![[ Robin Leach of 'Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous' ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2008/css-implement/lifestyles.jpg "Somehow, 'happy' just doesn't say it..")
A great way to improve your CSS skills is to check out the stylesheets used by other websites. Digging behind the scenes and exploring some applied CSS provides new ideas and insights about everything from specificity and formatting to hacks and shortcuts. Learning CSS by reading about ideal cases and theoretical applications is certainly important, but actually seeing how the language is applied in “real-world” scenarios provides first-hand knowledge and insight. While there are millions of standards-based, CSS-designed websites to […] Continue reading »
As announced at IE Death March, I recently dropped support for Internet Explorer 6. As newer versions of Firefox, Opera, and Safari (and others) continue to improve consistency and provide better support for standards-based techniques, having to carry IE 6 along for the ride — for any reason — is painful. Thanks to the techniques described in this article, I am free to completely ignore (figuratively and literally) IE 6 when developing and designing websites. Continue reading »
Recently, I have been getting a lot of requests for multiple-loop configurations in WordPress. It seems that multiple-column, multiple-loop configurations are in high demand these days, especially ones that display posts like this: First column, first loop: display posts #1-5 Second column, second loop: display posts #6-10 Third column, third loop: display posts #11-15 Using WordPress and a little CSS, this configuration is relatively easy to accomplish. Let’s cut right to the chase.. Continue reading »
In my previous article on redirecting 404 requests for favicon files, I presented an HTAccess technique for redirecting all requests for nonexistent favicon.ico files to the actual file located in the site’s web-accessible root directory: # REDIRECT FAVICONZ <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c> RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} favicon.ico [NC] RewriteRule (.*) http://domain.tld/favicon.ico [R=301,L] </ifmodule> As discussed in the article, this code is already in effect here at Perishable Press, as may be seen by clicking on any of the following links: Update: I’ve removed the […] Continue reading »
For the last several months, I have been seeing an increasing number of 404 errors requesting “favicon.ico” appended onto various URLs: http://example.com/favicon.ico http://example.com/2007/06/12/favicon.ico http://example.com/2007/09/25/absolute-horizontal-and-vertical-centering-via-css/favicon.ico http://example.com/2007/08/01/temporary-site-redirect-for-visitors-during-site-updates/favicon.ico http://example.com/2007/01/16/maximum-and-minimum-height-and-width-in-internet-explorer/favicon.ico When these errors first began appearing in the logs several months ago, I didn’t think too much of it — “just another idiot who can’t find my site’s favicon..” As time went on, however, the frequency and variety of these misdirected requests continued to increase. A bit frustrating perhaps, but not serious enough to […] Continue reading »
![[ Best Title Separator ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2008/misc-chunks/best-title-separator.jpg)
While writing my previous article on creating the perfect WordPress title tags, I deliberately avoided discussing the use of separators in titles. I feel that the topic is worthy of its own article, enabling a more thorough exploration of the details. Title separators are the symbols, punctuation, and other characters used to distinguish between various parts of the page title. For example, a title may include the blog name, post title and blog description, with each element separated by a […] Continue reading »
This was just too juicy to pass up. Blogstorm recently blogged about an easy JavaScript technique for making any website editable. After checking it out for myself, I just had to share it here at Perishable Press. Here it is: javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0 Paste that single line of code into the address bar of any modern browser and have fun editing the page. Obviously, any changes will only apply to the page as seen in your browser, not the […] Continue reading »
![[ Thumbnail: Google W3C Invalidation ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2008/google-check/google-invalidation_mid.gif)
Consider the Google home page — arguably the most popular, highly visited web page in the entire world. Such a simple page, right? You would think that such a simple design would fully embrace Web Standards. I mean, think about it for a moment.. How would you or I throw down a few lists, a search field, and a logo image? Something like this, maybe: Continue reading »
As more and more people discover the flexibility, specificity, and all-around usefulness of Microsoft’s proprietary downlevel conditional comments, it behooves us to reiterate the importance of utilizing proper syntax. Specifically, for downlevel-revealed, or negative, conditional comments, the commented content will remain visible unless the associated if condition proves false. Continue reading »
In celebration of CSS Naked Day, Perishable Press has disabled it’s CSS stylesheet for today, April 9th, 2008 (which also happens to be my 36th birthday)! What a great way to celebrate the occasion. What are you waiting for? Go get naked!! ;) Continue reading »
![[ Content Negotiation ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2008/misc-chunks/content-negotiation.jpg)
In this article, I discuss the different MIME types available for XHTML and explain a method for serving your documents with the optimal MIME type, depending on the capacity of the user agent. Using either htaccess or PHP for content negotiation, we can serve complete, standards-compliant markup for our document’s header information. This is especially helpful when dealing with Internet Explorer while serving a DOCTYPE of XHTML 1.1 along with the recommended XML declaration. According to the RFC standards1 produced […] Continue reading »
![[ Jump Menu ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2008/jump-menu/access-deco.jpg)
Recently, a reader named Don asked about this theme’s accessibility (accesskey) jump menu located at the top of each page. Several people have commented that they like the way the jump menu “lights up” upon gaining focus. Whenever a user hovers their cursor over the region at the top of the page, all links in the jump menu change to a more visible color. Then, as the cursor moves over the various menu items, each jump link is further highlighted […] Continue reading »
![[ Screenshot: Creative Commons Deed - Remixed ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/online/pages/creative-commons/article/webpage_cc-deed.jpg)
Not too long ago, I played with the idea of releasing article content under a Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0) License. At the time, I wanted to host my own copies of the two associated CC license pages. During the process of uploading the pages to my own server, several minor adjustments (regarding image paths, etc.) needed to be made to the source code. After tweaking a few things in the XHTML code, I began snooping around in the pages’ CSS […] Continue reading »
![[ WordPress RSS Feed ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2008/misc-chunks/exclude-feed-content.png)
Just a quick tip on how to create error-free links to feed validation services for feeds that are redirected through Feedburner. For example, let’s say our site’s main feed is originally located at: Continue reading »
As some of you (e.g., Louis) may have noticed during the recent site redesign, I decided to switch the default doctype from XHTML 1.0 Strict to XHTML 1.1. Just in case you were wondering, XHTML 1.1 is different than XHTML 1.0 in three important ways1: On every element, the lang attribute has been removed in favor of the xml:lang attribute On the a and map elements, the name attribute has been removed in favor of the id attribute The “ruby” […] Continue reading »
Just a note to web designers and code-savvy bloggers: make sure your custom error pages are big enough for the ever-amazing <cough> Internet Explorer browser. If your custom error pages are too small, IE will take the liberty of serving its own proprietary web page, replete with corporate linkage and poor grammar. How big, baby? Well, that’s a good question. In order for users of Internet Explorer to enjoy your carefully crafted custom error pages, they need to exceed 512 […] Continue reading »
