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

I was just handed a “Book Baton” from Martin Neczypor, the man behind Neczy’s Blog. With it came a simple question: “Up for a meme?” My response must be obvious if you’re reading this. I took Martin up on the offer to take the baton and run with it for a bit so without further ado, here goes…

Continue reading “On and on goes the Book Baton” »

It has taken a while, but I’m really quite pleased to announce the release of GreenBeast CMS Version 1.1. This marks the second phase of a fairly long-term three phase (plus) project which will culminate with the release of v.2.0 down the road a piece.

Continue reading “GreenBeast CMS v.1.1” »

Amazingly, Firefox users recently exceeded users of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (MSIE) on one of my servers. This is not just one site on the server either. It’s all of them. Even the ones not out for review to the web development community (three are: GreenMethods.com, GreenBeastCMS.com, and AdagioSpa.com). The numbers? Well, they are presently averaging as follows:

Continue reading “Firefox Dominates” »

GreenMethods.com —
I just wanted to announce the launch of my company’s site about biological pest control and integrated pest management (IPM). It’s a rather expansive site, but it matches the subject matter to a tee. It, too, is expansive. The site took me about a month-and-a-half to make and that was a period of long hours. It represents half of what I’ve learned about web development (the other half was long ago tossed out the window.)

Continue reading “GreenMethods.com” »

When checking my server logs I see a whopping 90% of visitors of all combined domains (I have a bunch) using Microsoft Internet Explorer, IE, when they visit my sites. The only time I see radical changes to this is when I have a site out for review or critique and it’s linked from one of the web developer forums I visit on and off. When a site is out for review I notice the number of other browsers goes up quite a bit, especially Mozilla’s Firefox (IE-using visitor numbers drop to 70-80%). It makes sense to me. After all one of the largest Firefox followings is from the web development community. That’s because web developers know and understand the clear benefits to using such a good browser. So, during these review periods I have a lot of Firefox-using web developers visting. Otherwise, the number drops once review time settles down. The masses revert to IE. So what am I getting at? What’s my point?

Continue reading “Web Developers and Firefox” »

This is sort of out of date. The tech is okay, but the colors I used are poor choices.

Today, class, we will build some “Accessible Smart Tables.” First you will need to gather some two-by-fours… oh, wait, wrong class. All we’ll need here is Notepad or another text editor for writing our code. I will show you how to build a table with web accessibilities in mind, and it’ll be a table with a bit more functionality and style than one would normally have. But, first, let’s have a brief look at tables and the purpose they serve, then we’ll address how to make them better.

Continue reading “Accessible Smart Tables” »

This is pretty old so I wouldn’t put too much stock in it. It could be better.

I was thinking about list manipulation and I came up with a really simple way of building curves into a list — “S”-curves, “C”-shapes, or a simple sweep (see the example). The possibilities are endless. Anyway, here’s what I came up with, using inline-styles and a definition list for this example, the former because it was as it was easier in my blog:

Continue reading “A Link Curve” »

There are many instances where a word or phase, or an array of such, require special treatment. Case in point: Latin names, specifically, for this example, insect names. In the scientific community insects are not regularly called “bugs.” The have a taxonomic binomial (two names) to which they are referred. This is a worldwide practice. This ensures, in this example, that entomologists the world-over stay on the same page. It doesn’t always work as I can think of several deviations from this rule, but it is the rule.

Continue reading “PHP Function: Latin-em” »

As a rule I never write an actual email address on a web page. Now, please note that I’m not talking about the page which is displayed, but rather the one that is written. The HTML part; what’s made in NotePad or whatever it is you use to write your mark-up. The part that is crawed by spiders looking for stuff like that. It’s all about privacy and trying to limit my spam intake.

Continue reading “Hide Email JavaScript” »