SEO, CSS, Web Design and stuff

This is a jewel of a book from one of the acknowledged grand masters of CSS and Web Design. There is a real connection between craftsmanship and Web design, and Cederholm and Marcotte show what this link resides in. That’s the theme running through Handcrafted CSS: More Bulletproof Web Design. It explores CSS3 that works in today’s browsers, and you’ll be convinced that now’s the time to start experimenting with it.

This book will also show you excellent tools to create the most flexible, reliable, and bulletproof Web designs. It shows and demonstrate progressive enrichment techniques over more traditional labor-intensive methods.

Some subjects covered:

• building for unanticipated future use
• progressively enriching designs using CSS3 properties
• modular float management
• crafting flexible frameworks
• fluid layouts using grid-based design principles
• craftsmanship details on typography, jQuery, and shifting backgrounds

This is an excellent work literally guaranteed to provide new insight. Also, the writing style is one that is easily read. There are new “tricks” galore in this book. The book is rated “intermediate to advanced” and deserves that rating.

Handcrafted CSS: More Bulletproof Web Design shows connections between artistry and web design and explores CSS3 for modern browsers. Web designers, project managers and artists alike receive an excellent progressive series of lessons on how to enrich designs using CSS3 properties. Color screen shots throughout provide excellent examples. This is an important book!

Links to books by Dan Cederholm at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Amazon CAN.

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CSS3 supports a new “box-shadow” property that can be applied to shadow page elements such as images, SPANs and DIVs. This is great, since it makes it easier to produce good looking frames for images and to nicely off-set boxes in a number of different and stylish ways.

This new feature is currently supported in a number of browsers, for instance FF3.5, Safari 3.1+, Gecko and Google Chrome. Opera (including version 10.10) and Internet Explorer (including IE-8) does not support it (there are rumors indicating the IE-9 will). However, for IE there are some other methods available (that works from IE 5.5 and up).

So how does this work? The basic syntax is:

So, for example

box-shadow: 2px 2px 2px #CCC; 

is a 2px horizontally (right) and vertically (down) offset shadow with a 2px blur. The color is grey (#CCC).

Then, to complicate matters, Safari requires the prefix

-webkit

and FireFox the prefix

-moz

. Fortunately the syntax for these are the same.

If you want to achieve the same results in IE, it gets even more complicated. But tools do exist. A number of sites on the net shows that shadow and blur effects can be produced in Internet Explorer too. And, indeed, several writers/sites show that it is possible to achieve similar shadow effects with IE’s proprietary tools as with CSS3. I found four different possible methods for producing box shadows in IE, all using Microsoft-provided “filter”-techniques – in reality, variants of not-so-good proprietary Javascripts.

These tools are the Shadow filter (usage

filter:
progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Shadow(color=#0000FF,direction=45)

; the DropShadow filter

filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.dropshadow(OffX=5, OffY=5,
Color='gray', Positive='true'

; the Glow filter:

filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Glow(Color=blue,Strength=5)

. A fourth possible tool is the Blur filter – I have tested it, and found it of little use for the purposes here. For these filters to work, the object must have layout, meaning they must have “height” or “width” set, or be absolutely positioned (or have zoom set – zoom=1).

The examples available online usually apply shadow effects to images or filled boxes (usually filled with dark colors), see for instance this example at the DynamicDrive CSS-library. However, for my own web designs, I wanted nice shadow effects on some simple bordered text boxes with white background.

To test the various possibilities I have set up four DIVs. The first is the text box as is for reference. Then I apply the following shading:

.shadow1 {
box-shadow: 2px 2px  #CCC;
-webkit-box-shadow: 2px 2px #CCC;
-moz-box-shadow: 2px 2px  #CCC;
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.dropShadow(color=#CCCCCC,
                 offX=3, offY=3, positive=true); }

shadow1 has only shadow, no blur. The IE code could have been given in a separate conditional IE style sheet (as some writers recommend), but that turns out not to be necessary (but see here for an example).

.shadow2 {
box-shadow: 3px 3px #CCC;
-webkit-box-shadow: 3px 3px 3px #CCC;
-moz-box-shadow: 3px 3px 3px #CCC;
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Glow
      (color=#CCCCCC,strength=3)
progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Shadow
     (color=#CCCCCC,direction=135,
strength=6); }

shadow2 has moderate shadow and blur with the same color. I also test the Glow and Shadow filters.

.shadow3 {
box-shadow: 7px 7px 8px #818181;
-webkit-box-shadow: 7px 7px 8px #818181;
-moz-box-shadow: 7px 7px 8px #818181;
filter:
progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.DropShadow
      (color=#969696, offx=2, offy=2)
progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.DropShadow
     (color=#C2C2C2, offx=2, offy=2)
progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.DropShadow
    (color=#EFEFEF, offx=2, offy=2); }

And in the final DIV, shadow3, the shadow color is different, and both shadow and blur substantially larger. For IE, the Drop Shadow filter is applied iteratively (this method is from Ole Laursen).

The results for Safari, Firefox and Chrome are very nice. Opera just shows the original text box – it doesn’t support box shadow yet. The results with IE are not very good. See for yourself (here is the page that you can check yourself in different browsers – demo):

Boxes in Firefox:

Boxes in IE8:

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More and more readers  buy e-book readers, and the competition in the marketplace is getting more and more intense. Kindle, by Amazon, is a huge hit. And now Barnes & Noble has released its own e-book reader, the Nook. The third major contender among consumers is Sony’s e-book reader, the PRS-600BC and PRS-700BC. And more e-book readers are on their way. This is, of course, good news for readers: more alternatives to choose among and competition that reduces prices.

