Posting suspended while on vacation

There will be no new posts until the next week (March 24) as there haven’t been any for the past few weeks already due to the studies and the current vacation.

Topics for the upcoming articles include: how to automatically create thumbnail images for the blog post excerpts (from the images inside the article), and how to create one sentence post excerpts using regular expressions (REGEX) and PHP. Therefore — stay subscribed.

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How to Create Beautiful and Elegant HTML Lists Using CSS

HTML list have become one of the most used HTML elements for marking-up various semantic content structures — navigation, comments and even image galleries.

This article will explain and show you how to style lists inside blog posts, articles or other basic HTML documents.

Before we start, it is necessary to understand the importance of using specific HTML tags <ul> and <ol>, instead of simple numbering (like 1., 2. or •, ») for building lists. By applying content a semantic structure, we emphasize the relationships between different content elements. In case of lists we are able to imply that there is a certain relationship between all of the list members, which is possibly described by the paragraph introducing the list. It also helps screen reader users for whom the total number of items is announced before the rest of the list. Read more »

Web Design Critique: Consistency and Homogeneity of the Blog Layout

Blogherald.com is a blog featuring news from all around the blogosphere since 2003, and is run by a dozen of contributors and writers. It was founded by Duncan Riley from Australia and is now owned by Splashpress Media. The Blog Herald has gone through multiple design and layout variations, including the latest one made by Brian Gardner.

Web design and design in general should never be judged from the aesthetic viewpoint or by how much one likes/dislikes a particular color scheme, typeface or the layout of different content elements. The purpose of design is to make the content organized and accessible to the widest target audience possible. Design should be the information highway without traffic jams and clearly marked road labels which don’t require any Design Positioning System (DPS) in order to navigate. Read more »

Podcast of the week: WordPress Weekly

If you are a WordPress user, you should definitely check out the WordPress Weekly podcast hosted by Jeff from Jeffro2pt0.com. It covers the latest and greatest in the world of WordPress — from news, plugin and theme reviews to general discussions about the online publishing.

The show is recorded live every Friday evening at 21:00 EST using the TalkShoe recording platform. It follows the round table discussion format where apart from the panel of guests also any of the listeners can call in and have their own say about the topics being discussed. Read more »

WordPress Plugin: Custom Function Widgets

Many of the WordPress plugin authors don’t offer widgets, but only raw PHP functions (or hooks) which you have to insert into the theme’s template files. As the number of functions increases it becomes harder to manage it all, especially if you decide to uninstall some of them or add new ones.

It is especially inconvenient for those who are not so savvy, or don’t want to edit theme files. Moreover, if one decides to change the theme, the edits have to be repeated all over again.

Therefore, I made this Custom Function Widget plugin which allows you to create sidebar widgets without ever touching the theme’s files and use these widgets in any theme you like. Read more »

Take-away photo and image positioning CSS styles for blogs — idea for a plugin

After reading Kim’s comment regarding the Morning Racer theme, I had an idea of how to achieve a consistent image and photo placement in a WordPress blog even if you decide to change the theme.

The solution would be a plugin which would provide a “standard” set of CSS classes for styling different image (and other element) positioning.

The great thing is that you could use these CSS classnames with any theme you like as long as you have the plugin enabled. It would be also possible to specify a prefared classname prefix (for example, kd-wide, mo-withborder-a or pa-image-a) so that the plugin’s CSS doesn’t mess with the theme’s CSS. It could also contain CSS styles for lists (like the “flat” and “spaced” ones used on this blog), “important” messages, etc.

A kind of a portable image positioning thing. And you wouldn’t have to learn new CSS classnames or image layout ideas offered by different theme authors.

What do you think? Maybe you have a suggestion of other items (apart from images and lists) that you would like to have special styling.

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IE8 Version Targeting — Understanding and Discussing the Arguments

In defense of version targeting is a follow-up article by Jeffrey Zeldman to his previous post and the topic of browser version targeting feature planned for the upcoming release of Internet Explorer 8. His arguments (in favor of version targeting) might seem to be valid at first, but they are not enough in comparison to those who are against the version targeting.

Let’s start with an example (dates and browser versions are made up and are not important to illustrate the point). I made a website a two years ago (in 2006) and followed the W3C standards which resulted in a perfect content rendering in most of the standards aware browsers. Read more »

Browser Version Targeting vs. the Web Standards

The following articles in the latest issue of the A List Apart magazine explain the necessity of browser targeting with the upcoming release of Internet Explorer 8, which is expected to be the most standards aware browser from Microsoft to date.

• Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8 by Aaron Gustafson,
• From Switches to Targets: A Standardista’s Journey by Eric Meyer.

To me the idea of browser targeting seems absolutely absurd, and reasons for that are so many that it will require another post to explain them all in detail. Here are just a few. Read more »

Podcast of the week: Boagworld

Every week from now on I will suggest a podcast that I have been enjoying and you might too.

Lets begin with the Boagworld — a weekly audio podcast by Paul Boag and Marcus Lillington discussing the issues of web design, development and related news. Over 100 (and counting) episodes of the Boagworld are much more than just the Web design and development 101 course for someone starting out on the Web — it is The Late Night with Paul and Marcus for everyone involved in the web design.

Home page (and blog): www.boagworld.com
Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/boagworldpodcast

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