Posted: Sat 25 February, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Own Business, Thinking About..., Web Development, Work-related |
In what I suspect may just turn out to be a theme on this stuff, page-widths are quite a bone of contention among web designers.
Basically there are two schools of thought – fixed-width and fluid . Fixed width is pretty self-explanatory – the page is designed to fit a certain size, say 800 pixels, or 1,000 , or another arbitrary figure. In general this is fine – the BBC does it this way, as does the Guardian, and many many others. It’s probably slightly more “standard” for commercial websites than fluid, but not by all that much.
Fluid, on the other hand, still tends to be used primarily on smaller-size (readership-wise) sites, blogs, that kind of thing. Not that it matters, but it’s also my general preference. Fluid widths fill the window, regardless of the size of that window. It doesn’t matter if it’s 600 pixels or 2,400 – the site expands to fit. D4D™ does it – if you’re lucky enough to have a dual-monitor set-up or similar, expand d4d to the full extent of the screen. Look, no blank space. It’ll shrink right down to about 450-490pixels before things break. That’s why I like fluid – because it doesn’t care whether you’re using a monitor that’s only able to use 800 pixels, or whether you’re all the way up at 2,400 (or more) or anywhere in between.
I suspect that a lot of it, as with colour, comes down to personal taste. The BBC site annoys me because it only uses half the window width I’ve got open. The Guardian annoys me for the same reason. However, people who like fixed-width (and again, I wonder if this is related to book or newspaper page widths being fixed, and thus “normal”) argue that if the text isn’t handle correctly in a fluid layout, it can end up being almost unreadable. And in fact I agree with this on occasion – if you’ve got lots of short paragraphs, they can look bloody awful in a fluid layout.
I suspect that the sites I’m currently working on will end up being fluid layouts – I’d rather see the space used for site content, instead of just being blank, wasted space. There’ll be space within the layout, though – I think that it’s the lack of space that can make a fluid layout feel cramped, and so I’ll be using as much space as I can for it.
We’ll see, when it comes to time to test it all out.
Posted: Fri 24 February, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Thoughts |
Is it really childish to consider using a colour scheme based around the hex FE F1 FO , and call it fum.css ?
Yeah, probably…
Posted: Fri 24 February, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Thoughts |
I noticed a story today about “Texter’s Thumb” becoming a potential health issue, and one of the statistics in it (from a survey by Virgin Mobile) said that on average 93 million text messages are sent in the UK every day. That’s a remarkable figure.
But then the old questioning brain kicks in, and I wonder if they meant “entire messages”, regardless of message length, or whether it’s each bundle of up-to-and-including 160 characters? For example, it’s quite normal for me to send a message to Herself (and many others) that consists of two, if not three, blocks of 160 characters. The phone automatically splits it up and sends it properly. To me that’s one message, but to the network it’s two (or three) – but does it count as three, or as one?
Posted: Fri 24 February, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Thoughts, Work-related |
Our company has a community site with a forum, where people can post comments and the like. Over the last few days it’s been beaten to its (metaphorical) knees by a set of spam attacks – roughly 2,000 spam postings, and because of the way the system *cough* “works”, we have to delete them individually, in order to keep the database stable and the system working properly without losing its way and having a bit of a breakdown.
The reason that the spammers are hitting the site so hard is because the person in charge of the website, in his infinite global wisdom, has decided that we must allow unregistered guest users the ability to post comments. Apparently, we don’t want to risk losing users by forcing them to register before they can make comments. So the site’s wide open to spam attack, and that doesn’t matter, according to this fucking genius.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I would think that anyone who wants to make a post and say something is going to be OK with registering. And if you want to be in a community, then you would rather register with that community and see it spam-free instead of having an open community that’s smothered in “nude Paris Hilton” adverts…
Posted: Thu 23 February, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: General |
“Falling” isn’t something I think I’ve done, when it comes to love. I’m not even sure I’ve even riccocheted or sashayed.
It’s just something I’ve come to and found myself in.
Like IKEA.
Thank you, Anna for that comment on this Pandemian post. Brilliant.
Posted: Thu 23 February, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Getting Organised, Thoughts |
One good thing about moving phones over to the XDA is that it’s allowed me to (at last) sort out all my contacts, get them properly organised, and edit the bits that were necessary.
The downside of it is that for some reason some numbers don’t appear to have updated all that well, and the initial transfer process lost a couple of numbers too, so if you’ve been in touch recently (i.e. the last month or so) with me about changed/new mobile numbers, can you send the info again? Cheers.
But anyway, with the exception of those misplaced numbers, everything now actually makes sense, and is in some vague form of order.
On the subject of which, am I the only one who stores numbers (whether in mobile phone, or filofax/address book) by first name then surname, instead of surname, first name? (for example, in my method “John Smith” would be under “J”, whereas apparently most people would file it under “S”)
Posted: Thu 23 February, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Animals, Domestic |
Recently, Hound has discovered that ripping paper (or cardboard, or plastic) to shreds is a very satisfying experience for a dog. It also helps that it normally gets some attention, but she tends to do it when she’s either bored, or feeling like being naughty. It’s one of those things where it’s also actually quite difficult to tell her off, because in general it’s quite funny to watch, and she doesn’t do it to anything useful, only to items that have been discarded.
Last night, however, all went quiet. We can only surmise she was bored. Anyway, we went upstairs to find the landing covered in shreds of paper. She’d found a brand-new roll of (unused) bog-roll, and had summarily shredded the lot. Everywhere.
*Sigh*