What are Aussies searching for?

Google have released their Australian top searches for 2004. The news everyone was waiting for? Shannon Noll was searched for more than Guy Sebastian! (Yep... we all needed to know that!) Also worth a look are the global results.

Worth noting:

• Janet Jackson was more popular than John Kerry (Maybe that explains the result of the US election)


• Searches for cricket made number 8 in the sports list


• The top 4 global searches were all females (Britney, Paris, Christina Aguilera and Pamela Anderson)

Enough useless trivia? Yep!

Sundry Links

Maps

Drawing navigation maps using Illustrator (but this really applies to any vector-based drawing program.)

CSS Troubleshooting

Dave Shea's CSS Crib Sheet should get you out of trouble. Maybe!

Favourite Javascripts

A collection of Javascript snippets. Some useful, some not so. Also links to a multi-level suckerfish-style flyout. (What a mouthful!)

Woody

A free program for creating seamless wood-lloking textures and tiles.

Zebra Tables

Creating tables with different colour or style on alternating rows.

CSS Sprites

Using a single image for CSS hover effects instead of using the old javascript preloaders.

PHP image/text replacement

Using PHP's GD image library to dynamically replace text with an image on the fly.

Flash image replacement

Using Flash for your page titles. I must get around to trying this out one day...

Cross Column Pullouts

The latest issue of A List Apart deals with having pullouts span multiple columns.

For the uninitiated, a pullout is the name for the box above that says "Can this box span multiple comuns?". Floating it within a single column of text is pretty simple. Spanning more than one column is a bit trickier.

It looks great on a printed page, but I'm not sure why you'd want to create a multi-column content layout for screen output anyway. Why force your readers to scroll up and down the page more than once? I think the practical applications of this one are fairly limited. Although, having said that - I'm sure it could form the basis for something more practical.

Waterfall Web is Born!

I know there are archives here and such - but today I finally got around to putting this site up!

The archived posts prior to this one are actually copied over from my old Blogspot blog. I'll abandon that one now and put everything here instead.

What will this blog cover? Will anyone ever read it? Does anyone actually care?

Stay tuned...

Website Project Management Part 1 : Introduction

It's probably fair to say that most website projects are not managed, they just happen. Do up some designs, slice the graphics and code it up, drop some content in and viola! We have a website!

This might be okay if you're working on one or two at a time, but when you get to half a dozen or more, you'll quickly find you need some project management skills.

I'll be outlining here over the next few posts a method that works for me. I'm always fine tuning it, so it's by no means perfect, but if you currently have no management system in place at all this will hopefully set you heading in the right direction.

I'll be referring to phpCollab (as that's what we use), so it might be a good time to download, install and configure it before we go much further. There's setup instructions on their website, so I won't repeat them here.

There's your homework for now, next time we'll deal with basic project management principles.

Embrace the Web for what it is

The article A Dao of Web Design is a bit old now, but it's well worth another look. I had a client today looking for pixel-perfect placement across multiple browsers & screen resolutions. That's not what the web is about. Hours can be wasted getting line endings to be in exactly the right spot - and then on someone else's computer it will probably be different anyway!

Embrace the control that the web puts in the hand of the user & you'll sleep much better at night!

Browser Wars - Reloaded

If you're reading this then you're probably aware that Microsoft's stranglehold on the browser market is slipping. A survey from late November tells a dramatic story. Since May, it's total market share has fallen by 5%. That's pretty substantial in 6 months, especially considering that the fall has been taken up by Mozilla's Firefox, which people have to choose to download and install. It's not part of anyone's operating system.

It reinforces the need for testing of your website in multiple browsers and operating systems before it goes live. Whilst it was always a fallacy to only worry about one browser, now it's becoming statistically significant again.

There are a few issues with testing, though. The first one is installing multiple versions of Internet Explorer on the same version of Windows. Joe Maddalone managed to figure out how it's all done, and to simplify the setup process I've packaged up version 3, 4, 5 and 5.5 into a single, simple installation file.

• Download Multiple IEs, single installation file (10.2 Megabytes)
  Install at your own risk - I didn't develop any of this, I've just popped it all in a single installer. It works for me, though!

After that installing Firefox, Netscape, Opera and whatnot are easy. Of course, that doesn't solve problems with IE5 for Mac or Safari if you're a PC-only office (like here)! So maybe it's worth signing up with Browsercam and being done with it! ;)