Splash of Style...Macs, Photography, Design, and other Passions

Colorcell.org

November 20, 2005 by debbie T | Art and Graphics • Web Design

I heard about this cool web site called Colorcell - http://colorcell.org

Vote (once a day) for your favorite color combinations, create your own combinations, and browse through the most popular & least popular combos.

A great place to find inspiration I think.

Subscribe to Bloglines Link

November 13, 2005 by debbie T | Content Management • Web Design

Add a “Subscribe to Bloglines” button or link to your web site: [Note: Bloglines is a free web-based blog subscription service. ]

http://www.bloglines.com/about/subscribe?tip=5

Subscribe with Bloglines

Because I am using a strict Doctype, I removed the border attribute and added the css class I use for img tags. I also added the title attribute.

Subscribe with Bloglines

UPDATE 12/17/2005:

There is a WordPress plugin called “Subscribe Me” that automatically displays Syndication buttons for your feed, but the generated coding did not validate “strict” so I searched on my own for information to display buttons for others.

To display an “Add to Google” button on your site: http://www.google.com/webmasters/addfeed.html

Add to Google

To display an “Add to Yahoo” button on your site: http://my.yahoo.com/s/button.html

Add to My Yahoo!

I also found a fantastic site that creates feed buttons for your site:

http://www.twistermc.com/shake/RSS-index.php

Redesigning Splash of Style

November 12, 2005 by debbie T | CSS • Web Design

I have been working for the past two days on the site redesign. I have most of it finished, but there is a big snafu on the single pages, where the side bar is not contained in the main division tag.

Oh well, back to the drawing board tomorrow.

UPDATE: After some research I found a web page that helped solve the problem I was having with containing floats within my division.

http://www.quirksmode.org/css/clearing.html

I chose to add the “clear: all” declaration to the footer id selector. It seems to work.

Principles of Graphic Design

October 31, 2004 by debbie T | Art and Graphics • Web Design

Yeah, I am busy today reading through all my bloglines feeds. Found an interesting tidbit for future refererence:

Principles of Graphic Design - Neat little Flash tool. downloadable too.

Cafe Lisa

October 30, 2004 by debbie T | Web Design

Hurray for Cafe Lisa!

Her gorgeous web site has been winning every web design award known to man, including The Web Standards Awards. I am proud to say that I knew her BEFORE she became such a star! Way back when she was Salmagundi Arts.

Lisa has always been my inspiration, and she has taught me so much over the years. And now, the world will know how talented she is! Congratulations Lisa!

Website Animal

September 27, 2004 by debbie T | Internet • Web Design

Oh brother, is this place for real?? After seeing the Website Animal full page ad in PCWorld magazine, I had to check out their claims for a FREE WEBSITE (for PCWorld readers)!

Easy to sign up, filled in my “name”, password, and email (using a throwaway email). Website deal is an easy to design do it yourself fully Flash site and one month of web hosting. After the 30 days, the least expensive hosting deal is $10. NO separate domain name, you get a sub-domain located on their servers. (ie http://debbiet.websiteanimal.com/)

The best part is their interesting terms and conditions:

The nature of SiteMaker’s database driven technology means that it is physically impossible for you to own a copy of your SiteMaker site. If our business changes, or for any other reason we cannot continue to host your site, you will lose it. You agree not to hold Greek Attic Ltd liable and Greek Attic Ltd accepts no liability in respect of, the loss of all data relating to your site. You are strongly advised to keep copies of any data, images, music or otherwise that you upload onto SiteMaker.

The link to their privacy policy doesn’t appear to be working, so besides their shoddy terms, who knows what they are going to do with personal information.

Bottom line, for $10 a month, you receive a website that you do not own, without an actual domain name. And considering they put up the cash for the full-page ad in PCWorld, they must be expecting an outpouring of subscribers. I am just wondering who would actually sign up for this account seriously. I would guess the naive new-to-Internet users that keep falling for the phishing scams. It is very sad that companies like this take advantage of people. It just proves that nothing is for free!

Note: [on further read, you can point your own domain name to the site, but why would you take the chance of losing the content by hosting with them?]

Web Content Compression & mod_gzip

September 22, 2004 by debbie T | Web Design • WordPress

While tweeking the final design for Splash of Style, I checked the page weight and found the total of the index page alone was 35kb.

After browsing over to Eric Meyer’s blog, I noticed that his page weight was a lot more manageable. Then I noticed a “congratulations” message:

This site is using HTTP compression, otherwise called content encoding using gzip.

So, off to Google to figure out what "content encoding using gzip" is about. Found an article at Site Point which explains the details.

Next step, how do I impliment this practice to my pages? I discovered that my host does not support mod_gzip on shared servers due to extra load issues. Hmm, more research must be done.

Excellent! It appears that WordPress has a way to easily compress output pages. Adding the block of coding < ?php ob_start("ob_gzhandler"); ?> to the top of your index.php file will enable PHP’s own compression. It reduced the index.html page from 35kb to a mere 7kb!

Another alternative is the little checkbox in Options>Reading from the WordPress control panel. It utilizes mod_gzip, so if your host does not support mod_gzip, then it supposedly will not work. The strange thing is, I tried both options, and both worked. Maybe my host decided to support mod_gzip afterall.

It is advisable not to enable both the php compression and mod_gzip. Choose only one or the other.

Well, my page is definitely smaller, but the vertical scrolling is still sluggish when viewing in FireFox. Back to tweeking!

There is something new to learn just about every day!

Creative Dissidence & Consensus

August 5, 2004 by debbie T | Web Design

I just love to read commentary on web design. It is an never ending learning experience, at least for me. The 10 web-site survey/comparision by François Briatte and the resulting explanations by him and others are a great resource. I printed all the information so I could study it thoroughly. It has proved to be a very educational read!

Eric Meyer commented on the survey and offered reasoning on his design.

Dave Shea, Jon Hicks, and Douglas Bowman followed suit.

Top Style Tips

May 20, 2004 by debbie T | CSS • Web Design • Web Development • XHTML

For those interested in learning more about TopStyle, Nick Bradbury has a very informative new blog for TopStyle Tips

Eric Meyer’s Color Blend Tool

May 20, 2004 by debbie T | Art and Graphics • Web Design • Web Development

Maybe I am the last one to notice the Color Blender tool from Eric Meyer, but this thing is fantastic! What a genius! You can even save the code to your own hard drive for offline use.