Shells, Scooby, basketball and chickens

A bunch of new entries to the CSS Zen Garden. Some I like:

• Like The Sea


• Chien


• Hoop - Tournament Edition


• And if for nothing else than the warped sense of humour: Hengarden

That's not a typo - Hengarden; not Zengarden...

Sort lists by dragging and dropping

Now this is pretty cool.

Most examples of list sorting I've seen involve little up and down arrows, and you have to click away and only move the item one step at a time.

Forget about that - drag and drop items on the list instead!

The example here uses cookies to store user preferences too, so you could probably enable this on yor website's standard navigation and let users put the links they usethe most at the top, and the ones they don't use much at the bottom. There are really dozens on applications you could use this. Check it out!

Getting Flash to talk to PHP

Straight from their website:

PHPObject is an opensource alternative to Flash Remoting for PHP developers. With PHPObject, you can call a method of a PHP class/library on your web server as if the class/library was defined in Flash itself. It takes care of your client-server connections and makes passing of variables (properties) between Flash MX and PHP easy, and thereby providing a convenient way to connect rich media clients with data and business logic residing on your server.

Sounds pretty useful... Here's the link: PHPObject

Inline Mini Tabs

Ever had to use float to get a list to display horizontally? All sorts of problems result: you have to contain the float, it can be difficult to centre or right-align the list, and so on.

Web Graphics have a nice little tutorial on how to use display: inline to good effect.

Much simpler!

A simple technique to improve sales

Well, it doesn't come much simpler than this:

Ask for the sale.

If you don't ask, you don't get.

Brendan Sinclair puts it this way: Make an offer. Not everyone will say "yes". In fact, many will say "no". But unless you make an offer, you're effectively getting a "no" from everyone!

Download speed detection

Just came across a useful piece of javascript, designed to test the connection speed of your visitor. I'm thinking that if you have a page with a lot of flash on it (or even a lot of static images), you might be able to use this to send people on slower connections to a "lighter" version. Or better still, load the lighter version by default and send people on faster connections to the "prettier" version.

I haven't tested it yet... but it looks like it might come in handy!

Font Sizes and Browser Quirks

This website has been online for almost 6 months now, And Ben has just pointed out a font sizing quirk that has made the text here unreadable on IE for Windows if the Text Size (in the View menu) is set to Smaller or Smallest.

And he was right - I'd never checked it before.

Turns out, using this is a no-no:
body {
font: 0.8em/1.6em Verdana, sans-serif;
}

Owen Briggs has written a fairly in-depth study (and taken a gazillion screen shots) highlighting the different methods of text sizing and their various behaviours across different browsers.

It appears a more reliable way to achieve the goal is:
body {
font: 100% Verdana, sans-serif;
}

#wrapper {
font-size: 0.8em;
line-height: 1.6em;
}

And before anyone gets on their soapbox and says I shouldn't specify a font size anyway, go and read Owen's post. I particluarly like:

"One sizing wisdom is that a document's main text should be left alone so it can display at whatever the browser default is. This sounds good, but since most browsers default to a text size that I have to back up to the kitchen to read, I decided the zen approach to design wasn't for me. Besides, if I was really zen I wouldn't write a stylesheet." (Italics mine)