Keith Lord - Online Portfolio

It actually happened several months back, after years of trying to get my sites working properly in Internet Explorer 6 and below I finally reached the end of my patience.

So, Grey Skies at least will no longer be supporting Internet Explorer 6 and below.
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Håkon Wium Lie posted an open letter in which is revealed that Opera has filed a formal complaint with the European Commission to force Microsoft to support open Web standards in its browser Internet Explorer.
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Previously I mentioned of my interest in Flickrvision. Well I recently discovered Twittervision, same basic principle of Flickrvision but with people’s “tweets”.
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Todays quote come from my dearest.

“what the hell are you doing to my eyes”

Taken out of context one could wonder what on earth she is referring too. She was of course refering to a test image of the new navigation bar I am working on for the MOUL site.
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So a few weeks back Ryan (GreyDragon) popped up on MSN and asked me and Denis (amon-re) if we would be interested in interning at Cyan, so we said yes.
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I’ve often thought about which would be the best way to structure CSS, which would be the most beneficial way to make finding and editing quicker and easier.
Not to mention it may need to be easy to find for others using the style sheet for example.

Currently I style my sheets grouped in to sections; structure style, text styles, image styles and so on. Within each of those sections the elements are grouped in terms of their placement on the site (header values are at the top, content values beneath that, footer values at the bottom).

I had been considering using a different format of having the style sheet structured by elements then within each element section having all the values for that element.

The problem with this format is that I seldom see it used on sites, which makes me wonder if it is one of those “web design no-nos”. Having said that I did discover a WordPress theme which uses this formatting for the CSS which you can view here: CSS.txt

Perhaps the size of the site could be a factor here, if you have a small site with minimal CSS values then you wouldn’t need to be concerned so much with using the structuring provided in the example. However I do believe this kind of structure would be greatly beneficial for The D’ni Jazz Club which has a pretty large style sheet which has gotten muddled and confusing as I have added in test values that have ended up staying but not in their designated spots.

I am curious as to what the thoughts are of the fellow designers who read this blog are.

I was browsing by Download Squad when I chanced upon up a link to flickrvision.

The site basically shows in real-time images being uploaded to people’s flickr accounts across the world by combining flickr and Google Maps. Despite the slightly stalker like qualities to it, I do non-the-less find it rather fascinating seeing what images are being uploaded elsewhere in the world. It’s like a quick 5 second glimpse at someone else’s life whether it’s pictures of themselves, protests or trips on the roller coaster.

The only thing about the site that I don’t like is the “light box” type viewing of the images, which is constently up on the screen, however some images come up and vanish so quickly that the image doesn’t have time to load outside the pinned bubble, which can get rather annoying when it obscures the images. I would have thought keeping the pinned bubbles and having a link on there to view the image it is showing would make more sense, but like most things web 2.0 the site is still in beta.

N.Design Studio, using a spot of Jquery, Javascript library and Fisheye component, came up with a stunning Mac like dock menu for websites.

I seem to be having a little issue with the icons being a bit jagged when they are enlarged but aside from that I am rather impressed with the smoothness of it.

Demo of the Dock Menu can be found here: Dock Menu Demo

I have been finding lately that the applications I enjoy using seem to loose something upon receiving an upgrade. New features are added, things I would never use (and sometimes wonder if anyone would use) and eventually the neat little application becomes this bloated thing that just doesn’t inspire me to use any more. I am sure I am not the only one who feels this, infact I know I am not, one of the key points to Zenphoto being created was an answer to the bloated gallery software you find floating around.

I have been having this issue with Wiki software, a lot of it is insanely bloated and just a pain to use. Now I can understand that Wiki’s can be complex in structuring and so you are probably going to get a lot of coding going on there, but there are some “light” versions around that don’t seem to fall prey to this issue. I have tried countless versions of Wiki software to find something that I like, I admit I am being a little picky but I need to know that it can do what I have in mind without hacking into 50 different php files to do so. Ideally what I would like to see is someone like Automattic take on the Wiki area. The format that they use for both WordPress and BBPress is something I would like to see in a Wiki. A simple installation and customization of themes, and the use of plugins for extra options. Especially with a rewrite for the urls, which has been the draw back of the light Wiki software I have used, I want more control over the urls.

A guy can dream.

With the new release of version 0.8 of BBPress, or Desmond as it has been dubbed, Michaels plugin to allow images in posts no longer seems to work.

So I took a look at the “formatting_functions.php” file located in the “/bb-includes” folder and found what needs to be changed. Where it says;


function bb_allowed_tags() {
$tags = array(
'a' => array(
'href' => array(),
'title' => array(),
'rel' => array()),
'blockquote' => array('cite' => array()),
'br' => array(),
'code' => array(),
'pre' => array(),
'em' => array(),
'strong' => array(),
'ul' => array(),
'ol' => array(),
'li' => array()
);
return apply_filters( 'bb_allowed_tags', $tags );


You will need to add;


'img' => array(
'alt' => array()),


Between the ‘em’ and ’strong’ array values.