruby on Rails design. For a project like Ruby on Rails it makes a whole lot of sense letting users of…
A month ago Opera CTO, HÃ¥kon Wium Lie, and WaSP publically challenged Microsoft and all other browser vendors to get their asses in gear and their browsers CSS support up to snuff. Now the goal line has been unveiled….
It’s been a long time since I’ve added anything to my portfolio. But just before leaving the online world for christmas, I worked with David (and indirectly Marten Veldthuis and Jon Hicks - kudos for coming up with initial ideas…
MSDN’s documentation sucks. Wanting to raise a runtime error in VBScript, I looked up the appropriate method; err.raise on MSDN. The description there is pretty straightforward, until you get to the part where you want to decide on an error…
Is it just me, or does this contact form seem intimidating? I cannot really put my finger on anything in particular, but something about it that makes me go “err, no thanks, I’d rather not fill that out”. It might…
I have for experimental reasons installed TinyMCE. TinyMCE is a “platform independent web based Javascript HTML WYSIWYG editor control” (nothing less). Installation is pretty easy, it hooks seamlessly into existing textareas, turning them into WYSIWYG HTML editing areas in supported…
Congratulations, Rejsefeber.dk. You just made a sale because your website was nicely looking, easy to use, and Firefox friendly - unlike your rivals. MyTravel came close to making a sale too for the same reasons, unfortunatly they had no travels…
Browse Happy is the new “Internet Explorer is bad, mmmkay” Apple-inspired campaign from The Web Standards Project. The website is built “to inform you, the user, that you have a choice”. A good idea - however I am worried it…
I didn’t qualify for Fran�ois Briattes survey of how 10 websites differ on 25 elements, however I’ll pretend I did and examine myself just for kicks. It turns out mentalized.net differs from the norm in 4 of the 25 spots…
Scoble assures us that it is untrue that Microsoft doesn’t want to comply with the W3C standards. Dave Massy from the IE team calls it a myth that Microsoft doesn’t support standards. Still, the newest addition to Microsofts IE-marketing, the…
As noted, the IE team held a public, online Q&A session some time ago. Unfortunatly they have been pretty lax in getting the transcripts up (read: the transcripts haven’t been posted yet). Luckily I had a man on the inside…
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Messed around with the new layout a bit today, fixing some issues and likely creating some new ones: The sidebar has been given a background color to seperate it a bit more from the main content. The main navigation links…
Yesterdays redesign post was a bit short since I was lazy and in a hurry. Today I bring you a bit more details about the new layout. Easy now, try to control your excitement….
Read the full entry, Mentalized.net, Projects, Webdesign , 2 comments
For a long time I have been contemplating redesigning this website. Not because it really needed it (I actually quite liked the old look), however I had to redesign something. So I did. There are still a few quirks to…
Microsofts Scoble in an opinion piece titled “Nigel says that Microsoft hates the Web”: I’m running Mozilla’s Firefox on Longhorn just fine. Good for you, Robert, but it’s beside the point. You running Firefox does nothing to show what Microsoft…
A few weeks ago we finally launched the new design of danish gaming portal, Daily Rush. We had been living with the old design for a couple of years, and everybody on the crew were getting tired of it. Furthermore…
The first steps I take when I start implementing a new layout are always the same: Create a basic, empty XHTML structure Try to remember how I create that 3 column, semi-liquid layout with a footer and the columns extending…
Ok, so I was bored before christmas. Only posting this because my brother wanted to see it. @import url(/journal/2004/01/05/css_christmas_style_sheet/heart.css); Enjoy, and yes I am horribly geeky….
