CogBlogged Tagged ‘web dev’

Do you like someone else’s web design color scheme? Curious as to what color codes are used? Try Red Alt – I Like Your Colors. Just enter a URl, and it fetches the colors used as defined in HTML or CSS (some sites seem not to give them up as easily, perhaps with the @import method of CSS?). For example, I ran it on the BurningBird site and found out shades or reds and brown’s in Shelly’s current bird theme: Fairly cool. I don’t get much from top designers like http://www.stopdesign.com/ or http://www.zeldman.com/, maybe their colors are tucked away.

Do you remember when the web was young and everything was about having a “Home Page”? The legacy is still there in our web browser’s “Home” button (and do you wonder why we are limited to one home?). In fact, when I started our web server in 1993, like others, I made our primary web entrance a file named… homePage.html In fact, in those days (late 1993), the correct URL to get to the MCLI main entrance was: http://hakatai.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/homePage.html Using a few little tricks of web “redirection”, this 11 year old URL actually still works and gets you to the current main entrance at http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/. Is it magic? Not at all, and it is easier than you think. The biggest mystery is why so many sites, big and small, are willing to leave old links hanging in the breeze. I will show later how I have been able to 3 [...]

Following a link in an email notification from Jay Allen‘s Comment Spam web site, I came across the best “404 Document Not Found” page I’ve seen in a while: For more fun things like this, or if you have some large amounts of time to idle away, check out the 404 Research Lab, which beyond featuring some of the better 404 Server Messages, has an explanation of 404, tips for web site visitors for getting around 404s, and suggestions for webmasters to do something more elegant than the out of the box server error message.

I recently wrote of some JavaScript glue-ing I did to create a tool that allows my to take any web page in view, and submit it with one click to Furl, del.icio.us, Connotea, and our own Bag of URLs (see A Cup of Connotea: A New del.icio.us Flavor of Social Bookmarking (and now a 4 in 1 bookmark tool)). Since then, I’ve gotten a pile of e-mail requests (well actually 2) for help in constructing different variations (“I just want Furl and del.icio.us”), which seemed enough justification to sit down and spin a PHP tool that allows you to select any combination of these 4 into one tool, all your own. Meet the DeliciousFurlBagConnotea Marklet Maker. Are there other web site submission sites that out to be tossed into this virtual Leatherman? Update: I should not have whipped this up so fast, there is some slop. I have revised the [...]

Help! I am in search of someone, some benevolent group, maybe a web design/development class project, willing to do an overhaul of a writing site that very much needs an update. Is this a lot to ask for? I just lack the time and resources to do it myself, and despite some flakiness, some 20,000 people have managed to create content on this site, and more come every day. Here’s the background. The Hero’s Journey was built in 1998 to bring to the web what was already a successful class exercise created by Mythology faculty Liz Warren, at South Mountain Community College. It is a creative writing activity based on the workThe Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. In a nutshell, on our site, people create their own accounts, being a story, answer a series of questions about their character, and then build a story by responding to [...]

Wow, bonus feedback. This is from someone who has used our free jClicker Slide Show template to customize and use for showing off their model design and fabrication work: Alan, I just upload my personal portfolio on the net that I built my self. I am so happy with it. Base on jClicker slide show, I modified to fit with my need, clean design. I hope you don’t mind with it. If you can put my site, www.asw-design.com in your example list, I will be proud and happy. Thank you so much for creating jClicker and publish it for public use. Take care, Addy If you check our Addy’s Works, there are some amazing images alone worth looking at, regardless of the use of our little slide show template. From model prototypes to woodworking, this is someone who has some real talent (as opposed to us you spend their days [...]

No, I did not have writers block or a novel to compose. Actually the email question was not even mine, but written to be sent under someone else’s name. Could this be Alan’s Secret Neutron Bomb that would eviscerate spammers? Nahhhh, ya must be dreamin’. Now, these are some messages that get generated from our 100% online Learning Grants applications system. This is an internal grants program that faculty and staff from our college apply for on a yearly basis, and we are in our 5th year of having this online. The entire application, review, and notification is done on our web site, another brilliant system developed by Colen, my former student programmer who also did most of the back end work on the Maricopa Learning eXchange. The Learning Grant application period closed at 6:00 PM last Friday, meaning many of the grants came in… a bit before 6:00 PM [...]

I think I got here via scanning RSS from Roland Tanglao – one of the Gods of Explaining CSS to Mere Mortals, Eric Meyer has rolled out a nifty way to assemble a presentation without any touching and software from Redmond. S5 is a fully web standards compliant XHMTL slide show creator- you can assemble a presentation by merely editing the text of single text file, and design it to your heart’s delight via CSS. To see it in action, check out the S5 Introduction. You get next and back buttons (also advances by space bars and arrow keys), and a hidden slide menu in the lower right corner. It plays back in any browser (well fuggedddaboutit if you use NetScape 4, go back to the 1990s ;-) Now this is your basic text and bullet slides (about 85% of what people twiddle their time in PowerPoint doing), as an [...]

Linkrot is a preventable scourge- it is rampant despite the available of utterly simple solutions. What is Linkrot? Jakob coined it early, when web sites are “improved” or “redesigned”, often web urls are changed, or files are moved to a new directory, or just taken off the server. This is the case where a web developer only sees what they work with, and they completely forget when they move files around on a web server, that they leave stranding out there: anyone who had a bookmark to the abandoned URL Anybody who had a hyperlink to a foresaken URL Search engines who still have the crufty URL listed. There is no excuse for not leaving a forwarding address, a “this page has moved” message, or better yet, an automated forwarder (see below). This happened recently when someone asked about one of our older web pages. I had a link to [...]

Okay, 14 readers took the time to try the goofy, meaningless survey I posted as a quick demo of using phpQuestionnaire. The survey is open, and I have set this one up so the results are publicly viewable: http://zircon.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/phpq/stats.php?sid=3. What was nice was that I could tweak it in midstream based on the early feedbacks that said the font was too small and they did not like all the items being mandatory. I could have in one stroke flipped the formatting by setting a different template too. The results? Meaningless? Charming? 1/3 read the blog from the web site, and 2/3 read from RSS reader or Bloglines. Only one person knew the dog’s real name (no it is not “Biff” or “Alan”) but most folks knew my bike ride was about 10 miles. The best ones were responses to question 6:   If you were describing CogDogBlog to a colleague, [...]