¤ jetless heights

makin’ tea in your underwear

+ Mon, September 13

Dokas Photos

After a summer of work, I’m happy to announce Dokas Photos to the internet.

My dad has been taking professional black and white photographs for the last 30 years or so and has recently taken an interest in getting his work online.  I produced this portfolio site for him over the course of this summer, swimming in the sweet nectar of valid and semantic code.

He’s already placed ~150 of his prints online, and I hear he’s ready to put more up shortly including photos from his trip to Greece this past June.  But enough of that, you can read about all the details over there.

On my end of things, yes, the site is fully accessible and compliant with all of your favorite standards.  It even has an Atom feed!  For me, this site was the largest departure from my standard course of design.  A portfolio is a far cry from a weblog (though, for those who are interested, his site is powered by MT) and as such required a great deal of thinking in terms of usability and flow.

It was also a wonderful chance to work with some recent techniques.  You might notice a modified version of Dan Cederholm’s fantastic CSS Tabs in action.  For those of you that missed it, it’s right below a modified version of the Fahrner Image Replacement technique.  Onion Skinned drop shadows are also heavily used, but that’s only because they’re so damn handy (if markup heavy).

But with all these CSS shenanigans, problems reared their horrible little heads.  Doug Bowman came to the rescue once again with his IE5/mac Band-Pass Filter debuting recently, saving users of that browser from some truly hideous errors.  Additionally, on account of Internet Explorer’s deep-grained hatred for PNG images (typically requiring ugly hacks), I’ve used the silly but useful Conditional Comments available in those browsers to prevent them from choking on content they shouldn’t even try to support.

In case you were wondering.

In any event, it’s live and now I think it’s time to buy a new toy.

5:49 PM  ×  2 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Mon, August 23

UMich & The Standards Game

A friend of mine, working on bringing the University of Michigan’s College of Engineering site into compliance with W3C standards, notified me that the main University of Michigan site had beaten them to it and unveiled their fully compliant redesign.  Using approved methods, they nearly perfectly retained their previous look and feel, both with Flash and pure XHTML variants.  As a UMich student and a web designer, I fully applaud their effort and the wisdom behind the project, it’s much too bad their return key was broken while they were writing the code.

(Hat tip, Yaniv)

10:07 AM  ×  3 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Thu, July 22

Design Notes

As promised, I want to discuss some aspects of the design and structure here.  Below is the unformatted list I used to track the features I wanted to address in the first release of this site:

x  new design
x  MT 3.0
-  choice of designs
-  choice of font sizes
-  better searching
x  rss for linkblog
-  comments for linkblog
x  better archives for linkblog
x  new archive structure
x  kill comment popups for normal blog
x  add trackbacks

X’s are for completed items, -’s aren’t.

The other items in my list are pretty self-explanatory.  Other blogs can send trackbacks to my posts, which you can see on individual entry pages on the side.  These trackbacks are links to entries on other sites with related subject matter to the post on my site.  Further reading and whatnot.  The other items were largely user requested.  Every link I post on the side is now archived forever.  There are rss feeds for the links.  There will be comments for the links shortly (I wanted to get this out in the wild sooner rather than wait for feature creep to rear its ugly face).  Additionally, there will be site searching, but that takes quite a while to develop and again, getting this site online was far more important.  And anyway why would you need a search for two posts?  User-selectable styles?  Did I say that?  We shall see…

You’ll notice there is no firm navigation anywhere to be found on the site.  Yes, the masthead of every page points back to home base, but that’s about it.  I did this because I want this site to break free from the cut and paste format of so many blogs.  I tried to ensure that every page allows access to related pages but only to related pages.  Heavy bloat is a sin equal to skimpy offerings.  I feel that my decision here adds a personalized and logical structure to every page, hopefully making page to page browsing easier and more streamlined for you.

This site was tackled with standards and accessibility firmly in mind from the outset.  At the bottom of every page you can find urls to check the validity of the structure, style and accessibility of whatever it is you’re viewing.  There are a few small errors here and there, but as Mike Davidson so firmly put it, completely strict validation is neither necessary nor entirely worthwhile.  I wrote these pages in xhtml 1.0 strict, but - and hold on here, this is shocking - I use the target attribute in the links in the comments.  This isn’t valid and that’s a-ok with me.  That’s the only error that really comes to mind as a frequently invalid item, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are others slinking in the shadows.

As mentioned in the colophon, I owe an absolutely enormous thank you to the wisdom of Jeffrey Zeldman.  Not to suggest he directly helped out with the work here at all, his is the most brilliant of guiding lights in web design.  Dishing out intelligent, practical and applicable advice and techniques, he has helped out more than I can say.  Between his Designing With Web Standards and his online mag A List Apart the debt I owe can be repaid only with results.  I think this site goes a long way in that department.

Web standards, man.  They produce results.

6:56 PM  ×  2 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks