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

It took a long time for me to get around to doing it, but I have finally submitted a CSS style sheet, an elastic design, to the CSS Zen Garden in hopes that it’ll be accepted as an official design. I have no idea if my submission is good enough. It’s not as fancy as many of the designs. I went with a straight-forward approach with keen emphasis on providing as many accessibility features as I could without touching the HTML mark-up. I succeeded well on this front, and this will hopefully be good for other web accessibilities advocates. Especially if the design becomes official.

Continue reading “CSS Zen Garden: Access Granted?” »

Just lately, after learning more about this blog promotion and “feed” stuff as I mentioned in a previous post, I have decided to put a little more effort into getting found by people who read blogs. After all, if more people come to this blog and read my stuff as a result, then that’s probably a good thing. It could lead to web design opportunities, all sorts of good stuff, right? So I took a half day and ventured forth on the web in hopes of being properly Chicletified. Here’s how it went…

Continue reading “Chicletification and Sloppy Code” »

Promoting your blog is probably up there a bit on your priority list of things to do. It makes sense. You go through all this trouble to write hopefully good articles so naturally you want them to be read and commented on. There are myriad ways to help you get this done… to be found and read, anyway. You have common spider submissions, good use of headlines, regular updates and new articles, tweaked keywords, a solid description, and the SEO list goes on. But there’s more you can do.

Continue reading “Explode Your Blog” »

The fiction department was busy this morning. Cozy up and enjoy this short story. Warning: This story contains a swear word. Sorry if this offends you, it seemed to fit, though.

Last Fall: A last minute adventure tale.

I opened the door that morning preparing to step outside. I was temporarily blinded and took an uneasy step back. It was very bright outside. Cold and windy, too. I could feel it coming in through the open doorway. I hoped I dressed well enough for the conditions. I took a quick mental inventory. Long underwear, insulated liner, wind-breaker jacket. I was pretty sure I was all set. Yet, I had an uneasy feeling I was forgetting something.

Continue reading “Fiction: Last Fall” »

It sure did take awhile but the GreenBeast CMS RSS Newsmaker plug-in, created by Jona and myself, has been publicly released. To learn more about this long awaited plug-in, see the official GreenBeast CMS News Article. Feel free to comment on the release here, or on the original Version 1.1 Release Post. Enjoy, the thing’s pretty cool I think.

Continue reading “RSS Newsmaker Released” »

Not sure if anyone’s interested in this sort of thing, but I made a “Beast-Blog” theme wallpaper for the desktop of your computer. To use this background just select one of the two sizes I’ve made available — 1024×768 or 800×600 — be sure to enlarge the image fully, then right click on it with your mouse (I don’t know how to do it otherwise without simply saving the image and setting it manually). Choose “Set as Wallpaper,” “Set as Background,” or “Use Image on Desktop,” depending on what browser you’re using. If you like this sort of thing… enjoy! If other sizes are wanted, just let me know and I’ll do ‘em up.

Continue reading “Beast-Blog Wallpaper” »

Here on this web log and on any page on my website I employ hidden focal navigation, “skip links” or “jump links” and such. I do this for the benefit of people not enjoying a proper visual display because they are using screen readers or they’re keyboard users. The latter, the keyboard user, is a prime example of how this plays a role. You see, a person using their keyboard to get around a site jumps from anchor to anchor (link to link). Now imagine having to tab through a long list of links to get from point A to point B. What a drag that would be. Jump links allow users to bypass certain sections. So what’s the solution? One is to provide these jump links at the top of the page leading all the way to the first content heading or div. I did this very thing at GreenMethods.com, top of each page, check it out. It works on that site. It fits. It doesn’t here, though… it wouldn’t look right. So what do I do, just forget about it, right? Some people will just have to deal, right? Wrong. The Jump Links are there, look again.

Continue reading “Hidden Focal Navigation” »

I changed the rules around here. The spam was getting a little foolish. Now, if you include a single link in your comments, the comment will now require a moderator’s approval. Sorry to all you legitimate posters out there. You will be approved quickly. I don’t want to discourage people from posting links, but with an average of three completely irrelevant links per comment was getting kind of annoying.

Continue reading “Resisting the Urge” »

How cool is this? I got an instant message from Jonathan Fenocchi last night in which he pointed me to his latest blog entry. I came to learn that apparently someone really likes the layout and CSS styling of our GreenBeast CMS Content Management System and the web page made to support it, and submitted it to the CSS-showcase site CSS-Mania.

Continue reading “GBCMS Mania (II)” »