Christian Heilmann

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Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Going Minty

Tuesday, September 6th, 2005

Shaun Inman's Mint Shaun Inman is not only a well known blogger and developer who recently put my pathetic efforts in generating CSS constants to shame with his server side CSS constants , no he also developed a very much blogosphere-hyped stats tool called Mint, which is available at http://www.haveamint.com/.

Enthusiastic, as I was, I signed up for the preview and demo just to realise that is database seems to have gone boom. This was a bit of a shame, as I dislike buying cats inside the bag. However, this pussy purrs very much and one painless install later I have Mint running on icant.co.uk. The recent success of the CSS Table Gallery made my former free counter from http://www.statscounter.com not free any longer (more than 9000 hits/day), and I considered to go for Mint instead of dashing out a monthly upgrade (I bought one now, though).

Now, as you can see in the Mint screenshot it is a beauty and gives very much the information you want. However, statscounter does a lot more, including user paths, browser, OS, resolution information and which country your visitors are from.

With Mint being a no-nonsense approach and an extendable architecture I am looking forward to more bits to come. Job well done for now!

CSS Table Gallery

Wednesday, August 31st, 2005

Following a request on the list, where a subscriber had unsuccessfully searched for an online gallery of styled data tables, I came up with the following idea:

http://icant.co.uk/csstablegallery/

It is pretty much like csszengarden, only for a single marked up data table.

What I need now is people participating with an own style for the data table. You can submit it directly on the site and I will check through them when I come back from a training in 3 days, so please don’t expect to see things appearing immediately.

Summer gone, Webzines back

Wednesday, August 31st, 2005

I admit I had fallen behind my webzine browsing, mainly because BT promises to make the move of your telephone number to a new location easy, but fouls up badly when you really try to do it. Therefore my only online experience at home is my neighbour’s unencrypted wireless…

Good news is that A List Apart is back with a new, slicker layout and another Joe Clark article, this time dealing with PDF accessibility.

I am also proud to see that evolt.org is finally live with the new Drupal based layout and will hopefully get some good articles to review there soon. Right now the backlog is rather overwhelming though.

Sitepoint.com has lately taken to have an illustration for every article and its Really, Really, Really Good Introduction to XML is as much what it says on the tin as Cats in Sinks is.

Digital Web focuses on the business end of the web design stick with an article about RFPs . They will publish my article about “10 reasons why our clients don’t care about accessibility” in the next issue I am told.

Devarticles gets very techie in the last few issues, reporting on C++, Java and how to build an encrypted Login system in JavaScript.

Web Standards, Style Sheets and Semantic Markup presentation

Friday, August 26th, 2005

Funny, right at the moment where I am working on slides and examples for a training at the company here, maxdesign, the lovely bunch behind listamatic and listutorial, offer their slides: Basic Webstandards Workshop.

Very good collection indeed, and I now have to restrain myself not to copy and paste the lot :-)

Found via Jens Grochdreis

Bulletproof Web Design Review

Thursday, August 25th, 2005

Bulletproof Web Design Dan Cederholm did it again: The author of the indespensable “Web Standards Solutions” delivered with “Bulletproof Web Design” a wonderful follow-up showing you how to use CSS and XHTML to create flexible web sites. One of the main reasons developers still stick to layouts using tables – their resizability without breaking the layout grid – has lost a lot of its punch after reading this book and following its advice.

Just like in his older publications, Dan is based deeply in our developer world and does not dwell in theory, but explains the issues we have to face daily and offers solutions to them. (more…)