New Digs

OMG, A BLOG POST! OMG A BLOG POST! OMG A BLOG POST!

Sort of, anyway. But yes, this in fact a blog post and not an automated collection of yesterday’s links from Delicious. Just dropping a note to say that a) there’s a redesign in the house and b) there’s an actual real post in the works featuring CSS and Javascript goodness.

The redesign was prompted by an upgrade to Wordpress 2.7.1 which somehow threw my blog into a tizzy when clicking on “Blog” in the nav would bring you to this post about blogging with Textmate. More of a back-side reorganization than a full-blown redesign, but you wouldn’t know it by looking!

The forthcoming post (I promise, it’s on its way. There’s even an outline on a pad on my desk!) will be about doing up custom form elements with CSS and jQuery and was prompted by a project I had for a client recently.

Okay, poke around, see what’s different and what’s not and I’ll be back after some ice cream.

Wither IE6!

Over on CSS Tricks, there’s a discussion brewing about why people still use IE6. Chris breaks it down into four different user types: Those who have to due to IT policies; those whose computers don’t support IE7 (although they would probably support Firefox); those who have actually avoided upgrading to IE7 and who may actually prefer IE6; and those who don’t know any better and for whatever reason haven’t had their system auto-upgraded yet.

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Renovation Complete

Well, well, here we are. Welcome to the newly re-designed robmaurizi.com. What do you think?

As you can see, I’ve opted for the static homepage as opposed to the blog-flavored listing of recent posts. All of the photos on the home and contact pages are fed from Flickr. The about page has been given a slight makeover in the last.fm feed and the addition of Rob Miller’s cool Now Reading plugin. And regular readers may have noticed an uptick in their RSS spam with the new addition of the del.icio.us daily links posting.

So, feel free to bounce around, check things out, and let me know what you think. The old favorites like the story about Olive eating the bunny and the piece about creating a tabbed interface with DLs using CSS and jQuery haven’t moved.

I hope (I know I say this all the time) to add more here more frequently, but you all know how hard it is to do that.

Wear Fake News!

Perusing the Interwebs and 37Signals’ SVN blog pointed me toward the CNN Headline T-shirt store, with a note about how you could hijack the URL to make your own funny headlines.

Well, here’s a bookmarklet to make life easier for you:

Wear Fake News!

Drag the link above into your browser’s toolbar and have fun making wacky t-shirts. Not sure if you can buy them, but they make fun links.

Enjoy!


Update: Looks like CNN fixed their glitch and made more use of the hash and datestamp to tell if a headline was real or not. Oh well.

Bundle Up in Hell!

The cool thing about Twitter is that it can deliver up-to-the-minute information from across the Internet. Mostly, this is mundane, random drivel regarding what people are doing. But it’s great when something happens, like a MacWorld keynote or some other global event. The tweets that appear become a gigantic discussion of what’s going on at the moment.

And so it began last night when I got a tweet from Dan Cederholm stating that he’s high-fiving the IE team.

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On Safari

When Steve Jobs dropped his “one more thing…” dirty bomb on Monday, my immediate reaction was to quit my job and go to culinary school. I downloaded the beta and gave it a brief whirl on the Mac and the XP box (I’ve since uninstalled the Mac version to go back to 2.0 since that’s what we support, but I’ve left 3.0 on XP).

I really don’t see Safari being a huge hit for the Windows users, and my reasoning is as follows: Most Mac users don’t even use Safari. Most Mac users that I know use Firefox because they know better. Safari is effectively the IE of the Mac world. It ships with and is the default browser of the OS in question. Non-technical people who use Macs typically use Safari because it’s there and it works. In the same way that many Windows users use IE because it’s there. I won’t get into whether it actually works.

Sure, developers and technophiles are going to download it and play with it, and we may add it to our test suites, but it’s not becoming a default for us. That leaves the non-technical Windows users, and if they’re in the market for a different browser, chances are they’re already using Firefox.

I’m interested to see how Apple tries to market Safari for Windows, who they target it to, and ultimately how well it does. It’s not off to the best of starts, although releasing an update within a couple of days says good things about the development team and their commitment to security and fixing bugs.

Creating a Tabbed Interface with CSS and jQuery

Here’s a piece I put together recently for a client who wanted a tabbed interface on one of their pages. My goal in doing it was to make it as accessible and semantic as possible. One requirement I gave myself was to NOT use redundant elements (like one list for the tabs, and another for the content).
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Everybody Get Nekkid!

I’m gearing up for CSS Naked Day on Thursday, and I can’t wait. So far, there’s over 650 of us that will be shedding their CSS coverings and baring all of our black Times on white for all to see.

Maybe I’ll go to work wearing nothing but my -9999px; shirt. Maybe they’ll send me home! :-D

Looking for a Few Good Men Person

Fry Chicago is looking for a front-end developer to turn PSD files into XHTML, CSS and JavaScript. Even though the ad doesn’t mention it, I’d say the candidate should have a firm grasp of web accessibility and semantic markup. Knowledge of JQuery would also be a bonus.

Don’t be fooled by the title, this isn’t a “producer” job as it’s normally thrown around in the industry. In Fry-speak, a producer is a front-end engineer. A client-side coder. An HTML/CSS/JS/DOM wrangler, if you will.

But if you sign on for the adventure, you’ll be joining a growing team of standards-savvy developers like myself who are looking to make the Internet (and E-Commerce with it) a better place.

View the ad at Authentic Jobs

Reverse of the Title!

I’ve noticed a paradigm shift recently in my trollings of ye olde interweb. More and more sites are reversing their titles! Thus far in my experience, it’s been mostly personal sites, blogs and agency shops that are doing it, but these are the sites run by the people making the larger sites. What do I mean by reversing titles? I mean putting the name of the CONTENT before the name of the site instead of the other way around.

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