New York Times has published a comprehensive review of e-book readers, but Nook, Kindle and the Sony PRS-readers for the moment seem to be the major competitors.

Nook is the device on the top right, and below are pictures of Kindle and the Sony reader.

It’s hard to say which is the best. They all seem to be very good. Nook and the Sony readers have touch screens, Kindle has a keyboard. Otherwise they have fairly similar features. Their prices are fairly similar too. If you ponder buying one, I suspect that to a large extent it is a question about what your shopping and reading habits are and which company you have the strongest relationship to.

It will be interesting to follow what is happening in this area in the near future. Readers are faced with several good choices, and with more alternatives to come soon.

Links to the e-readers: Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Amazon’s Kindle, and Sony’s e-book readers.

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SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a biggie. But it is seemingly extremely complicated, in the sense that a huge number of factors affect how a given page ends up in searches.

One of the factors some authors and discussants on the net point to, is how well your page is designed. Some point out that it is desirable to have a design where the content column is the first to load, so that crawlers and bots indexing the page meet the content you want to be indexed on first. So the problem is like this:

That is, you have a nice layout (much nicer than my illustration). And when the crawler meets your site’s HTML, the first thing it sees is all the stuff you have in your left sidebar. Perhaps a navigation menu, some news, some advertisements, or something. That’s number 1 in the figure. But all your content, or most important content, the stuff you really want to be indexed on, is in box 2.

So what you want is that the crawler read the page like this:

Here the crawler reads first the main column, then the left sidebar, and finally the right sidebar. Just as you want. Andd hopefully in a manner that gives better indexing.

To achieve this turns out to be very easy. Here is a picture of how it could look:

And here is a link to the 3 column frontloaded (or content-first) web page (use view source to see the HTML). This is the CSS for it – just the barebones. You can replace the fixed widths in the CSS with percentages and turn it into a flexible, strechable layout.

Please note that all this does is to show a way to make the content load first – there are other problems that have been solved elsewhere by far better CSS-ers than me that are not addressed here for the sake of simplicity, such as getting columns of equal length, and so on.

There is another way to achieve the same result – to load the content column first with a margin big enough for the left sidebar (eg. “margin-left: 185px”), and the later move the left sidebar into the content margin. If this is done with  sidebar-wide margins on both sides of the main content DIV, it opens up for hybrid layouts with fixed sidebars and a flexible content area (”negative margin designs). Personally I don’t like these designs because of the Dreamweaver rendering bug, but they are perfectly ok and display properly in all CSS-compliant browsers.

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Read review of The Redbreast by Jo Nesbo, one of my favorites!

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This story of adventure and romance, based on C. S. Forester’s novel The African Queen (C.S. Forester is mostly known for his Hornblower Saga), experienced by a couple in Africa just as World War I got underway, is an engrossing motion picture. Just offbeat enough in story, locale and star teaming of Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn to stimulate the imagination. It is still a very worthwhile picture to view, and also one that really displays the star qualities of the main characters. Actually, it is one of the best movies Humprey Bogart ever made. As well, it is a picture with considerable warmth. And there is plenty of African wildlife.

New York Times in its review of this movie, wrote:

“Whether C. S. Forester had his salty British tongue in his cheek when he wrote his extravagant story of romance and adventure, “The African Queen,” we wouldn’t be able to tell you. But it is obvious—to us, at least—that Director John Huston was larking when he turned the novel into a film.

His lively screen version of it, which came to the Capitol yesterday with Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart in its two predominant roles, is a slick job of movie hoodwinking with a thoroughly implausible romance, set in a frame of wild adventure that is as whopping as its tale of off-beat love. And the main tone and character of it are in the area of the well-disguised spoof.

The movie is entertaining, visually interesting, has great acting by wonderfully talented actors and tells a strange and intruiging story with lots of warmth, humor and compassion. What more do you want?

Links to The African Queen (DVD) on amazon US, amazon UK and amazon CAN.

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I like corn, but I have never considered them to be exciting in any way. Rather boring, actually. Until recently, that is.

This guy (I guess it must be) has forced me to reconsider. There may be more to corn cobs than I have previously thought. I now have an open mind on the issue.

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Denmark is seemingly the world’s most bureaucratic country – maybe even bureaucrazy. The Danes – a peaceful, very nice and friendly people – have allowed themselves to be completely exploited by the country’s bureaucratic machine!

According to the EU, the Danes have the highest taxes in the world. The average in the EU is 40%, while in Denmark it is 59%, according to Danish newspaper Politiken.

A pretty sorry state of affairs if you ask me. But bureaucrats in Denmark – along with the politicians – make good salaries. And there are a lot of them.

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It is surprising how often my assumptions about people are contradicted by facts. I have always assumed that people concerned with environmental issues were somehow a little more ethically minded than most others. It would at least seem logical that those are engaged an seemingly idealist struggle against the evil forces of commercialism would have higher standards morally than the rest of us.

However, this does not seem to be the case. The Danish newspaper Politiken reports that

The global climate challenge may have been on the daytime agenda during the recent World Business Summit climate conference in Copenhagen, but in the evenings many businessmen, politicians and civil servants are reported to have availed themselves of the capital’s prostitutes.

“We’ve been extremely busy. Politicians also need to relax after a long day,” says ‘Miss Dina’, herself a prostitute.

So, during daytime these people make speeches and proclamations about the importance of protecting the environment. And when the conference is over, they go out and buy a prostitute.

To me this does not sound so good. I am not so sure I will bother to listen to these guys the next time. And, what can I say? I was wrong again.

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