Beast-Blog.com
Mike Cherim's Professional and Personal Web Log

I don’t usually go for doing the meme thing, but with so many around me partaking in this one — Stephen, Jack, Gill — I decided to be a lemming today and leap off the cliff with the others. In this meme I have to name three events, two births, one death, and one holiday that occur/occurred on my May 15th birthday. I also added one unofficial prehistoric event and one future prediction… to spice things up a bit. Here goes:

Continue reading “Wikipedia Birthday Meme, Plus” »

As most of my readers know, one of the things I do is make themes and templates for WordPress web logs and stand-alone sites. The themes and templates I make are accessible, universal, standards-compliant, and strictly valid. I take a lot of pride in what I produce and I try to turn out nothing but the highest quality stuff. Once users download the fruits of my labor, my responsibility of quality control ends and the users take the reigns. That’s when things sometimes go awry. But in many instances, it’s not the users’ fault.

Continue reading “Stop Writing Garbage Code, Please” »

The latest music device, the Sony “iMind System,” invented by Sony with the assistance of German neurologist and technologist, Hans Frieh, goes above and beyond what I consider acceptable tech. I think this new tech is invasive and irresponsible. I don’t know what they could’ve been thinking when they decided to move forward with this project but I urge you all to blog about this in hopes of putting a stop to it before things get completely out of hand. Already there have been isolated incidents worth worrying about.

Continue reading “New Tech Goes Too Far!” »

Ever get one of those spam comments held in moderation that you’d love to respond to? I do. It’s tempting sometimes. Obviously approving the comment is something that simply isn’t advisable, even if you were to remove the links. Well, what I have decided to do is post some of those comments here followed by my responses, similar to Jack Pickard’s Spam Smörgåsbord. I have to warn you, though, some of their “names” are about really whacked stuff. Any way here’s a few:

Continue reading “My Responses to Spam — Literally” »

Within every industry compound words are created, then used extensively, often without a second thought once they enter that industry’s mainstream lexicon. The same is true of acronyms, abbreviations, and buzzwords. For instance, look at the web development industry. We use all sorts of verbal shortcuts to convey information that our core readers will have no problems with. Eventually many enter the public mainstream and end up in the dictionary.

Continue reading “Using Compound Words on the Web” »

When they “axed” if I wanted to be interviewed for WebAxe I was delighted. This was about a month ago. Finally, the damage has now been done and I have spoken on the web. I have to laugh. I think I sound like a war correspondent on the front lines, reporting in. Here’s the WebAxe post or you can jump straight to podcast number 44. This interview was hosted by both Dennis Lembree and Ross Johnson. Thanks fellas, it was a pleasure. This is Mike Cherim, signing out. Roger-wilco, over and out.

Continue reading “My WebAxe Accessibility Podcast” »

I recently read an Information Week print article by John Soat called “E-Mail: A Plague of Biblical Proportions” (view online version) and it hit home. The article had some interesting numbers such as 200 billion being the number of emails sent every day — which translates to 30 messages per person daily — 70% of which represents the conservative estimated percentage of that mail which is spam. The print title noted it was “A Plague of Biblical Proportions” and, man, there’s some truth in that little nugget.

Continue reading “Email’s Out of Control” »

In a news item that I first saw at Accessify.com there is a quote taken from the original “BarCamp London 2: Accessibility Panel Thoughts” post at Mike Davies’ Isolani site. It’s a quote I don’t necessarily agree with. Before I provide it here I want to say I’m not trying to stir anything up or cause trouble, and I’m not commenting on the rest of the article (which, aside from the alleged damage caused by “universalists,” I mostly agree with), but I do want to say remarks like this bother me a bit. First I’ll provide the quotation, then I’ll explain what it is I don’t agree with and why.

Continue reading “Failed? Fundamentally Flawed?” »

We needed a bigger, badder, and better back-end for Accessites.org. We like to write lots of articles and needed a more powerful and flexible web publishing application than the homegrown content management system (CMS) we were using before. We decided to go with WordPress dressed up with a variation of my lastest accessible theme — though it was made even more accessible, which is a given considering what it’s serving. Hope you like it; we do.

Continue reading “Accessites.org Reboot” »