Die Mac IE5 die!

So I ran into this bug today - the IE5/Mac whitespace parsing bug as explained by Code Bitch on her Mac IE5 bug page. In IE5/Mac extra whitespace causes the wrong styles to be picked up if the actual class name is a substring (or superstring) of some other class name. Well isn't that handy! 27 April 2006

CSS footer

Ah, a classic came up today - a colleague asked how to position a footer to the bottom of a page (as well as the bottom of the viewport if the page is short) using only CSS. Well, at A List Apart is this css footer example I have used before and it seems to be a good answer to that question. 24 April 2006 | 1 comment

Best Practice Basics

While searching for the best practice for displaying quotes on this site I came across Brainstorms and Raves by Shirley E. Kaiser. There are some good articles on there including a useful tutorial on how to create a solid, semantically correct webpage.

24 April 2006

Search Engine Optimisation

My company has recently hired an SEO specialist who quite frankly doesn't seem to offer any advice that I couldn't already offer myself! For example, his summary email goes as follows:

Some initail on-site optimisation recommendations which will help with site theming. I think you need to look at making some of the anchor text links more descriptive as well as the content on the key pages. Total Jobs do this well and give the search negine spiders some good links with keyword rich anchor text to follow from the home page. Plus all the destination page title and gh1 tags match the anchor text of the refrring link. Urls also seem to be a little long, but thay might not be easy to change, as you may need all those diff directories. The source code is nice and clean. Although your head tag is not coded up as per best parctice. Anyway give us a call and I can talk you thru this.

Sigh, as you can tell, he is also illiterate. If you are interested in SEO there is a lot of information out there that you can read up on including this SEO article on Webmonkey by Bryan Zilar who recently sat down with strategy consultant and SEO guru Jason McQueen to talk about all things search. They discuss trends in the SEO world and the philosophies behind "white hat" and "black hat" techniques. Jason also offers advice for webmasters who want to adopt an SEO strategy that produces results on a limited (or non-existent) budget. 24 April 2006

Welcome

After the demise of The Curious Sofa due to Barclays kindly asking me to take it down, View Sauce is finally here. I haven't shifted all my content over so things may look a bit lean for a few months. Like Brighton Writers, my private passion, this site is adapted from the lovely open source blog software that is Pivot.

19 April 2006

sIFR

I've recently begun experimenting with the use of sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) in my designs. The last site I used it on was the NMA Web Register. I love that I can now have a site with titles that look like images without having to actually create any of them by hand or compromising accessibility, search engine friendliness, or markup semantics. You can use sIFR to replace short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in your typeface of choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems. It accomplishes this by using a combination of javascript, CSS, and Flash. Genius! 19 April 2006

The MySpace economy

Wired magazine published an article about Louis Ramos, a freshman at Southern Illinois University, who says he has made more than $200,000 since last June by running Pimpmyspace.com and Myspaceeditor.org, two sites that offer MySpace users free tools to upgrade and spruce up their profiles with colors and images. Damn, I missed the money train again. 11 April 2006

Clearing floats without structural markup in IE7

So a few months back I started getting nervous about IE 7 and what it would do to all my lovely code. I followed the blog and things looked like they were moving in a general direction that made me happy. In other words they were fixing a lot of the most annoying IE 6 bugs as listed on PositionIsEverything and Quirksmode. Still, a worrying rumour stated that the easy clearing method didn't work in IE7. Sure enough, my sites were all looking worse for wear. Luckily this looks like the answer. 05 April 2006