These are older articles. Please bear in mind the further back you go, the more dated the material may be — in some cases.
Mike Cherim’s Blogging Past
GrayBit Goes Live
It all began harmlessly one evening with a single utterance: “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could plug in a web address and go to the site, but have it converted to a perfect grayscale instead of full-color…? you know, to check its contrast accessibility. An online tool. Think Google-simple. Colors can be misleading when looking at a site, but grayscale never lies. Well, things stared happening fast after that. Next thing I know a real application, just like that envisioned, begins to come to life. Born is GrayBit. Where turning gray is cool!
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Feedback for The Green Spot
For those who’ve known us for a while, you’ll know that asking for feedback is something we do regularly.
This is a quick post for friends, customers, and distributors of The Green Spot, Ltd., home of the GreenMethods. The reason is a simple one: We want your comments and feedback. Whether it be about our business, our products, our service, our catalog, or our website. Anything you want. This is your opportunity to speak your mind and ask those burning questions.
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My Links are Your Links
Link sharing is becoming quite popular on the web, and there’s a new service in town that facilitates this sharing. Specifically I speak of Ma·gnolia. There I started a group, Accessible Web Developers which shares bookmarks related to accessible web development, of course.
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A long, cold 24 hours
I’ve had my coffee and a nice hot shower. Warm food is next.
Just in case you were wondering, where’s Mike?… my family and I have been without good old fashioned ee-lek-tricity for the past 24 hours. It sucked royally, let me share:
Life as we know it comes to a screeching halt without the shock-juice. Thus we haven’t done anything but try to stay warm — it’s well below freezing here. No heat, no water, no toilet, no freakin’ coffee. Tried especially hard, I did, to keep the fingers of my right hand warm mindful of my occasional voyages outside in the icy wind. 
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The Alt and Accessibility
The idea here is to provide that which is needed only to deliver the content in a smooth and natural way.
The proper use of the alt attribute is perhaps one of the most misused, misunderstood, and most debated attributes. I’m not going to set out and try to change that or anyone’s thinking, but luckily I have permission from the owner to give you my hopefully comprehensive views and opinion, and that’s what I want to do, at least as it pertains to the use of the alt attribute on an accessible website.
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Accessible Form Results
That’s all there is to it. Save the files and go. You’re done.
After playing around with some modifications to Dan Champion’s Accesskey Script in use at Accessites.org, I discovered a significant improvement to the self-returning form result to make it more accessible. I have recently been going through my forms, starting with those on the site mentioned above, one at a time, improving their level of accessibility by adding a simple ID to the results heading and a bookmark pointing to the results heading on the form submit self-target. I haven’t changed my PHP contact form download (yet), but herein I will describe the changes which are quite simple to implement so you may do it yourself.
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Fiction: The Spot
Breathing through the pen tube evaporated any saliva I had in my mouth.
The best stories are those that make the reader say “no kidding,” “how true,” or “yep, that’s me.” This story is one such tale, yet it isn’t. It better not be. If it is, for you, you’re one hard-working web developer and you might want to go to bed after the movie tonight. Enjoy!
The Spot
“What the hell is that smell? Turpentine?” Tommy asked as we stepped into the elevator.
“It’s acetone.” I said.
“Acetone?!” Tommy questioned, one eyebrow raised.
“Yeah, it happened last night. Something… something really weird happened. It’s sort of a long story.
“We’ve got time, Mike,” Tommy said.
“All right. It all started around six…
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What the Flock?!
There’s a new web browser in town. Namely, the developer version of Flock Browser is now available for download. So far I like it because my pages render well in it without breakage. At least that’s telling me the bowser is off to a good start. It’s supposed to be a “social” browser to faciliate sharing and community.
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Counting Clicks with PHP
A rather simple PHP solution to help you count your clicks.
If you know me, you know I like stats. I’ve got no problem with putting a hit counter (though not a rented or external one) on one of my sites. In fact my Home Page has one at the footer. It’s just for my portfolio and doesn’t record my unique blog hits — approaching 10,000 — that’s kept on a separate counter which isn’t displayed. You might also notice the counters I have on my blog’s side bar. I like numbers. It’s good to know if anyone’s online, how many visitors I’ve had, or how many times something has been downloaded. If I didn’t count these things, I would never know that my Beast-Blog theme, for instance, has been downloaded almost 2000 times as of this writing. And trust me when I say I would have never guessed the number would be so high. Unlike my site hit counter which maintains an IP address list and records unique hits only, the click counter doesn’t record unique persons downloading, but each number represents a link-click and subsequent *.zip file download. Yep, numbers can be interesting, and telling.
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