Andrej Koelewijn

I’ve looked at using a desktop blog editor before, but couldn’t find one which i liked. My main reason for using a blog client would be to avoid having to upload images. I just want to write a text, drag some images into the text and save it to my blog. I tried some clients but they all required me to upload images through some ftp window. Too much work. I want something which works like MS-Word. Paste an image into you text, resize and crop it in your document, and save it. No more external image programs required.

So far, Live Writer seems to be better already. I’ve just pasted a screenshot into this text and resized it. Cropping isn’t supported as far as i can tell. You can apply some effects to your image, like black and white and watermarking, but no cropping. Hope it ends up in the production release.

What about uploading? Let’s test…

Update: image upload is not seemless with wordpress. I had to enter ftp configuration details, like where to save the image. Also, i would think that a good image program would generate smaller images.

Conclusion: not bad, not great, but better than an html interface when adding a lot of images with a post.

There’s a very interesting post on Veerle’s blog: A response from an accessibility consultant from BlindSurfer. It seems like web standards, xhtml and css are not improving accessability for blind people, yet. Apparently, screenreader manufactures are as slow implementing support for web standards as some other big software companies. Worth a read.

WordPress 1.5 has been released. I’m actually pretty happy with WordPress version 1.2, so i’m not sure if i’ll be upgrading soon. After installing Spam Stopgap Extreme(now called hashcash) all comment spam has disappeared, so my biggest problem with 1.2 has been solved.

There’s a good article on onlamp.com about some of the new features in php5: Why PHP5 Rocks!. I’ve been doing some development with php recently, and reading this list with new features makes me want to switch to php5 immediately: better mysql support, better oo implementation, better xml and soap support, exception handling, and support for tidy. The only question is, when will it be stable enough for hosting companies to start using it?

We’ve just gone live with a new website for IT-eye. We’re using the Infoglue CMS, which has been a pleasure to use. The html has also been improved, as most pages should now be valid xhtml. I’ve also removed all tables used for layout. I’ve used the suckerfish dropdowns method for the dropdown menu’s, but unfortunately i’ve run into a mozilla bug, the dropdown’s don’t work over div’s with “overflow: auto”.

I’ve also added rss feeds for our list of articles and news items.

Just found usability.gov while searching for some usability guidelines on page length. Usability.gov has listed a great number of usability guidelines and also indicates how important these guidelines are.

LaughingMeme has a list of web based color tools.

As i wrote a couple of days ago, i’ve been working on converting a website with a lot of tables for layout to an tableless website using xhtml and css. The result is ok in mozilla but not very good in ie6.

The problems in ie are mostly caused by two bug, which are well documenten on the internet:

1. margins for floating divs are doubled if you don’t specify display:inline,
2. extra margin is added to the bottom of list items.

The page now looks ok in both mozilla and ie, althought the pictures in the top don’t change in ie when you hover over the menu. I’ll probably have to use some javascript or ie behaviours to fix this.

Some usefull ie workarounds are listed on mezzoblue and on Explorer exposed!.

I spend tonight converting this site into a valid xhtml website. Went pretty smoothly, even the images change when you hover over the menu (the pictures at the top, not the background image under the links). Not one single line of javascript.

I was pretty happy, untill i tried it with IE6 (I developed it using mozilla 1.6) I didn’t expect it to work in IE5 or IE5.5, but i had some hopes for IE6. Well, dream on. So far for standards support.

I’ll research the issues tomorrow, but seeing the current result in IE6, i don’t expect very much anymore.

The Web Developer plugin is a really usefull extension for Mozilla and Firefox. It adds a toolbar with a lot of usefull tools for web developers. I installed it because i wanted an easy way to see the HTTP headers sent by my web server. Using the web developer pluging these are easily displayed by selecting “information | view response headers”. Also usefull is the “Validate Local HTML” function, which will validate a page, even if it’s only available on your intranet. Another function i’ve been using is “Display Form Details” which will show the source code for form tags in your page. You don’t need to search in your source code anymore, it’s simple displayed with the form element on your page. Great stuff!

Found this usefull multicolumn layout generator through a list apart. Getting it right can be a pain, especially in netscape 4, which is why i usually don’t bother.

I just found the website of the city of Assen, a city in the Netherlands. It has a big image on the home page saying ‘visually handicaped’. My first though was, nice, they actually considered handicaped people when designing the page. Now, i’ve never actually worked with a braille translater, and i also don’t have to use very large fonts, but somehow using an image to help the visually handicaped doesn’t seem clever to me. You can’t easily increase the font size of an image, and a braille translater doesn’t show the image at all. Well maybe the alt attribute of the image makes sense? You know what the alt image contains? ‘Press here for a different font’... Does that make sense? Yah baby, show me a different font on my braille translater! The rest of the page also doesn’t make much sense, the actual contents is burried in 8 or 9 levels of tables, and then the paragraph titles don’t use H tags, but are just marked STRONG. That’s not something the braille translater can use to create a table of contents with.