The Sunday Times this weekend had an ad that made my eyes pop (click the detail to see the whole page):

It really looks like one of those overlay ads you have in web sites, and must have cost quite a bundle.

If you came here to learn how to create overlay ads, check this out instead

i just had a fun bug to kill: A client complained that their site is not working. The code is theirs, all we did was update some flash movies. What didn’t work, was a popup window showing the flash movie.

Now, the code was Dreamweaver generated and the out-of-the-box functions have their version as comments on the line of the function name:

function MM_openBrWindow(theURL,winName,features) { //v2.0

window.open(theURL,winName,features);

}

	

There seems to be some optimising setting on the client’s server that deletes all whitespace in the documents, and when they uploaded the above code, it ended up as:

function MM[...]([...]) {//v2.0window.open([...]);}

This commented out the whole function and broke the popup. Learning from that: Don’t use embedded JS in an unknown environment.

Specificity is not only the aspect of CSS that will make any fluent presentation stop in its tracks (or am I the only one who has problems pronouncing it?), it is also a very important part of CSS design. Basically it allows to override settings defined earlier in a stylesheet by adding other element, class or ID names.

h1{color:#fff;background:#369;}
will not apply any longer when you add another id of an element the h1 resides in:
#home h1{color:#000;background:#f8f8f8;}

While it is easy to trial and error initially, the more you mix and match elements, IDs and classes the harder it can get to predict the outcome.

Andy couldn’t stop his nerdy alter ego and came up with a star wars based, wonderful cheatsheet on the subject which initially had some errors that Molly rectified.

Wonderful stuff and something to hang up in the office.

Are you scrounging ebay or price comparison sites daily for deals? If so, give rectifi a go. It is a search engine that donates 92% (no idea how they came up with that number) of their advertising income to charities.

Doesn’t cost you anything, and it is a nice idea.

Some may remember that I reported on the unfortunate logo of an oriental school some time ago. I am also still puzzled what the Olympic Games 2004 in Athens mascot is, but what really got me was a new German creation:

This logo, chosen from supposedly hundreds of creations by top design agencies should encourage me to feel good to be German. How can something resembling either

• a white shirt after a boozed up stop at the chip shop (gravy, ketchup, mustard)
• a dog turd in the German national colours

should inspire me to feel good about my nationality?