Has anybody else noticed the proliferation of YouTube spam? I realized the other day that I get at least one message from YouTube a day. Most of these are from people I don’t know asking me to subscribe to or view somebody’s videos. I believe it has now reached MySpace levels.
While it does show how far YouTube has come, I wonder how well it is working. But as with all spam, you have to think that it does work, or people would not put so much time and energy into it.
I don’t usually do link posts, but I thought in this instance it was worth mentioning. I recently discovered 2 posts on Eric Meyer’s blog dealing with reset styles. So what are reset styles and why do we need to use them? For that, read Eric’s post, Reset Reasoning. In this post, Reset Reloaded, Eric lists exactly what his reset styles are so you can use them.
I think that Eric is right in using them. It does seem like reset styles are a better alternative than using a universal selector to remove margins and padding because, as Eric says, the universal selector removes padding and margins from everything. There are some cases where you might not want to do this, such as form elements.
I think I am going to give reset styles a try. How about you?
I just took Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch off my feed reader. To be honest, I did this because there is too much news at both of those sites per day for me to keep up with. While I do think they post valuable information from time to time, I do not feel like I am missing anything by removing them. This is because the big news will hit all the other SEO, Tech and Internet Marketing blogs that I read.
I am not discounting Danny Sullivan here. Search Engine Land is a great site and Danny is the man! But I cannot keep up with 20 posts a day no matter who is posting it. I think that Search Engine Watch feels like they lost a lot of their audience when Danny left, so now they are trying to stay on top by keeping up with Danny and Search Engine Land.
If I could not get the information elsewhere, I think that would be one thing, but I can. Plus, I always know if I am looking for the latest search engine news, I can go to either one of those sites and find it quickly.
I wish both companies luck, but I hope others do not do the same thing I am doing. If this is the case, they may have to rethink the amount of material they are posting. Sometimes, less is more.
Well, I noticed something strange today that I had not noticed before. Internet Explorer ignores the bottom margin I had set when it is the last item on the page. I had the same problem in IE 6 and 7, but not in Firefox or Safari.
To elaborate, I set a bottom margin on the last element on the page. IE ignored it and displayed the element flush with the bottom of the browser instead of showing a margin. When I added another item below it, it showed the margin, so it has something to do with being the last item on the page. This only happened in IE 6 and 7.
Solutions I thought of included setting a transparent border, increasing the height of the footer and setting padding on the body. The transparent border didn’t work in Firefox or IE. Increasing the height of the footer wouldn’t work because there was a bottom aligned background that needed to appear at a certain height. I felt that setting padding for the body was also not a good practice.
I tried everything I could think of to get around it. I ended up adding an empty div below the element and setting the height to what I wanted the margin to be. This worked. It was the best solution because all of the other things I could think of wouldn’t work because of the design constraints.
A friend of mine, David Ross, just gave me a hot tip the other day. I have a lot of problems with layout in Internet Explorer 6 and 7, usually so much so that I have to have extra IE-only styles for the builds that I do.
David told me to make sure when you use floating divs that you use display: inline for Internet Explorer. That did the trick! I have way less problems with layout in IE now thanks to this tip.
Ever want to use dropdowns, but you can’t because a Flash animation underneath the dropdowns shows through? We had this problem on multiple occasions. There is a simple solution. Make the Flash transparent by setting wmode=transparent in the code. Works every time.
I’m not sure if this will work with sIFR or not, or if sIFR even causes this problem, but I would recommend trying that first if you are stuck. You can set wmode to transparent in sIFR by adding wmode:"transparent" to the sIFR parameters.
Okay, the other day I was trying to use font-variant: small-caps and I could not get it to work. This sent me off on a wild goose chase of sorts because, as it turns out, I was also using text-transform: uppercase. Needless to say, the two don’t work together as text-transform: uppercase seems to override font-variant: small-caps in every browser I tried.
But, I noticed that I could not find any examples of what it looks like and what fonts it works with. So, I decided to do a blog post about it. Below, you will find several examples of this property in use with the basic web fonts.
Arial normally
Arial in small caps
Verdana normally
Verdana in small caps
Times New Roman normally
Times New Roman in small caps
Georgia normally
Georgia in small caps
One thing that you notice that it only capitalizes the letters that are already capitalized. For some reason, I thought that it capitalized the first letter in every word.
So there you go. It does work with basic web fonts Arial, Verdana, Times New Roman and Georgia. Do you have any more examples of which fonts this will work with?
This tool is right up your web 2.0 alley. It’s called Stripe Generator, and everything about says Web 2.0, from it’s design and functionality to it’s purpose.
It’s basically a web application to generate striped patterns to use in your web design. In case you didn’t know, striped backgrounds are the latest thing in web 2.0 design. It’s also basically a widget, which is another component of the web 2.0 world.
What’s cool about it is that it takes something that is not that hard to do and makes it that much easier. It also makes it really easy for the novice to do. The implementation is very smart in that it only does one thing but does it well. The interface is a particularly important part in this aspect. Notice the use of Ajax here!
The marketing is really well done also in that it is obvious who their core audience is and they have aimed it squarely at them. They have also made it easy to link back to them by including a banner. They even provide a mailing list I guess to stay up to date on their current projects. What they need to do is to figure out how to make this a widget that other people can add directly on their site.
Well, the inventors have really done a great job here. Hopefully, they will expand this concept into other areas. Well done!
I got a notice today from the Web Marketing Association that the 2007 WebAwards is now open for early entry for past participants. The official call for entries is not until Monday April 2nd, but the entry form is now up on the web site. So start thinking about which sites you want to enter! I believe the deadline is sometime in late May or early June.
Okay, word on the street is that Internet Explorer 7 has already gained more browser market share since launching in January than Firefox currently has. This means that if you are not designing for IE 7, you should be. IE 6 still has the majority, but according to Microsoft, IE 7 is around 25% and growing. I believe this since I have actually seen statistics backing this up.
So, I am now checking all sites that I build in IE 7. And yes, I am discovering that, while IE 7 is a huge improvement over IE 6, it still has problems rendering CSS. So much so that on my latest project, I had to create 2 IE only stylesheets, one for IE 6 and one for IE 7.
If you are using Firefox, which I hope you are, you may know about the web developer toolbar for Firefox. This is an extension for Firefox that gives you tools to easily debug all kinds of problems with web pages. Today I found a similar tool to help debug IE 7 display problems.
IE 7 copied many of it’s new features from Firefox, including the ability to add third party plug-ins called add-ons. You can find a directory of these add-ons here. The Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar is similar to the web developer toolbar for Firefox. It is not nearly as easy to use or as functional, but it has many of the same functions and can be useful for debugging in IE 7. It is a big improvement over debugging for IE 6.
Incidentally, one thing I noticed is that while this add-on is free, Microsoft charges for many of the add-ons on this site. I saw some as high as $300. While I don’t necessarily agree with that, it could be very lucrative for developers, if you are so inclined. That is if Microsoft is sharing the revenue.
I also see how it could give Microsoft an edge over Firefox. If they are sharing revenue with developers to build extensions and Firefox is not, they could in theory build better extensions and take more market share away from Firefox. Somehow though, I don’t see many people paying for browser extensions, so maybe not.