Interactive Llama

There is an army of spiders out there.  Some, like GoogleBot, you want scanning your site to be listed in their search engine. Many however have a devious purpose–to collect email addresses to add to spam email lists. If your email address is already out there, then there is no pulling it back in. The only way to eliminate spam is to create a different address and inform all your contacts that you have changed email addresses.

Ways to combat email spam:

• A non-linked image
• HTML entity encoding
• Client-side obfuscation/abstraction (via JavaScript)
• Server-side redirect
• Contact form (no email address listed)

If your email address, is spelled out with any client viewable code, it is possible to obtain. Now that search engines can read PDF documents, including your email within a PDF as text may be suspect. I have not gone into great depth on any of them below but have provided a short description of each method with advantages and disadvantages listed. (more…)

The need

Professional web developers have been aware of CSS sprites or CSS rollovers/hovers since 2004 (The rollover term is taken JavaScript and hover term is taken from CSS). They are the background graphics that change position based on mouse hover thus eliminating the need for JavaScript image swaps and image caching since the “mouse on” and “mouse off” are one image. I have been using sprites for years. It is a more tedious process than clicking Swap image on a DreamWeaver drop down menu, but it produces more accessible and more clean code. The most tedious part of creating CSS sprites for menu navigation is aligning the static (in-active) and hover (active) images. This script solves this problem by taking two images and merging them into one. I hope this increases your productivity and creates a more standards-compliant web.

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No matter how carefully you design your site, visitors will always request a page that is missing, moved, or non-existent (especially if you experiment with your site structure frequently). This past week, I’ve been obsessed with HTTP 404 errors and working on creating a better 404 Not Found page. The default 404 page for WordPress offers the opportunity to search the blog, but you should go another step. Usability is one of (if not the) key trait of a great website. If thought has gone into even your 404 error page, then I’d guess that much thought has been put into your entire site. (more…)

I’ve been familiarizing myself with WordPress 2.5’s new media gallery. If you’ve visited my blog before, you know I don’t upload many images, but I’m hoping to upload many images to my wife, Rachel Steely’s website. I was annoyed to find out that the default image posting size is medium (which is about 300px). On top of that, if you select full size, it doesn’t mean full size. It means your WordPress theme’s column width. So unless you are using Kubrick your media size will not be your column width. (more…)

If you have ever wanted to turn a plain text link, http://www.smjdesign.com, into a "linked" HTML version, http://www.smjdesign.com, you can now. Pass the following function your entire text field and it will find all your links and return tagged HTML.

function replace_plain_text_link($plain_text) {
$url_html = preg_replace(
'/(?<!S)((http(s?):\/\/)|(www.))+([\w.1-9\&=#?\-~%;\/]+)/',
'<a href="http$3://$4$5">http$3://$4$5</a>', $plain_text);
return ($url_html);
}
echo replace_plain_text_link("hi this is dummy text before
http://www.smjdesign.com hi this is dummy text after")

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On Saturday, February 9 at 11:30 am, I spoke at BarcampIndy 2008 on Graphic Web Design and Cascading Style Sheets. All presentations were broadcast on BlipTV. You can view a video of this presentation on BlipTV.

The premise of my presentation was to show an overview of the process between layout in Illustrator and PhotoShop to coding in HTML and CSS. I find that web design is often segmented between the coders and graphic designers. I propose that the best outcome can come from bridging that gap. I do this in my daily workplace and try to show tips and techniques for others to bridge that gap. The time slot was only a half hour, so I could not go into coding detail, but only point to tutorials via links. (more…)

A new HTML standards for email clients advocacy site has sprung up. It’s called Email Standards Project. I sincerely hope that it is able to make a difference. I’ve personally had issues with the major discrepancies in email clients at my job. I’ve heard that Microsoft Outlook 2007 is unfortunately using the Word HTML engine instead of the Internet Explorer Engine. The full list of clients that are on the Average or Poor list are:

• Apple .Mac
• Google Gmail
• Lotus Notes 8
• Outlook 2007
• Windows Live

This is based on their acid test. If you are involved in developing internet applications or sites and aren’t familiar with acid tests (and you should be!), visit WebStandards.org for the web browser acid test.

So what’s a person to due in the mean time–structural tables and inline CSS, of course! That’s what! So barbaric and so 1999! Here is a tutorial on what HTML/CSS you can use across multiple email clients.

Overview of Search Engine Optimization for Gallery2

I hope this is a starting point for those that want to make Gallery2 more SEO. Please remember that the SEO doesn’t make you show up higher in search listings, but makes it easier for this to happen. Having other people link to your pages is always the best thing you can do (at least for Google). Any additions to this list would be helpful. If you have questions or would like clarification, please ask.

Technical Background on Gallery2

Some of the suggestions on this list involve editing template and class files, do this at your own risk. Gallery2 administrators recommend copying the file you are editing to the subdirectory called “local” and editing the file there. Gallery2 will then use that file instead of the original. This also means that upgrades will not overwrite your edited file. In the examples below, I am using Gallery 2.2.3. (more…)

For a long time, I have had problems with Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 crashing at the close of the program. I had never had a problem with Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 crashing at startup until the other day. I surmise that Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 had closed and crashed as it usually did, but this time it wrote an invalid or corrupt Site Cache file. It took me a few hours to remove all parts of Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 from my system, but I finally found the corrupt site cache file in users/{username}/library/application support/macromedia/common/8/Sites/

I have not tested Dreamweaver CS3, but prior versions of the program do a mediocre job of displaying CSS correctly. For instance, div tags do not always display correctly without inline style tags–which we all know is such a coding faux pas. This has led to a departure from using a WYSIWYG editor and to using the browser to construct webpages. Below are the best aids I have found in debugging and editing webpages in the browser Mozilla FireFox. (more…)