Archive for November 2001

Like to get a surprise from Santa? Hanukkah Harry? or [ fill in the blank of a character that everyone claims is not real, but you believe ] ? Who wouldn’t? Thanks to Nick for alerting me to a cool Secret Santa [ or fill in blank again ] project.

Thanks to Sooz for the link! Also, kudos to her for all the great work she did on the id essay project.

It feels weird that this week is American Thanksgiving, just snuck up. I suspect many of the American-based blogs and Web sites will be quiet this week, so I wish to take this time to wish everyone a happy and peaceful Thanksgiving. Even if you’re not in the USA, I wish you happiness and peace.

Thanks to MojoFat for link.

Uh-oh! Our secret is out courtesy Wired. They’re spilling the beans how designers actually make certain things happen such as making Jennifer Lopez weigh more and the infamous tourist on the WTC photo.

A common frustration for Web designers is how to handle copyright-related issues. Webdesign-L provided a valuable resource: Ivan Hoffman.

So many Web talent shared their thoughts on the future of the independent Web. It was inspiring to read the diverse thoughts and ideas. The ones that hit home with me were Nick Finck, Carole Guevin, Molly Holzschlag, Shirley Kaiser, Maurice Wright, and Jeffrey Zeldman. I look forward to whatever is next up the id’s sleeves. Kudos to the team for making this happen. It was a lot of work!

NextDraft reported that Barbie gets a tatoo! Oh dear, this is gonna make it harder for some of us to tell our daughters that tatoos are not acceptable in our families.

Also from NextDraft, Shrub is expected to sign legislation that will extend the moratorium on Internet taxes for another two years.

The movie that everyone is talking about is Harry Potter and I admit I joined the crowd and attended it on opening day yesterday. I rarely ever attend movies much less on opening day, but I went with a team of people who reserved tickets in advance. If I felt better while seeing the movie, it would’ve been a truly enjoyable afternoon. I’ll appreciate it more when I see it on home video with captions and sans headache. The movie theater volume was too loud for even this hearing aid wearer. The effects were superb and the Quidditch match (think witch rugby) was something else! Movie gets gig’em Ags (For you non-Texans – Texas A&M’s hand sign for gig’em is thumb up) from me. You want reviews? All right, I’ll give you reviews!

Just learned about Friday’s Five from Christine and it’s cool. Gonna give it a shot:

1. Name five things in your refrigerator: soy milk, 27 cans of soda, 15 bottles of water, string cheese, coffee
2. Name five things in your freezer: expensive peanut butter jelly uncrustables for picky kids, Gevalia coffee, fish sticks, frozen brocolli, frozen edamame beans
3. Name five things under your kitchen sink: window cleaner, furniture cleaner, dishwashing tabs, SOS, kitchen cleaner
4. Name five things around your computer: PDA cradle, VisiBone card, Netgear Firewall Router, covered mug with water, Hot Wheel cars
5. How do you plan to spend your weekend? Keeping son out of trouble

Web Design in a Nutshell, 2nd Ed. by Jennifer Niederst. Check out the review at Webreference.

I did my homework and submitted another project. Thankfully, you can’t see it too clearly because I took a picture while on the treadmill… with no makeup!

Zeldman reported a link to who is behind the upgrade to Netscape 4.79. It was iPlanet.

House of Boo Boos, thanks for making the connection.

Whenever my mailbox fills up with catalogs, then I know the fun is beginning… shopping, annual newsletters, cards, baking, etc. etc. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to begin daydreaming about the things you’d love to get. Today alone, I saw a lot of articles on holiday shopping for the techie. NextDraft listed two links: Holiday Buying Guide from New York Times and Buying Guide from Silicon Valley. Webreference mentions gizmos top techies holiday lists. Next one is not a holiday guide, but an interesting gadget that I’d love to check out for myself. It’s Casper, the friendly keyboard.

Interesting outline on a presentation called Lies, Damned Lies and the Internet from Marylaine Block, distributor of NeatNewStuff. It’s a growing problem. Includes information for reporting and recognizing frauds and hoaxes.

Another goodie from Marylaine Block’s NeatNetTricks: StartStop, a free and fast download that provides you with more control over programs that start up when you boot your computer. When booting, you can change the current settings or stick with the default. The goal is to keep your startup programs to a minimum to help your computer load and run faster. I downloaded it, but I haven’t tried it yet.

I mentioned several times that there’s great stuff happening at id. Now, it’s taken a hiatus to make room for bad poetry.

Lots of people are sharing some great resources today and making my bookmark file grow a few more megs. Let’s start with the shocker of the day.

