Beast-Blog.com
2007 May

Over-thinking, over-engineering, or going to extremes is rarely a good thing when acted upon.

I’ve seen it before, I’ll see it again, and I’ve been guilty of it myself. What is it? Extreme Accessibility, of course. But what is it really? What is Extreme Accessibility? And why should one want to avoid it? It sounds like a good thing after all. But it’s really the abuse of features, faulty or overboard implementations, and good intentions gone bad. Sometime in your life, did someone ever tell you that moderation is the key? This logic applies to web accessibility as well.

Continue reading “Avoiding Extreme Accessibility” »

This is an off-the-wall post for me — a recipe of all things — but I do want to share this with my readers since I’m a graduate of the University of Diversity and a gastronomic guru. Long before “fusion cuisine” was a buzzword in culinary circles, I had written and published a recipe that married the influence of a special Japanese recipe and American backyard grilling. You see, I learned a lot about Japanese cooking having lived there: three years in Tokyo, and one year in Wakkanai.

Continue reading “Japanese Style Smoky Grilled Beef” »

Different elements are given different initial or default layout values as ascribed by various browser rendering engines. One element may have a natural padding value of 10px in one browser, for example, while another browser may give it 15px. And in these cases, the padding may cause different renderings of the same element. What this boils down to is that the default styling of an unstyled page will look one way in one browser, yet, while close, it may be different in another browser.

Continue reading “The Power of Zero” »

I told the fiction department they’d be on the street looking for work if they didn’t produce a story soon. It’s been a while — too long, in fact. This is what they came up with. They hope you like it, but I gotta warn you, it’s kinda on and off the wall.

Continue reading “Just a Fly on the Wall” »

If you’re a person who spins around fast when someone shouts “hey, you, web developer,” you probably use HyperText Markup Language (HTML) lists often — or you should anyway. But do you use them correctly and effectively? Let’s take a closer look at the three list types available, figure out what they’re best used for, and how to do so properly. Also, let’s see about putting them to use creatively, with imagination and a little bit of style.

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A pull quote is a selected blockquoted passage from the post it accompanies used to reveal or emphasize a portion of the post.

On most of my posts you’ll typically see some sort of decorative image. I do this to jazz things up a bit and give my posts a sprinkling of good old fashioned artistic love. I think it compliments the posts. I started thinking, though, that a pull quote would also be cool. I’m sure you’ve seen them elsewhere. Now you can learn a decent way to make them a built-in WordPress feature. This may be especially useful to theme makers, but anyone can do this.

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Well, today’s the day. My forty-fifth birthday. If I live to ninety — which I think is unlikely due to my wild and woolly past — my life is half over. Will the next forty-five years be as good as the last forty-five? I can only imagine how they could be. I hope all goes well. I still have some good times to look forward to provided something doesn’t come along to ruin my fun. If you’ll indulge me, I’m going to wax retrospectively and offer insight. Time to share.

Continue reading “Forty Freakin’ Five” »

I’ve come up with an idea that might be useful for obfuscating an email address using your Cascading Style Sheet or CSS. Not a linked email address, but one just posted on the page as text. Trouble is adding an email address to a web page as text or as a link means it will be harvested by ‘bots. Because of this, many people use something like email[at]domain[dot]com in hopes of hiding it. It is my understanding that can be harvested too, though. So I came up with something that may prevent that. For a bit, anyway.

Continue reading “Obfuscating your Email with CSS?” »

I had mentioned in a previous article, “Replicating Browser Behavior: The Top Link,” that I named it the way I did with the notion that I might expand it into a series of articles. Following through with that, I am offering a look at another browser function often replicated by web developers: The print function. For the record it isn’t really a browser function, but rather a function of the operating system accessed through the browser. I’m including it in that category, though, so let’s take a look.

Continue reading “Replicating Browser Behavior: Print Function” »