Typetester does something that shold have occurred to all us web geeks sooner. Check any type you like and you can see how it will display in different sizes, colors, treatments, etc.
Fellow webslinger Czeltic Girl hipped me to it.
A good friend of mine, Arman, sent me this in an email. I post it not as endorsement, but as food for thought.
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Missing the Point
By Sankara Saranam
The Danish cartoon affair got me thinking of another cartoon. Imagine Jesus in the foreground holding a bomb. In the background an obstetrician is walking out of a Planned Parenthood building.
I won’t pictorially present the cartoon, but not because I want to avoid getting bombed. I just can’t draw and the cartoon is so simple that describing it gets the point across.
At least, you would think so.
(more…)
The Onion puts into words what we’ve all been feeling since the slow decline of the meaning of the word celebrity. (I was going to add more prepositional phrases there until I could no longer stand it, but it turns out three is my limit).
Some Valentine’s funnies for you:
Something Awful Star Wars Valentines
Cap’n Wacky’s unfortunate Valentines
McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Obsessive-Compulsive Valentines.
Diesel Sweeties’ Cards are a waste of money: 1, 2, 3
And the Geek Love Poem shirt that I got MHG just because, but that arrived near Valentine’s Day.
Dick Cheney misses bird, hits fellow hunter
“Serves him right,” Cheney was quoted as saying. “You pathetic fleshlings are vulnerable to weapons that cannot hope to penetrate my exoskeleton. Even your attempts to use an electro-magnetic pulse to stop my cardiac-unit have failed in the face of the evil that animates my cyborg corpse. TREMBLE!”
Cheney then peeled back his lips to reveal a double-row of burnished titanium teeth, took a sizable bite out of a nearby puppy and began complex sexual intercourse with a Whirlpool washer/dryer unit.
Link proliferated from Davezilla.
Full text of recent spam I received, that I read due to the interesting subject line, Fucking Saint Valentine:
What are you to do if you have bad erection? Especially
in the forthcoming Saint Valentines Day???
Don t worry, it is not the last of pea-time…
The most simple way is to visit our site, order the
medication and that is all you are to do!
Do not kill the clock!
In anticipation of the ACW in Las Vegas, I bring you Self-defence with a Walking-stick: The Different Methods of Defending Oneself with a Walking-Stick or Umbrella when Attacked under Unequal Conditions (Part2). Part 2!
Actually, Czeltic Girl brought it to me, and The Morning News brought it to her.
These guys did a swell job cleaning up Neil Gaiman’s site. Part of why I wasn’t reading it as much as I would have liked was due to the sort of slapdash, haphazard old design.
I do have to complain, though, in three stages. The first is that I should have patented the Webslinger moniker for web programmers and design when I first thought of it about three years ago. I humbly admit these guys beat me to it, but I wholeheartedly object to the S at the end being replaced with a Z.
The second stage is that their main site’s design is simple enough to accommodate a clean standards-compliant, forward-thinking, table-free layout, but they have several legacy techniques cluttering it up. If I had just done such a smart job on a well-read site like Neil’s, I would have taken some time to quickly update my own site to match.
Edit: Upon looking at the source for Neil’s site, let me rescind that comment: it’s just as ugly as their corporate site. Such a clean design is deserving of better code. Call me, webslingers, and let me hook you up.
The third stage is that someone has written Neil, in regards to those complaining about the new far-superior design, that he should take the CSS Zen Garden approach and allow people to “skin” his site and perhaps even submit skins. While I’m all for this open approach to viewing, I now must rapidly finish my own “skinning” project for this blog to beat the more famous Mr. Gaiman to the punch. And that’s just not likely.
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UPDATE: Neil’s response: I loved the idea of doing the CSS thing (http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/184/184.css&page=0) and letting people create “skins” for the blog, but the reply I got from our webmistress, Stephanie, was As for the reader’s suggestion: I’m told this is extremely difficult to implement as this was not considered before the site was created, and involves the integration of many different web technologies. Also, every “skin” submitted would have to be tested on all major browsers and platforms as we did for the current site to make sure it looked correct for each user. Coupled with that, it would require hours of testing for each skin created to fix any bugs. Which seems to be a polite way of saying no.
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I take similar issue with the advertising for Microsoft’s upcoming Internet Explorer 7. in true microsoft fashion they are extolling the virtues of their new browser by implying that their browser does things that other browsers does not. In actuality they are playing catch-up on technologies that have been adopted more that a year ago, essentially copying Firefox as they did the Mac OS so long ago.
Is it better for everyone that they try to give people what they want by “upgrading?” Yes, i suppose. Did they do it because they are becoming more progressive? Not at all; they originally branded the browser a dead technology and only decided to release a new version when people got wise to Firefox and its popularity threatened the 25% mark. Will IE7 be the new IE6? No doubt.
We will be stuck with it because it will have further integration with .NET, a dubiously popular technology, and any other irresponsibly coded Microsoft claptrap that attracts the lazy or ignorant. Le sigh. I know I sound like a zealot, but it simply comes down to progress, people. Let’s move forward, not let Microsoft dictate just how long we stagnate.
