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
Fiction: A Case of Mistaken Identity
The Bigfoot was starting to become indistinct as it made its way into the clouds.
Paul started his trek leaving his car at the country store opposite the Wilson Path trail head. Today he planned to summit Mt. Devon via the Wilson-Devon Ridge trail off of Wilson Path. Paul had years of experience as a mountain climber and hiker, but he knew today he was being especially ambitious. The altitude at the trail head was 1,460 feet above sea level. The summit was 9,355 feet. It was going to be a rough day, but he could do it. It is possible, he reminded himself and set off. He didn’t realize it at the time, but he had forgotten to throw his extra layers in his backpack.
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Adding Embedded Images to a Web Page
Embedding content images on a web page is a dirt-simple, basic, and straightforward task, right? Well, yes, it is, but there are some interesting tricks I’ve learned since I’ve been doing this that I think are really helpful to know — and worth sharing. Most of which I have stumbled upon quite by chance, while others came to the front of my brain by way of my interest in making web sites more accessible and usable.
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CSS Layouts: The Fixed. The Fluid. The Elastic.
Which Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) layout is best? All have their quirks and their unique pros and cons. Is one more accessible than the other? More usable? What are the drawbacks and how are they dealt with? Is one easier to create than the other? Is there an evil, inaccessible layout? I suspect some will say yes to this, but I’m not going to. I like them all and feel all are suitable if steps are taken to ensure easy usability and equal accessibility. All are part of a web site’s presentational layer, so most of the accessibility relies on the extractable semantics and proper usage of the underlying mark-up. What follows is my take on the rigid fixed, the adaptable fluid, and the expandable elastic layouts.
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Abusing Fonts for Graphical Gain
Turning to fonts can sometimes be a convenient time-saving addition to a graphics project.
This is a quick tip to remind us that graphics don’t have to be difficult or time-consuming to make. They really are nothing more than sized shapes, colors, lines, and fills — nothing but than a bunch pixels if you think or want to get picky about it. With this in mind, nothing is out of reach. What with the various image editing (manipulating) software programs out there, an imaginative creator can have a ball. But graphics can be time consuming. It’d be nice if there was some time- and labor-saving shortcut. Well, there is. Fonts.
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WordPress Posting and Commenting Tips
WordPress is smart — really smart — and I like that, but it requires the right input if you want to exercise its abilities. What follows are a few things I do to get the most out of WordPress’s highly professional desktop-like web publishing features. Many of the tips I will offer carry over to the commenting side as well, not just article posting. Please know that I am not using the Visual Rich Editor so while most of the posting tips will apply, they may not be all shared.
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Adding your own WordPress Smilies
On a site I’m making I added a table of available smilies on one of the pages in the help section (similar to the smiley list my daughter has on her blog). It’s part of the site’s help section. The audience will be a mix of somewhat savvy surfers and complete novices. Many I’d say won’t know what a blog is. Thus I’m offering a lot of passive site support. While making this table of smilies I decided to add three of my own. It’s really quite easy. Here’s how I did it:
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A Quickie on the Q Element
adding a script to the page load to fix one instance of one small problem for one browser made me frown
I’m utterly swamped right now, but as I get a breather now and then — which is a few hours at a time — I still want to write short posts (or are they articles?) to let you know I’m alive. One of the things I’m doing is building a rather large site using WordPress as a content management system (CMS). I can’t show you anything yet, but it’s a good one I think. On this site I have an instance where I use the <q>
element to markup an inline quote. I don’t use it often so I wanted a simple solution to the matter of that element not being supported by Internet Explorer (IE) — including IE7 if you can believe that. I started thinking about the situation.
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The Obsolescence of Handheld Style Sheets?
On any fixed-width designs I currently create I offer a handheld style sheet for those users who may access these sites via a smart phone or other handheld device. I feel this is needed in this day and age; I want to make sure those skinny screen users have decent experience on my sites and find it accessible and usable. But will this need become less important, even unnecessary in a few years?
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What Goes Around, Keeps Going
Here’s a piece of fiction that came to me recently — based loosely on the saying “what comes around, goes around” — and I finally got it down on the digital paper I call my blog. It’s a strange multi-first-person tale dished out one scene at a time. I’ve never written a story like this before so I hope you’ll bear with me if I goof. Be warned, there is a small amount of foul language in it. I don’t think it’s usually necessary to get a point across, but it fits here. It’s a little bit on the long side, but I hope you’ll find it worthy of your time and a good read.
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