Tag Archives: web design

If you have ever linked to my blog, you might have noticed that my URL’s are absolutely monstrous in size. Not only is my long domain name rather long, but I also happen to use the “pretty” style of permalinks … Continue reading →

This was a conversation rolling through my Twitter feed lately: how do we design good web service signup form? One that is unobtrusive, intuitive and inclusive. How many fields do you need? What is the best way to arrange them? … Continue reading →

If you are still using HTML4 for your new websites you should stop probably stop. And I’m not saying this because of standards compliance, or some sort of web snobbery. I’m saying this because it is a pragmatic thing to … Continue reading →

Back in December, I wrote a short post about building websites without server side includes. I used AJAX and magical hasbang url’s to get around the fact that the hosting space I was given on the university servers did not … Continue reading →

When you browse the web do you prefer websites which have light background and dark text or vice versa? I wrote about it some time ago and it seems to be a polarizing issue. Some people seem to prefer one … Continue reading →

Here is a neat HTML trick for printing HTML tables that most people don’t know about. Btw, designing your page to print well, is actually a joyless task full of insurmountable obstacles such as lack of any page break support … Continue reading →

Guess what time is it kids? It’s time for yet another boring, technical post. It’s that sort of week. Or rather it was – I usually queue my posts approximately 8-10 days in advance. This means that if I get … Continue reading →

When I saw IE8 being pushed out via Windows Update I was ecstatic. This meant that in a few months the number of installations of the first semi-standards compliant browser made by Microsoft will reach a critical mass. At that … Continue reading →

What I am about to show you is known as the Design Circle or 360 Degree Design principle. It states that you initial design and/or layout is usually correct, but it will never be accepted by the client who will … Continue reading →

As promised, I’m posting my semi-working sql parser below. You should keep in mind that the code is still very immature and full of bugs. One of my reasons for posting it here is that people will start playing around … Continue reading →

As you may know, I teach a introductory computer course in the evenings. One of the topics we cover are databases. Of course this is not a programming class, so there is a limited amount of things we can actually … Continue reading →

Back in February I showed you how to create a nice looking, dynamic home page on Google AppEngine. This implementation had major flaw – namely ugly URL’s. I have set it up so that the name of the page to … Continue reading →

Anyone who has been blogging for at least few years now, can attest to this: Youtube videos sometimes go away after they have been up for a while. Most of the video hosting services do not have policy of deleting … Continue reading →

Back in the day I used to have a fan site devoted to a pretty Australian actress Gigi Edgley. This is ancient history, and it predates this blog and therefore most of you guys. The website was primitive, clobbered together … Continue reading →

This scenario happens to me at least once a week if not more often. I see a name of a product, project, movie, video game or just an unfamiliar brand name of some sort and I proceed to google it … Continue reading →

It is no longer OK to use IE6. If I see it on your screen, I swear that I will hold you down and forcefully install IE8 on your machine. I’m not joking here. I may not be able to … Continue reading →

Here is a problem I’ve been having for a while now: large HTML tables take way to long to render, especially under IE. Why do you use tables, you ask? To display large amounts of data on the screen – … Continue reading →

I’m a big fan of Firebug. I believe that if you do any kind of web development, that’s the one Firefox extension you NEED to have on your computer. It is simply indispensable and I miss it greatly when I … Continue reading →

Last week, I talked about setting up a dynamic personal web page on Google AppEngine. I mentioned that it would be possible to grow and expand your page beyond the simplistic informational page I have shown you. More specifically, I … Continue reading →

I don’t know how many of you visit and/or subscribe to my little tumbleblog that I dubbed /dev/random. I started it around March 07 and I have been irregularly updating it since then almost on a daily basis. The idea … Continue reading →

A while ago I ranted and raved on how free email services look unprofessional. I recommend Google Apps as a very inexpensive solution. You get a professional looking email address, Gmail, Google Calendar and free home page hosting via Google … Continue reading →

I hate Internet Exploder with a passion. Why does it need to be such a piece of non-compliant, non standard crap? It’s not like I was trying to do something outrageous. It was simple and logical script, but it wouldn’t … Continue reading →

This blog got bubbled up to the front page of Digg and Reddit once or twice in the past. I remember that the browser post turned out to be a huge hit that made my server blow up. It’s always … Continue reading →

A while ago I mentioned that my school gives students and faculty Novel NetDrive accounts. This means we can all publish simple websites on their service, but get no server side scripting. This makes that space great for teaching students … Continue reading →

This is an outcome of a conversation I had recently. Apparently saying that MVC is a fairly simple concept is some sort of blasphemy. But it is. You really don’t need to use the almighty RAILS or a rails like … Continue reading →