Web Design and Development

Well its about time that one of the sites that I have worked on over the last 5 months have launched EleniSpeaks.com, a site for a local motivation keynote speaker. The design was created by the wonderful folks over at InnerCircleMedia.

I love this design and it gave me a bit of a challenge with the drop shadow on top of the gradient. I got to use some cool new CSS techniques and luckily Inner Circle has contracted me to work on some sites of theirs this month and I got to work a lot with the PHP Templates and their cool new way of implementing these dynamically.

Guess I need to update my portfolio LOL. This is the first of about 5 great sites that I have had the chance to work on lately.

If you havn’t yet worked with AJAX or even an a programmer using it all the time. Here is a great article “Seven Things Every Software Project Needs to Know About Ajax” written by Dion Hinchcliffe. He gives us his perspective on what we have learned in the last 18 months since the term has been so greatly popularized.

Well the other day IE 7 was finally released to the public and as everyone was going crazy because they don’t know how to code without hacks, and havn’t tested their sites throughout the year or so of Release Candidates. All my sites were just fine pretty much and I never had a version prior to the public release but did view them on BrowserCam so I wasn’t to worried. The only sites that were not fine that I have done (Including this one), were the ones that all use the great ClearFix hack, which clears the nested floats inside of a container div.

I just started using this during the summer, before then I either floated the container divs or used a clearing div, which of course to the coding snobs is bad because of extra markup.

Here is the updated hack for any of you that were unaware of this:

.clearfix:after {
content: "."
display: block;
height: 0;
clear: both;
visibility: hidden;
}

.clearfix {display: inline-block;}

/* Hides from IE-mac */
* html .clearfix {height: 1%;}
.clearfix {display: block;}
/* End hide from IE-mac */

Place this in your CSS and then put the class “clearfix” on the container div that is holding the nested floats and there you go, no more clearing divs.

That was the only thing that was “Broken” on the sites that I have worked on. For all the people that are so scared of IE 7 and bashing how bad it is, all I have to say is that it is 10 times better then IE 6 and hopefully this means soon IE 5.5 will get out of the picture and we won’t have to use the box model hack anymore.Boy oh Boy I can’t wait till we can start using ” Attribute Selectors“, That is going to change CSS a lot, but I will get more into that in another article.

Well for all the people that used others layouts, and cluttered their code full of hacks I hope you knew to start testing and fixing a while back because soon Microsoft will be forcing its users with a critical update that will install IE 7.

Another interesting Blog entry I found today was on Wired’s blog and no not the big IE 7 will break the web one, which I thought about writing about but just am getting sick of this. It was about all the sites that still give you that pesky page that “This site requires Internet Explorer“. It wasn’t really the article that was interest but the comments that people left sharing what sites don’t work for them. It’s truly amazing to me that there are so many services that require this still out there. I run into this problem when paying for my car. What’s worse about that is that they don’t even tell you that the forms don’t work in other browsers you just find out because it just doesn’t work in Firefox.

It turns out that it’s a lot more sites then I thought more well known sites and services that is. The main reason being that all other browsers don’t support ActiveX, because its Microsoft’s technology. With most of the sites listed its all form functionality and why would all these sites need ActiveX to create the functionality of their forms when there’s other technologies out there, which are better cross browser. I know plenty of other sites that do the same exact type of forms and functionality but don’t use ActiveX. One commenter named Jerry states it perfectly,

Of course, one would hope that it would only be used where necessary (virus scanning sites, ms update, games) and not where it doesn’t (financial institutions, government websites). There are alternatives out there for sites that need/should cater to everyone such as government sites. Java works fine in most places as does Flash now that there is the Flash Player beta for Linux. Not everyone likes flash or java, but many people dislike ActiveX as well. There is not one platform that everyone likes, but if you write to one that is cross-platform, then at least people can access it and still hate it rather than not access it, hate it, and hate you for not even giving them the opportunity to use their site.

Pretty crazy that I am just about to create a Blogger blog for a client coming up here, when I run into this article on PC World about how they got hacked. It also talks about large amounts of downtime it had this weekend for both Blogger.com and Blogspot hosting services. Apparently Google who owns Blogger said the down time was due to a “network malufunction”, isn’t it always LOL.

The hacker exploited of all blogs, the main official Google blog. I found this to be rather funny. The hacker (I would call this kid a script kiddie) posted a blog entry stating that Google had cancelled a joint click-to-call advertising project with eBAy. Between this and the downtime I would think many users are going to be thinking of switching services.

You would think since Google owns the company that they would be on top of things but like the author of the article states “Google has been criticized by some for being slow to enhance and upgrade the pioneering service.” I guess their to busy making all these new and cool things and not caring as much for something they invested in 3 years ago. Hopefully this shows them that they are slacking and maybe come up with some more innovative ideas for this bloggin service and not let it fall behind, I mean at least stay on top of security. The last blog that I would think would get exploited would be Googles. I guess they should of got Wordpress LOL.