Web Design
A Fresh Look at Mint
Posted on September 6th, 2005 @ 1:03 PM EST
Last night, Shaun Inman released his long-awaited stat-tracking application, Mint. Mint is the replacement for what was previously known as, ShortStat, which I’ve been using since I released the Retro version of my site in the beginning of May. Iíve been running it for about 15 hours now and have noticed some big improvements over ShortStat. The load time is significantly faster, the stats are no longer clogged with referrer spam, my visits to my site are now ignored, and the interface has a much cleaner look.
One of my favorite things about Mint is that it offers a quick and easy way to view all of my site’s important statistics in just one page view as opposed to having to click a lot get to various pages like with Urchin. Another great feature is the Pepper API, which allows others to create add-ons to make it better. Shaun is already offering two great additions; Local Searches, which records what your visitors are typing in on your local search form, and User Agent 007, which tracks visitor information such as their browser, platform, resolution, and Flash version.
Mint costs $30 per domain, which isnít too bad, however I think it would be a lot better if he decided to charge $10 or $15 for each additional license.
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Rebooted Baby!
Posted on May 1st, 2005 @ 12:35 PM EST
After a hectic week of juggling between projects and working on this site, the redesign of XHTMLed is complete! Now I can finally get some sleep! All of the pages should validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 2.0. The site has been thoroughly tested in Safari, Camino, OmniWeb, Firefox, Mozilla, IE 6, IE 5.5, Netscape, and Opera and everything looks good in all browsers except for the following:
- Borders in the Photographs section are not vertically lining up in Safari.
- The hyperlinks in the footer of the page do not work in IE due to a bug in IE’s implementation of style filters. Unfortunately, there isn’t a fix for this that I know of unless I use a GIF instead of a PNG image. The PNG image has a much smoother gradient compared to a GIF when it is used over top of a background that isn’t a solid color. So if you are still using IE here’s yet another reason to switch to Firefox.
If you notice any problems besides the ones listed above I’d appreciate it if you would post a comment or drop me an email and let me know.
Since I just decided to redesign the site two weeks ago, I didn’t have much time to work on the site. I started last Sunday and am pretty happy with the end result after scrambling to put something together to meet today’s deadline. I didn’t have a chance to add a bunch of new features so it is basically just a facelift, although I did add a Links page and made it so the last five links that have been added will appear in the sidebar on every page. There is also an RSS feed for it that you can subscribe to in your news reader as well. I also got rid of the atom feed for the main entries and have permanently redirected it to the RSS 2.0 feed.
If you like my design please head over to CSS Reboot and also May 1st Reboot (my site is on page 15) and give me a good rating. :)
Here’s a screenie of XHTMLed v1 in case you’re new to the site and would like to see what it previously looked like:
;)
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May 1st CSS Reboot
Posted on April 14th, 2005 @ 12:38 PM EST
I’ve decided to participate in this year’s May 1st Reboot and also the May 1st CSS Reboot. It’s been almost a year since I started the site and it’s time for a fresh look. In case you’re not familiar with the May 1st Reboot, it is a yearly relaunch of websites with new designs and is currently in it’s 5th year. The main problem with it though is that most of the entries are created with Flash. For this reason a new site has been started this year called CSS Reboot that is independently run.
The May 1st Reboot is a community project that brings together web professionals from all over and encourages them to collectively launch redesigns of their sites on May 1st. The only problem is the entries are all extremely Flash heavy. Sure, Flash has its place but where’s the CSS and web standards representation?
So this year CSS Reboot will attempt to bring together web professionals who design with CSS and standards in mind to launch their redesigns on May 1st along with all the Flash designers. This way we can both participate and show everyone just how great semantic, accessible design can be.
It’s going to be tough to make the deadline as it is just over two weeks away. Looks like I’m going to have to find some time to start coding!
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Style Master CSS podGuide
Posted on December 14th, 2004 @ 10:18 PM EST
I can’t believe it’s been over a month since my last post! I promise that I will start posting more frequently! westciv has released a portable edition of their Style Master CSS guide which can be read on an iPod. This will certainly come in handy in the future.
Link to this entry • Posted in Web Design •
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