I have previously ranted about the crappy so-called antileech javascripts that some sites employ to prevent users from downloading images right clicking. Now I have come across an even more retarded “protection”. I present to you, The Anti-Textselection-Script of UGO’s…
Well, I wanted to try some things out designwise and ended up creating a new look’n’feel for Mentalized, oops. Vastly inspired by Binary Bonsai and Stopdesign and an old layout I had laying about on my HD. As always, please…
Unfortunatly I’ve found myself hunting for a new monitor. The old one decided to no longer function. I had pretty much already decided on a 19” CRT (suits my needs just fine and is affordable), and I had been recommended…
Looks like Paul Scrivens has read my plea for a repository of Good Web Design. Ok, so he likely hasn’t, nevertheless I dig his CSS Vault - a gallery of nicely looking, CSS based websites. Partly because he and I…
With the end of November also comes the end of submissions for the ReUSEIT! design contest . Not surprisingly, I never actually got around to finishing my own entry so you will have to settle for the 50 something entries…
Actual conversation, managing director of one company to another: “Listen, if first you start getting those usability people in on the project, there’s no way you will be able to launch in reasonable time. What you need to do is…
I recently came across the Cool Web Design website. CWD is seemingly a repository of websites considered cool, which webdesigners can browse through to get inspiration for their own designs. Someone should create an opposing site called GWD: Good Web…
Sorry Simon, but I couldn’t help finding the irony of this error on a page titled “Validation on the Fly” rather funny: XML Parsing Error: not well-formed Location: http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2002/10/21/validationOnTheFly Line Number 67, Column 14: $entry =~ s/&(?!amp;|#|[\w] ;)/&/g; ——————-^…
Hooray, I never realized the depth of the service that Microsoft offers it’s Frontpage users. They even provide “Easy to use template[s] for Frontpage”, where all you have to do is “add in your own content and pictures” for free…
www.nikeplay.com gives me (after looking at a blank page for a while): For full enjoyment of this website you’ll need a newer browser (Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator, version 5.0 or newer). Click below to download and install a new…
Creating slim, cross-browser div’s with a height of only a few pixels proves to be not as simple as one would think when you add Internet Explorer to the mix of browsers (gee, don’t you just love that browser). Gecko-browsers…
I wonder if we’ll ever see CSS in XML-format. Imagine creating styles like: body white div.header div.something + div.another 1px solid black 2px dotted red 1 dashed #FF0000 I doubt there’s any real benefit to it, just an odd thought….
Dave Shea asks for people to post links to HTML editor browser components that output reasonably wellformed (X)HTML. For the sake of my own often-failing memory this is a linkdump of some of the more interesting components: Rich Text Editor…
One thing that usability “guru”, Jakob Nielsen, is often bashed for is his website, useit.com, which is, hmm, less aesthetically pleasing than it could be. And by that, I mean it’s ugly. Now, Bob from Built For The Future has…
Max Design’s piece about using ems to achieve an ideal line length for content gave me an idea. Why not use em’s for everything? Traditional fluid- and fixed-width designs often suffer from being garbled when the user in- or decreases…
For the design-challenged of us, color scheme creators can be a great boon when trying to design websites where the colors don’t look totally out of sync with each other. Pick a base color and these tools suggest colors that…
Dave Shea notes: We’re stuck with Internet Explorer for the next 3 years bare minimum, most likely 6. Let’s start thinking about how we can move forward. His suggestion: We keep developing websites that work and look right in IE…
Thank you for taking the time to contact us. As you may be aware, Internet Explorer on Windows has had support for PNG images since version 4. A drawback in the current implementation has been support for per-pixel alpha…
I submit to you, the most retarded leech-“protection” script ever: 2 Pinups HQ Dear mr. l337 hax0r webmaster. Your FEAR_SQUADRON ANTI-LEECHING PROTECTION V 2.0 does not prevent me from downloading your HTML or images. As a matter of fact, when…
In a time where XHTML/CSS is being bashed from left and right, mezzoblues css Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design is a much appreciated initiative. The garden showcases some of the big strengths (and some of the big weaknesses)…
With Mark Pilgrim diving into website optimization I decided to run this site through a size analysis tool. The verdict: TOTAL_OBJECTS - Congratulations, the total objects on this page (including the HTML) is 4 which most browsers can multithread. Minimizing…
Or “Why forcing links into a new window is bad” I realize the topic of opening links in new windows has been covered countless times, but the dead horse has shown its ugly head and I am intent on beating…
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