Other Recent Articles


Popular Tags

Experience - Mar 6, 2008 17:56 - 3 Comments

siFR and the user experience

Polaroid of the 22nd Street Caltrain station. San Francisco, CA

Scalable Inman Flash Replacement or sIFR for short, combines Flash and JavaScript to enable the display of custom fonts on a web page. sIFR is attractive to both web designers and developers as it provides an accessible and semantic alternative to other methods of font replacement.

sIFR enhanced sites require a modern web browser with the Adobe Flash plugin installed and JavaScript enabled. For visitors lacking these features, sIFR will degrade to a suitable baseline font and continue to render both on the page and in the generated source code.

In theory, sIFR is a perfect response to one of the more frustrating restrictions imposed on web designers by the medium. Unfortunately, the technology is not without its flaws and ultimately should not be considered a viable choice for web professionals.

Read full article

Presentation - Feb 15, 2008 16:36 - 0 Comments

Accessible footnotes with HTML and CSS

Standing in Dolores Park. Assessing what needs to be packed: a blanket, leash and shoes. San Francisco, CA

Having recently set out on the long journey of mastering a new CMS I’ve found myself searching for and stumbling upon1 all manner of plugins, customizations and tweaks for WordPress.

The latest clever addition I found is the use of footnotes. When used properly, footnotes are an appropriate way of commenting on or referencing a portion of text2.

Footnotes serve as a more graceful way to add an aside compared to the long-winded parenthetical. (For instance, here I could give some personal insight into the guilty pleasure of using lengthy digressions, but as you can see, by the time you reach the end of this amusing passage, the original point is confused with a new idea).

Read full article

Publishing - Feb 7, 2008 8:50 - 0 Comments

Creating a blog for fun and profit

Stacks of hay in the fields of Yuba City, CA

In this series of articles I will discuss the process and research that go into starting your own website for fun and profit. Many of these suggestions can be applied to the creation of other websites, but for now we’ll focus on one of the more popular formats: web logs or blogs as they are more commonly known.

As with any website, launching a blog requires careful planning. To the joy of many, what isn’t required is a reason! Anyone can launch a website at any time and for any purpose.

Still, careful planning can sometimes make the difference between success and failure. So let’s look at some of the necessary steps:

Read full article