Standards

It's interesting how standards shift over time. I'm thinking specifically about phones and web applications. Sound quality on cell phones (and land lines, for that matter) is terrible, and web apps are usually unbearably slow. Why is this accepted?

People accept what is normal to them. We all become accustomed to things. For typical phone use, sound quality has never been great. And for the next generation that use cell phones much more than land lines, dropped calls and even worse sound quality are normal. That's just the way it is. We've always been at war with Eurasia.

The same goes for web apps. The slow response time, frustratingly short session expirations, and relative reliability are normal. It takes a wise person or a person with a new perspective to see how things could be improved. How much of what we deal with is acceptable, and what needs work?

Twitter, Schmitter

From the excellent (and unfortunately no longer updated) blog,

Creating Passionate Users by Kathy Sierra.

Twitter is ridiculous. Have we really "progressed" so far that we need to know what every single one of our 567 MySpace friends is doing at this very instant? I mean, c'mon. No, John, I don't really care that you sneezed 5.13 seconds ago.

Maybe social networking is just pointless all together. MySpace and Facebook (or MyFace and SpaceBook, as I like to call them) are enormous networks with more people than you could ever hope to meet in your lifetime. I think the old adage of "Everything in moderation, including moderation" comes into play here. Social networks can be very useful and fun for some things, but they are no substitute for person-to-person interaction. Excess amounts of time spent on them may lead to deteriorating social skills and hermit-like behavior. You may (God forbid) have to go out sometime, see real people, scream "Humans!" and run away in terror.

I know I haven't been getting out enough when I start updating my blogs and/or Facebook (yes, I have one) too often. And do my friends really need to know what I'm doing all the time? I don't think so.

I suppose people are just searching for "connected-ness." That's why they use MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, Digg, Technorati, Google Groups, email, and text message. Don't even get me started on texting. I'll rant about that another time.

For now, c u l8r. (Updated 7.6 seconds ago)

Fixing Star Crash Blogger Theme in IE

The theme I am currently using for this blog, Star Crash by Blogcrowds, doesn't natively display correctly in Internet Explorer. The entire sidebar ends up at the end of all the blog posts, and that's really not acceptable. Here's how to fix that.

The Underscore Hack

The underscore hack is a way to hide certain CSS rules from all browsers except IE. Because our page renders correctly in more standards-compliant browsers (Firefox, Safari, etc.), we don't want to change the CSS for all of them. By putting an underscore in from of our property name (width: becomes _width:), we can show CSS to IE and all other browsers will ignore it. You can read more about this hack here.

The !important CSS Flag

The !important flag in CSS sets a rule to have precedence over any other rule that conflicts with it. If you have a paragraph with the class "note," and there are two rules that apply to that class, the one with the !important flag will take precedence. It can be quite handy. Here's an excerpt from the excellent book CSS Mastery by Andy Budd on the cascade and specificity:

With even a moderately complicated stylesheet, it is likely that two or more rules will target the same element. CSS handles such conflicts through a process known as the cascade. The cascade works by assigning an importance to each rule. Author stylesheets are considered the most important, followed by user stylesheets, and finally the default stylesheets used by your browser or user agent. To give users more control, they can override any rule by specifying it as !important–even a rule flagged as !important by the author.

The cascade works in the following order of importance:

• User styles flagged as !important
• Author styles flagged as !important
• Author styles
• User styles
• Styles applied by the browser/user agent

The Fix

The <div> element we need to change the style of has the ID of #beta. I, unfortunately, am not entirely sure why IE wants the element's position to be absolute, but that seems to solve the problem. Using our newly-acquired knowledge of the IE underscore hack and specificity in CSS, here's the code we need to insert into our template:

#beta {
    _position: absolute !important;
}

Voila! The Star Crash Blogger theme now renders correctly in Internet explorer. You can insert the code anywhere in the template; I inserted mine near the top so I can remember that it's a manual edit I've made.

If you've fixed your Blogger template, learned about the IE underscore hack for the first time, or learned something new about CSS, let me know in the comments! I always like hearing from you.

Ajax Loader

Ever wanted those cool little spinner graphics that have come to be known as the "Ajax loader" in your webpages? Well, search no further. As you can see above, there are a wide range to choose from at AjaxLoad.info. You generate a custom loader graphic after selecting the loader type, loader color, and background color. There's also the option to have a transparent background (Although in my experience, some of the loaders don't look very good on a dark webpage even with the image background set to transparent). Once you've generated your file, click "Download It," and you're done!

AjaxLoad.info nice service that performs a specific task very well.  It has already proven useful to me in my web development.  Try it out!

AjaxLoad.info

Web 2.0 Apps I like

I just found and voted in the Webware 100 Awards 2008. "From 300 finalists, pick the best products in ten categories," states the website.  As of right now, 1,880,462 people have voted, so I think it will be a pretty rounded result. I really do like and use some of those things, so I figured I'd give them my vote. They all perform exceptionally well in their respective categories. Here's what I voted for:

You too can vote in the Awards; anyone can!

Webware 100 Awards 2008