Archive for the ‘designmeme’ Category
Tuesday, December 13th, 2005
I’m not sure if this is some sort of strange sub-culture that I’m unaware of—but I just don’t understand why a group of kids would create websites and message boards where they make-believe that they’re myself and some of my friends. I mean, while it’s true that my life is filled with movie premieres and trips to Monte Carlo to play celebrity poker games, and it’s reasonable to expect people would want to day dream they’re doing that too, these kids wouldn’t know any of that. All they know about me is that I’m a web designer, living in Ontario, and I’ve written some articles on CSS.
Instead of pretending to be civil war soldiers or medieval knights, they’ve got some strange type of web designer / font creator / cartoonist / digital artist reenactment group. Fortunately that kind of “fun” goes against the terms of use of most web hosting companies, and those sites are soon shut down.
But the question remains—why would people do this? While it might not be a realistic goal to one day become a movie star or celebrity poker champion like me, they could easily spend the time they’ve wasted on make believing they’re a web designer or cartoonist—to actually become one. Now that I think of it my friends and I have all written articles that would help people do that too.
Tags: designmeme, spooky, web
Posted in designmeme | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, December 7th, 2005
After moving the blog to Wordpress there have been a couple of steps involved in trying to get Google to index the site the way it had been with the old system. I’ve noticed quite a few blogs running with the basic install, which gives you confusing URLs and page descriptions in search results. If you’re still running a default Wordpress blog, these two tips might be helpful.
The first thing you should do is setup the Permalinks for your blog. This is under Options > Permalinks, and unless you have a reason to do otherwise you might as well go with the suggested structure of /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
This will change the URLs for your posts from something like this:
http://www.designmeme.com/?p=40
to this:
http://www.designmeme.com/2005/11/29/firefox-15/
Much better for search engines, bookmarks and putting into email.
After Google had reindexed the site I noticed the next problem—every page had the same description metadata, which meant every search result for this site listed the same text. That certainly wasn’t ideal.
I tried a few plugins and settled on using Head Meta Description, which automatically generates a meta tag based on the content of your posts. After Google once again reindexed the blog the search results changed from this:
Design Meme » Firefox 1.5
News, information and tips for designers, developers, and independent media artists.
to this:
Design Meme » Firefox 1.5
Firefox Version 1.5 came out today. If you’re not using it already, you really
should give it a try. Pages …
Again much better for people finding the content they’re looking for on this site.
The next thing I need to consider is the Optimal placement of the blog name in page titles and links.
Would this be better: Firefox 1.5 » Design Meme?
Tags: blog, designmeme, web
Posted in designmeme | No Comments »
Thursday, December 1st, 2005
I’ve been moving the archived blog entries over to the new site. While it would make sense to use some type of XML export / import process to move the data the old MovableType database no longer runs well enough to make that possible. That’s not a criticism of MovableType—I’m still very pleased with it. It’s just that the Perl / Berkley DB environment I was running it under wasn’t ideal… and now it doesn’t work.
Looking back over the archive of the past 3 years I can really see that I’ve gotten more comfortable with writing—although I’m still much more concise than I’d like. I still have to force myself not to condence my blog entries too much. Some of my earliest posts weren’t even worth moving over. One entry was literally this short:
Blambot’s Nate Piekos offers a wide range of high-quality comic lettering fonts.
Wow. I type about as much now when I’m adding a bookmark to del.icio.us!
Actually, it’s del.icio.us that inspired me to expand the number of categories I’m using for the site. I’m now using them the same way I use tags on del.icio.us. I think that might help technorati work with the site as well. The benefit to you, is being able to find whatever you’re looking for a bit more easily—whether it’s a tutorial or what I’ve written about webcomics.
Updates to wordpress continue—the Captcha on the comments pages is now gone, and I’ve added a plugin to generate a Google Sitemap.
Tags: designmeme
Posted in designmeme | Comments Off
Thursday, November 24th, 2005
After chatting with DJ earlier this afternoon, I decided that today was the day I’d finally move the site to a proper host, rather than have the domain forward visitors to my personal webspace at the University. It’s probably something I should have done years ago, but kept putting off. There may be some issues with the site over the next few days as I move files between servers, but I’ll try and keep the chaos to a minimum.
Tags: designmeme, web
Posted in designmeme | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005
It’s been a very busy fall. Being a new dad, teaching, working on monstrous projects—leaving little time to keep my blog updated. Someone mentioned to me that A List Apart is featuring my Night of the Image Map article as the Editor’s Choice right now. I had forgotten I wrote it with a spooky theme, to complement the spooky project it was developed for.
Hopefully I can start making more time for the blog again. Maybe update the design too.
Tags: designmeme, spooky, tutorial
Posted in designmeme | 1 Comment »
Friday, June 3rd, 2005
I’ve made a few updates to my Comic Gallery Script, and a new version is now available. ComicGallery 1.1 includes navigation links for going to the first or last image in the gallery, as well as enhanced XHTML output to allow you to replace the text navigation with custom images. You can see an example of Comic Gallery 1.1 at RealmOfAtland.com
Download
ComicGallery.zip
Be sure to check the Comic Gallery Tutorial for help with setting up and configuring the script.
New Features
The First and Last links are controlled by the variable:
- $firstlast=1;
- The default setup for Comic Gallery includes start and last links for navigating back and next through the images. To this option off, change this line to:
$firstlast=0;
Additional <span> tags have been added to the generated markup for use with CSS Image Replacement techniques. This will allow you to replace the text navigation for the gallery with your own custom images.
This zip file includes some sample images for you to get started.
Download
cg_nav.zip
Setting up your navigation images
Unzip the file and upload the files to a directory on your website as follows:
- YourWebsiteFolder
- comicgallery.php
- example.php
- kubrick.css
- images
- kubrick
- cg_nav
- back.gif
- back_on.gif
- back_off.gif
- first.gif
- first_on.gif
- first_off.gif
- last.gif
- last_on.gif
- last_off.gif
- next.gif
- next_on.gif
- next_off.gif
Add this CSS to your page (eg. example.php) and your gallery will display images for the First, Back, Next and Last links:
/* CG nav setup */
#cg_nav1 { height: 50px; width: 400px; margin: 0 auto; }
#cg_nav1 a, #cg_nav1 span { height: 50px; width: 100px; float: left; background: #fff top left no-repeat; }
#cg_nav1 a span, #cg_nav1 span span, #cg_nav1 .cg_divider { display: none; }
/* CG nav images */
a#cg_first { background: url(cg_nav/first.gif); }
a#cg_back { background: url(cg_nav/back.gif); }
a#cg_next { background: url(cg_nav/next.gif); }
a#cg_last { background: url(cg_nav/last.gif); }
/* CG nav rollover images */
a#cg_first:hover { background: url(cg_nav/first_on.gif); }
a#cg_back:hover { background: url(cg_nav/back_on.gif); }
a#cg_next:hover { background: url(cg_nav/next_on.gif); }
a#cg_last:hover { background: url(cg_nav/last_on.gif); }
/* CG nav unavailable images */
span#cg_first { background: url(cg_nav/first_off.gif); }
span#cg_back { background: url(cg_nav/back_off.gif); }
span#cg_next { background: url(cg_nav/next_off.gif); }
span#cg_last { background: url(cg_nav/last_off.gif); } Replace the cg_nav files with your own, but be sure to adjust the height and width settings in above CSS if you have different size images. You might also consider using CSS Sprites to reduce the number of image files needed for your gallery’s navigation.
Tags: designmeme, tutorial, webcomic
Posted in designmeme, tools | 7 Comments »
