It is not easy to see how our design will look on various browsers.
Browsershots.org to the rescue!
All you need to do is to enter your public (i.e. accessible from Internet) website address.
I didn’t even know that Iceape is actually a browser. 
I found a good website that I can use to compare fonts.
Even better, Typetester website allows me to download the CSS!
There are three different sections to display different font formats including size, alignment, color, background color (among other settings).
Once you have selected the formatting, scrolling down will reveal the fonts in various styles (e.g. regular, bold, italic).
Good website to bookmark!
I’ve been working on integrating AJAX into my project. It wasn’t easy, but I got the data to load dynamically.
Depending on how much data to load, it may take a while especially over a slow connection (or an overloaded server). It is a good practice to have some progress indicator.
I found a really cool website that can help to build the progress indicator.
Even better, the images are free for use!
Feel free to post other websites that offer the same feature.
I am sure at some point web applications will require an entry form.
I just notice that Rails does not make the ‘Reset’ button available. Here is an example of an HTML form with a reset button:
Google helps me again!
I found a post from mc-kenna.com to describe what needs to be done.
<%= submit_tag "Start over", :name => ‘reset’, :type => ‘reset’, :id => ‘task_reset’ %>
Upon further research, I found an interesting discussion/ticket about making the reset button available in Rails. Making the button available is considered as a bad practice.
The ticket refers to Jacob Nielsen’s useit.com. A little blurb:
The Web would be a happier place if virtually all Reset buttons were removed. This button almost never helps users, but often hurts them.
I agree with the opinion that the button should be removed!
There is a good usability guidelines document that one can read from w3.org.
It is not a long document but it is a dense one and contains good guidelines. For example, “Don’t rely on color alone.”
It is worth an hour (or more) of your time if you are into web design and usability.
I know I will put this in my future reading.
I recently purchased Bulletproof Web Design book and I like it!
I am still learning CSS and this book take my learning to a different level. There are some techniques in the book that I actually use already (ehm… sidebar).
I am a fan of fluid website design and Dan Cederholm (the book author) shows how it can be done.
I highly recommend the book!
I’ve updated the sidebar to be a bit nicer.
I’m planning of improving my theme a little bit at a time with various techniques that I observe and learn from other websites and books.
I’m beginning to enjoy web design now.
I did an investigation on how to improve HTML rendering. I found general recommendations from Yahoo! web site.
I also read Steve Sounders’ High Performance Web Site site and found good examples! Here’s the link to the main site.
Here’s an interesting rule from Steve Sounders’ site:
Put your stylesheets in the document HEAD using the LINK tag.
The rule makes sense after I thought about it, but I wouldn’t know about the rule unless I did some testing and benchmarking.
I like to customize my blog page that is running on Wordpress. Obviously, I would like to replicate the setup in my Mac.
I will go through a step-by-step instructions on installing Wordpress in my Mac.
1. Download MAMPS. I choose the non-pro version. You should get a .dmg file.
2. Download Wordpress. I choose to download the .tar.gz file. It does not really matter which one you choose.
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I just noticed that my theme passes the W3C CSS validation!
I can also easily validate my future themes easily.
Update: My theme also passes the W3C HTML validation!
I have made more fixes to my WordPress theme due to various minor bugs:
I have also switched to use my own theme.
Let me know how you like it!
Here is the link to download my theme. Enjoy!
I know how to program CSS, but I have never done any project with CSS.
I was thinking that the best way to start with CSS was to start creating my own Wordpress theme!
Here is the screenshot of it:
I started the theme from the default Wordpress theme. The biggest improvement that I did was to make my theme liquid.
You can use my theme for free, but you need to leave the credits in the footer.
You can download the compressed theme file.
book and I like it!