As you know, Netscape recently release a new version of its browser. Right? What’s so shocking about that? Well… they released two versions. One that we all know about: 6.2. The other we thought we’d never see again… 4.79! I got the news straight from Zeldman. When 6.0 came out, I remember reading that they were not releasing any additional versions of 4.x. What’s up with that? Trying to make us take a step backward?

I know that some people love their Netscape 4.7 and the newer versions haven’t retained some of its wonderful features. Guilty. I’m one of those people. However, I use various browsers, old and new. All my bookmarks and email are in the old Netscape. Certainly, I’m all for standards and I’ve never been been afraid of progress or advances (I’ve got the shopping bills to prove it) — Netscape 4.7 works faster, bookmarks quickly, and runs smoothly. Netscape 6.2 is getting very close, but is missing one of the bookmark features and takes longer to load and run.

Am I going to download 4.79? Heck no. I don’t even know what has improved since the only link is directly to the file and no release notes. I searched high and low for information about 4.79 and most hits led to places that said certain issues on the Web site were fixed in Netscape version 4.9.something.something. According to the Netscape browser plans article, this version has security-related fixes. Plus, there are more interesting comments at Mozilla.

Pop ups… love ‘em or hate ‘em, they ain’t going away soon and advertisers have found a new trick. Got the lowdown from Webdesign-L. The latest trick is not so bad because it requires you to do something to make it happen. If you mouseover an ad, then you must be interested unless the ad is between point A and point B — you’re likely to move too fast between two points to make the "Boo! Pop" happen. See it in action by doing a mouseover the banner ads, however, if you’re using an older browser like (surprise!) Netscape 4.x, it won’t work — lucky you. Is that a BOO! or what?

Advantages: No closing windows. Proactive (you have to roll over it AND click on it).

Disadvantages: This is not the good kind of surprise. It doesn’t work properly in all browsers (this reason is practically a given for every project these days).

How is it done? Why should I tell you and risk your creating some? You’re right… I’m a teacher. It’s educational. Shame on me for asking such a question. It is DHTML. Dang, I wish I could remember the Web site where I found cool code that makes a thumbnail sized photo blow up when you roll over it just like with these ads. Ah-ha! I found it just for you. Even the author says, "The blowup works with all browsers of version 4.0 and later, with the exception of Navigator 6.0. Because DHTML support is not yet completed in Navigator 6.0, I created a Navigator 6.0-specific workaround. I’ll show you how to convert Navigator 4.0 DHTML to Navigator 6.0 DHTML in a future article."

id continues to rock ‘n roll with a diversity of essays celebrating the independent web. Don’t worry if you missed someone’s brilliant essay since they’re all archived. If you want to see who else is a-comin’, there’s a list of all the contributors.

I finally took the leap and joined The Mirror Project.

Y’all gotta check out Grand Master Peter’s fun MAME swf videos. MAME stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator and it’s a program that lets you run dumped versions of classic arcade games, circa the ’70s and ’80s (is my age showing?) on your computer. He has posted three for your guilty pleasure:

• Movie – Nine minutes long with a soundtrack and special guest stars
• Song – See Fame in a whole new light! Move over Irene Cara. Ms. Pac Man leads a chorus of ghosts and special guest stars in an all new version of the Fame song.
• Dance – Never thought you’d see video characters dancing to Greek music? Never say never.

Another content management system joins the crowd to give others a little competition. Biz Stone introduces WebCrimson at WebReview. I happened to be reading the article in Netscape 6.2, which is impressive so far, and clicked to check out the WebCrimson demo. Guess what? Netscape 6.2 is not a valid browser for viewing the WYSIWYG according the the message, "Your current browser does not support rich-text (WYSIWYG) editing. Unfortunately, Macintosh and Netscape browsers do not yet support WYSIWYG editing. As soon as these browsers get up to speed, we will add WYSIWYG editing support for them."

I’ll let you think about that for a little bit… curse all you want unless you’re on Bill’s payroll. I switched over to M$ IE 5.5 and it worked fine, of course. Despite turning off many of you at this point, I’ll go ahead and let you know it uses XSLT and has the ability to syndicate with RSS. Looking at WebCrimson’s product support page looks like a cross between a pyramid scheme and spam. P.S. It costs $19.95 a month. Boy, I’d love to hear what you think of this. E-me: meryl@onramp.net.

In checking out the Independents Day stuff to see what time the next essays will be up, I couldn’t figure out Internet time even with the popup information. Did a little research and found info at Swatch. However, I still don’t understand it though I played with the calculator. To heck with figuring it out, I’ll just use the converter. You can even download it for Windows and Mac.