Tech Hive

It’s been a couple of months already since I made a custom theme for Tech Hive. I have been using my Spartan theme which sucks big time. I knew I’m really not good with creating something that can be used by everyone. Sad, I know

Anyway, for some time now, I wanted to stop using plain and clean backgrounds. So I came up with this after obsessing over pownce’s design for sometime. I loved what I did with the background that I hate to see it covered by a solid color so I used PNG! A transparent PNG over a transparent PNG, yes, yes it’s pownce!

I’m pretty sure I just crossed some serious accessibility rules (just look at the colors) but sometimes, I guess it’s OK to break some rules. And I haven’t done something like this before so… Sorry if the colors hurts your eyes, I’m still looking into it.

Read the rest of “Redesigned” »

One of the guidelines in usability is that you should provide only one way that will lead them to a certain action. For example, if someone sees 2 option buttons, chances are that they might think that each option button does separate tasks when in fact their functions are the same. Also, we have to make sure that the links are descriptive enough and if not, then we should provide a title for the link so when a user hovers over it then they’ll know where the link will take them.

On a similar note, accessibility advocates encourages people to use unique name for every link that we use on a page (kinda like what I was saying before only have a different reason), meaning countless “Read more of this entry” is not really the best practice because you’re using the same text over and over and these texts are leading the user to different pages.

I was looking for a way to add that in <?php the_content(); ?> tag in wordpress before but I couldn’t do it. What I did then was append the the_title(); within the_content(); so it looked like this –

<?php the_content('Read more of ' . the_title() . ' & raquo;' ?>

The problem though is that it does echo the “Read more of” but the title is no where in sight! I was so ready to find a way to make it show by hacking away through function.php, thankfully I remembered to check the_content page in the codex first.

Read the rest of “Appending the title of the post in Read More links for Wordpress” »

As a designer, the biggest problems that I have with IE are the PNG transparency problem and the :hover pseudo class is not working unless it’s used in the a element.

Thanks for HTC which is only understood by IE 5.5 and above browsers — I’ve found some handy “hacks” to work around these 2 limitations on the browser designers/programmers’ love to hate.

Note: calling it in CSS will make your CSS file invalid even though it’s a part of CSS property lists, I tested it against CSS 1, 2, 2.1 and 3 (just to be sure) so… CSS valid-freaks sorry… Maybe it remained to be just a part of the draft?

PNG Transparency

I have to admit that I haven’t really looked that hard for PNG transparency hacks, sure you can use PNG 8 but, isn’t it just a “PNGized” GIF? Anyway, if you’re certain that you won’t be using your image on plain backgrounds and your background does not have patterns on them then PNG 8 will be a good solution.

So, while I was looking for a hack to make PNG work on IE 6, I came across IE PNG Fix of Twinhelix which is a good enough solution for me because it doesn’t complicate things for me and it also works on PNG backgrounds on CSS and images you have to insert into your HTML file. However, this being a “hack”, of course it has some limitations too.

Read the rest of “The Great IE 6 Hack” »

It makes me feel a little sad whenever I see people saying that making your website accessible is such a waste of time and resources because it only deals with the blind. When, in fact, that is one of the misconceptions about accessibility.

What is Accessibility?

Just look for its root word — access. It doesn’t only mean that blinds and other visually-impaired people should be your focus when it comes to making your site accessible. It means making every people using any kind of browsers, any kind of devices to browse the web, any kind of settings on their browsers, no matter how slow or fast their connection is must be able to view your site just fine.

Accessibility is not only making your site well-structured that those using screen readers won’t be exasperated in using your site but also making your site accessible to:

• people who have problems with their visions because they are suffering from color blindness and other stuff related to it, or because of old age — the most popular
• people using lynx or other text only browsers
• people who don’t use mice because they are suffering from locomotive disorders
• people who have turned off images to save loading time
• people who have turned CSS off
• people who are using PDA, their mobile phones, iPhone, iPod, PSP, etc
• people who are using their TVs for screen
• people who are using browsers older than I am
• people who are on dial up
• people who have a connection slower than a dial up
• people who are using monitors with low screen resolution

So maybe you can already understand what I’m trying to say. Accessibility is not a waste of time. Rather it is giving more than one ways to your users to see, surf and visit your site.

Read the rest of “The Basics of Accessibility” »

Not yet anyway.

Earlier, it was said that Sir Tim Berners-Lee, only the inventor of the world wide web, mentioned that Google will be a goner for something that is called the semantic web. Sure, the ideals are nice, but sir, in all fairness, you can’t convert every developers and designers out there just because of these ideals.

Just take a look at the current state of web standards.

Semantic Web

According to Wikipedia:

The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content. It derives from W3C director Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange.

In layman’s terms, semantic web is when all of our data online can be understood not only by the people looking into it, but also by the sites itself. Through semantic web, searching will be easier because everything is laid out in a web where every single thing is interconnected by one another because of the meaning attached to it through the coding used.

So, maybe it’ll give rise to Web 3.0? Perhaps in terms of design they’ll bring back the grunge? Just to show that we’re non-conformist.

Anyway, according to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, “It’s about creating a seamless web of all the data in your life.”

Also:

One example frequently given is of typing a street address which, if it had “semantic data” built into it, would link directly to a map showing its location, dispensing with the need to go to a site like Google `maps, type in the address, get the link and paste it into a document or e-mail.

Sounds ideal, right? Now, let’s move on.

Read the rest of “Why I Think the Semantic Web Won’t Succeed” »