dustinfluke.com

As I’m planning to re-launch dustinfluke.com later this summer with something that actually resembles a web site (with graphics) I was happy to see that someone has finally found a solution to create accessible good looking form controls for radio buttons and check boxes.

Being the one person to always read about cool new CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and other related items but never do anything with them I’m really excited about trying something here. I even have the perfect idea for once. Well, we’ll see how perfect it is when it comes to my very flexible deadline I’ve set for myself.

In other news, I was disappointed that the shuttle launch today was scrubbed. Oh well, it’ll happen soon.

As a side update, I’ve been reading The Zen of CSS Design, Stylin’ with CSS, and The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips Tricks and Hacks to brush up on CSS layout skills for the re-launch. If you aren’t reading or don’t have these books, I think they’re well worth the money. Of course, one could use the web, but right now books are working better for me.

Over at thewatchmakerproject you too can test your skill to see Which Guru Are You?

I’m a subscriber to the Sitepoint e-mail list and receive the Tech Times whenever they publish it. In this edition, one article really hit home for me personally: Color for Coders – Color and Design for the Non-Designer It was about color schemes. From the author,

"I’m a designer and I work at a hosting/ISP company in a room with four very talented Web programmers. Together, they can develop just about any kind of application, but not one of them could develop a harmonious color scheme if his life depended on it."

I by no means consider myself to be a web designer, but rather, a web developer. If there’s confusion about the differences in each head over to Jeff Croft’s blog entry on it. In a nutshell, this article explans the color wheel and color schemes, which is really new to me. This is great timing, as I’m looking at what color scheme I’d like to do for dustinfluke.com I’m glad to see there are still some folks out there that can appeal to people like me, who happened upon web design.

In somewhat related news, there was also an article about Movable Type’s comment spam, and ways to fix it. This topic has been covered just about everywhere, but I thought the author of Automated Blog Comment Spam? talks about using other methods for removing and eliminating comment spam that I haven’t seen before. If you’re sick of comment spam it’s definitely worth a read.

Well, with a nice break from both school and work, I hope to have a different version of the homepage and site in general. With everything going on lately, I’m lucky if I post twice a month, let alone about anything exciting. Perhaps the holidays will spur some creative thoughts.

Merry Christmas!

I uh…finally realized that my site wasn’t loading in Internet Explorer correctly. Sorry ’bout that folks.
I had some server side includes that were overriding my comment tags that I used to remove the side bar from the site. I’ve removed those.
Of course, my site works perfectly with Firefox
Maybe not perfect, but close enough.

Over at BetaNews, (via Slashdot) I was reading about AOL’s new Netscape web browser. Basically, it’s a clone of Firefox 0.9.3 with some Netscape specific extentions. More interesting however, is the ability for this browser to switch rendering engines from Gecko to Internet Explorer via Active X controls.

Why is this?
It’s because web designers or developers (whatever you call them) are generally lazy. And AOL is stupid. Check this out:

A source close to the company said AOL opted to include IE engine support in order to offer users more choice, as some sites are optimized for certain browsers. But to avoid security vulnerabilities found in IE, Netscape “gives the user the choice through Site Controls of what sites they trust and don’t trust by allowing them to turn off Web functionalities that expose security holes on a per site basis,” the source told BetaNews.

After I read this paragraph, I was finished reading the article. I was even going to consider downloading the trial version just to see what it was like.
I mean, give me a freaking break! “…gives the user the choice through Site Controls or sites…” If I had a link on my page that said “Win 1 Million Dollars” I’m sure I could get people to commit. That is, if I had many visitors. My point is, the users that are given the choice wont know what to do with it, and get infected with even more malware. I especially liked the part, “… expose security holes on a site by site basis. Horray! A buffett of hijacked computers to choose from!

I don’t know about everyone else, but it seems that if certain sites were designed for certain browsers, then we’re back to square one as far as I’m concerned. If this browser catches on (which I doubt), you can kiss your web standards goodbye, as more and more “designers” will be coding in Front Page for Internet Explorer.

What does a “Premature end of script headers” perl error message and 3 1/2 hours of time equate to?

A slash

Sometimes, I hate programming. Make that most of the time. I suppose practice makes perfect.

While working on a project for school, I had (on the first line) of my cgi script:
#!/usr/bin/perl/
Little did I know, it should have been #!/usr/bin/perl
GRRR!

Well, it has certainly been awhile. Haven’t had much to say, or time to say it. Been playing a lot of DOOM 3 and Battlefield Vietnam.

I’ve recently began re-reading (as in never finished) Zeldman’s designing with web standards [amazon.com]. I’m on part three. With my slow reworkings of my homepage, I’ll hopefully get some additional inspiration.

Speaking of inspiration, I visited CSS Zen Garden today. It’s been awhile and there are a few more enties. I’d like to point out two of my favorites:

• Pleasant Day by Kyle Jones
• Some Leafs by Michael Tupy

My favorite? I’m not really sure. Right now, I think it’s going to have to be Pleasant Day. I do like them both.

I’m also enjoying Standards Resources for Beginners over at Mezzoblue. I’ve seen a lot of new and some old reference sites that I’ve bookmarked. Surely, this is a great thing.

Eventually, I’m sure I’ll be getting some use out of Maxdesign’s web standards checklist. This is great for those already having functional web sites (unlike mine).