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

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” »

On a recent site I made I created wooden frames around most of the embedded and stand-alone images. Doing this, while somewhat time-consuming, added a nice “finished” touch that may be worth doing in some cases. Bear in mind these are wooden frames, but the technique described herein can be used for all sorts of materials: metal, marble, plastic, etc. In this tutorial I will be using Adobe’s (Macromedia) Fireworks. Even though I have a variety of image-editing software, like PhotoShop, Fireworks is my absolute favorite.

Continue reading “How to Make a Wooden Picture Frame” »

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” »

To better understand this post’s curious title, you must understand design and recognize it for what it is — what it really is. Immediately you might think of colors, images, and patterns, but design is so much more. Design is something that touches our lives continuously, day in and day out. From the subtle touches to full-out implementations that, if done properly, are unappreciated, taken for granted, and go unnoticed unless absent.

Continue reading “Usability is Design” »

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” »

I’ve written about the natural marriage between WordPress and Search Engines and what to do to enhance it before, but I wanted to offer something a bit more definitive and specific this time around. I think I have finally tweaked my practices to the point I don’t think they can really be improved upon. I think so, anyway. I will provide copy-and-paste scriptlets in order of importance — especially useful to WordPress theme developers. But before I do, there are some things you need to know if you don’t already.

Continue reading “Optimizing WordPress for Search Engines” »

If you were to ask your typical business owner if they plan to add a web log or “blog” to their web site the last answer you’d probably get is an emphatic “yes.” Instead you might get a quizzical look, a frown and a scoff, or even an emphatic “no” instead. That’s a shame because a blog has the power to increase the main site’s traffic, page rank, and general appeal — it can even stand alone and be the site. Blogging is a powerful communication medium if the right software is used, it’s properly designed and maintained, and it’s put to use. Let’s take a closer look:

Continue reading “Blogging and Business” »