OK, I admit it. I did a vanity search on my name. Yes, its tacky. It turns out that as of today, January 31, 2006, my site is currently the top search result on Yahoo Search when you search for my name. This is no small feat, it would seem to me, being that my name is a pretty boring and common name. On Google, I’m no where to be found unless you add my middle initial to the search, in which case my Resume page pulls top billing.
Google gets all the press about how good a search engine it is, and I’m not denying that it is excellent, but I do have to say that on several occasions, I’ve searched on Yahoo and found things that I could not easily find on Google. Folks, don’t discount Yahoo Search.
January 31st, 2006 •
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sgc • website
I updated the
Mini Slide Navigation so that there is now an active page indicator, informing the user as to where they are within the navigation/site. This was a known omission in the original version of the navigation and it was also astutely
called out in a comment on my original
post.
I used the “decendant selectors” method in creating the active tab, where I gave both the page’s <body> tag and each navigation item their own unique id, so I could style specific elements of the page based on the relationship to the parent element.
As usual, I have only tested this out on Firefox 1.5 and IE 6.0. I only changed the CSS and made no changes to the SlayerOffice JS. For some reason, I am seeing the “tab slider” move slightly on the initial page load. I am not exactly sure why I am seeing this, and will investigate further. I think it may have something to do with the “z-index” element I am using in the CSS, but I am just not sure (and its very late when I am posting this and I am tired). If anyone has any insight into why this may be happening, please feel free to post it in the comments area of this post, or my original post.
Found this out on delicious. Its an amazing Flickr Album Maker that generates either a photo album/gallery or a slideshow simply by putting in different paramaters from your Flickr account. The super cool thing is that you can select photos that have multiple tags (steve AND/OR ond05). This is something I’ve been looking for to manage the multitude of photos on my Kids’ site. I guess the only downfall is that it does not automatically update when I post photos to Flickr since the HTML is static. Need to look into this.
January 19th, 2006 •
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flickr • social media
Saw this great research factoid in a newsletter I receive from Iconculture:
37% of women say they’ll eat food within 5 seconds of its being dropped on the ground. 57% of men say they will.
Source: Electrolux Homecare Products – December, 2005
January 17th, 2006 •
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Food • funny • kids
This is it! I recently read this blog post by Garrett Dimon addressing the fact that the time is now for Front-End Architects. Options and applications being used on the “front end” (i.e. presentation layer) are quite diverse and as the Web becomes more pervasive, the need for an architect to handle the front end in its entirety is needed. I completely agree!!
January 15th, 2006 •
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design • web development • websites
We’ve all heard all the noise about the instant classic Chronic of Narnia rap. My kids, being kids, have gone to McDonalds several times over the past few weeks and have picked up some Happy Meals that included Narnia toys. So, one day we set up them up in our empty living room and I took some photos, for a goof. Here is the slideshow of a few more photos.
January 12th, 2006 •
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cs lewis • fantasy • Movies • narnia
My
Mini Slide Navigation mash up was discovered and posted up on
del.icio.us this weekend. By Sunday 1/8/06, it had made it to the #2 slot on the
del.icio.us/popular ranking (see photo).
As of Monday 1/9/06 Thursday, 1/12/06, its been tagged by over 400 750+ people. Not bad for a small “mash up” I whipped up late one evening.
I had to make some last minute edits to the page and directory. It’s been on my site for a while, but I still needed to put the files in a more accurate directory, so I was admittedly a little unprepared for the traffic and attention. Del.icio.us obviously accelerated this! :) I even got a small nod of approval from Dan Cederholm of Simplebits himself.
I’ve been trying not to post too much about sports this year, just to try to diversify the content on the site a bit. However, with it being NFL Playoff time, I’m can’t help myself. Yes, its that time of year again. My
New England Patriots just polished off a first round playoff game victory over the Jacksonville Jaguars. This has been an interesting and challenging year for the Patriots because they have had to manage through a great deal of injuries and adversity, including losing two of the best coaches around in Charlie Weis and Romeo Crennel. But over the past month or so, they have had some key players return and have started to play effectively.
Will the Patriots win an unprecidented 3rd Super Bowl in a row and 4th in the past 5 years? My instinct says its going to be very, very hard. But time will tell. Bring on Denver or Indy (I think I’d prefer Denver).
January 8th, 2006 •
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football • nfl • patriots
So I was recently playing around with a couple of navigation treatments that I’ve seen – Simplebits’ MiniTabs and SlayerOffice’s Focus Slide. And I came up with a navigation “mash-up” of the two. I’m calling it the Mini-Slide Navigation (click to see demo page). I’m not sure this is any great innovation here, and I’m not claiming it to be.
I essentially applied the small Javascript used by Steve Chipman at Slayeroffice for his neat Focus Slide navigation to the equally neat Mini Tab navigation treatment created by Dan Cederholm @ Simplebits, with a few CSS tweaks. So instead of having the bottom indicators “appear” when you hover over the navigation link, the indicator
slides between the navigation choices. So if you are a CSS purist, you can go with Dan’s creation. Or you can add Steve’s little Javascript (so Web two point oh-ish) and give the navigation a little bit of life.
This has been tested on IE 5 and Firefox 1.5, however I made no material changes to the Slayeroffice JS so the testing done there should be valid for this. Enjoy!
