Dave Shea kicks his site up a few notches with the introduction of A Second Voice, a new section of mezzoblue which features different authors writing about their areas of expertise, all relating to web design in some way.
The first installment, Build it, and They Will Come, Nic Steenhout focuses on Accessibility. Check out the comments–they are already starting to add some useful info to the article.
![Separating Content From Presentation [book cover]](/p/blog/cssbookcover.gif)
Something is indeed coming, and coming soon; unfortunately, good news often comes at a price, and the price in my case has been limited time to do anything other than work, eat and sleep (and little of the last two), which includes managing SuperfluousBanter.
Posting has been rather infrequent of late (as noted by readers like Adam Polselli), and it’s due to a few projects which have been taking up quite a bit of my time over the last few weeks (most of them warrant the time spent…).
I will be writing more in the week(s) to come (expect limited posting until some of these projects have been completed) but here’s a quick run-down of what to expect:
Everything is quite exciting at the moment, which is a nice change of pace. I’m also working on ideas for a few articles that I will attempt to have published (ALA, Digital Web, etc.) — I’ll publish them here if I have to (ahh, the joys of independent publishing).
Changes continue to be made to SuperfluousBanter, some noticeable, others hidden behind the scenes — I’ll write up a list of changes and any interesting tidbits once some of these other projects are underway. One you will see soon is a transition from JavaScript to CSS for the style switcher rollovers in the sidebar, as well as further use of the FIR technique (or its recently discovered alternatives throughout the site (for more on FIR, read Dave Shea’s new article for Digital Web Magazine, In Defense of Fahrner Image Replacement).
Finally, in addition to The Old Technology Giveaway, I’ll be posting another little contest early next week (possibly over the weekend) with some more useful prizes, and a little less-esoteric theme.
While sorting through some old piles of paperwork, SyQuest cartridges, and floppies, I came across a curious item: An original AOL 2.5 for Macintosh Installer Disk, still shrink-wrapped!
So I started wondering “what other mint-condition examples of useless technology are hidden in the collections of techies like me?” Since I can’t very well go rummaging through your houses, under your desks, etc., the only way for me to know is for you, my cherished reader, to submit links to photos of your ancient technological curios in the comments of this post.
“What’s in it for me?” you ask? Well, I thought of that too, so as incentive, I’m offering up another piece of computing history to the individual whose submission tickles my fancy the most (this is, of course, purely subjective, but it’s my giveaway, so deal with it) — the top two “winners” (term used loosely) will receive (shipping paid by me, and the first place submission gets first choice of the prizes) either an original Quadra 950 Motherboard w/68040 Processor! (pics: one, two) or a shrink-wrapped 3M 590MB Rewritable Optical Disk! (pics: one, two). Hey, we are talking old technology here…
This “contest” will run for an almost indefinite amount of time, but no later than November 30th (so you can get your prize in time for X-mas — if you celebrate another, earlier holiday, good for you, but the November 30th deadline will stay put).
Also, if you link to this contest (“The Old Technology Giveaway”) from your site, it will certainly make for a much more interesting experiment (and I’ll get lots of traffic too… ;-) — feel free to use my mini-banner in your sidebar.
Happy digging!
UPDATE: To paraphrase the walrus, the time has come — the contest is now closed to new entries, and judging is underway (sounds serious, don’t it?). The winners will be posted within days…
I’ve made some changes to the Comments layout on each individual entry page (you may need to refresh the page, reload the style sheets, or clear your browser cache if you can’t see the changes).
Now the Post details for each comment are listed above the comment, which makes much more sense, and I’ve also added an icon to each comment, adding to the branding of the site. The icon is placed as a background image with CSS, rather than cluttering up the page with tons of <img> tags.
The entire comment area (save the comment form) is now set apart from the rest of the page with a light background color and border, and some padding.
First of all, no, this has nothing to do with the Incredible Hulk — I spent a good deal of time this weekend revisiting the site design for Webgraph, which has been sitting idle in my hard drive for too long. I’ve had the basic design completed since the beginning of the year (!), so I decided to start testing the colors on different systems before I consider the scheme (and the exact shades) finalized, and this is where I start to run into problems: I’ve dealt with gamma issues before (PC’s and Mac’s have different gamma settings, which cause colors to display differently between platforms, and even between different monitors if they’ve been calibrated), but I can’t recall ever seeing as much of a difference as I am with this particular case.
To illustrate the problem, I’ve created an example (view test image) showing what I consider to be the acceptable variations in shades of black (concentrate on the nav bar, behind the words “Home, Our Work” etc.) between the top and bottom borders, the solid background, and the diagonal pattern (all shades of black). If you are viewing this on a PC, you might not see the pattern, or the top and bottom borders. This is the problem.
On the desktop PC’s here (the problem does not occur on our Dell laptop, because LCD displays do not generally share the same gamma problems as CRT’s) the entire area from top border to bottom border (except the white lettering) looks black. No pattern, no difference between the borders and the background. On our Mac’s (some of them calibrated, others straight out of the box, all CRT) the difference in shades is clearly visible.
The problem is this: when I change the shades so they show up as subtle differences on the PC’s, it is so incredibly light on the Mac’s as to make it look stupid.
Aside from any ideas (which are most welcome), I would like to use you, my valued reader, as a test user: please post your review of the above test image in the comments of this post, and include your testing environment (OS, browser, type of monitor, color depth, calibrated or not, gamma setting if known) and let me know which of the variations you prefer (or none, if you cannot see the pattern at all).
I really appreciate your help, and if you can assist with an direct solution, I’ll include a comment in the final site’s HTML listing you as a contributor, and linking to your site.
