graphiceyedea » news

W3C Validator worries & WCAG2 out

prisca — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 20:50:26 +0000

Molly Holzschlag wrote a quite worrying post a few days ago – outlining the problems the W3C Validators are facing. These tools we all rely on are in trouble and we all need to get involved to make sure that we will not lose such essential service.
Please do read Molly’s blog post W3C Validators in Jeopardy.

For more detailed information about the W3C validator services and the current situation, or to become involved, please visit the W3C Validator Donation Program page.

On a more positive note – the new accessibility guidelines are out – and will hopefully be a step forward. It’s been 2 years since Joe Clarke wrote his critical “To hell with WCAG 2” article on ALA – so this has been a long time coming. I have not had the time to read yet but I am hoping that these guidelines will be a major improvement over the existing ones and be written in a more concise and legible format.

→ Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0
→ The Web Standards Project – WCAG 2.0 resources

eyelearn – new site

prisca — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 13:05:43 +0000

finally made time to set up the ‘eyelearn’ courses up on a new site – eyelearn.org – new branding implemented and a completely new setup for course details and student area.

After testing out several LMS (learning management systems) to see what might be better than WordPress … and a total of 7 databases later… I ended up returning to WordPress – I’m quite pleased to say that I managed to incorporate a login system myself – as I couldn’t find a plugin or extension for WP…..

jQuery

prisca — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 19:16:05 +0000

javascript… the superior geek’s land… as many times before, I again feel I need to face another challenge in coding… as with handcoding – before facing it I thought my visual mind would not be able to handle the code – I feel this is even more so the case with Javascript.
But seeing how many useful and wonderful little tricks people come up with using Javasript, jQuery or others – I need to finally get over another hurdle, time to start learning JS basics at least… I finally bought Jeremy Keith’s book ‘DOM Scripting‘ and started my venture into DOM and JS.

I was aware of the reputation of this book and I have to say it is beautifully written. I was very apprehensive about whether I would be able to get my head around the complexity of this topic. I have not gotten very far yet – but I already feel less worried ;) thanks to the wonderful writing. Struggling to find time at the moment – I am looking forward to go deeper – thanks, Jeremy :)

As my progress with this will likely be pretty irradic due to my current workload – I set up a mini site purely to keep track of my tests and trials… might become a handy reference for our work with the eyedea team as well: → dev.eyedea.eu

I’m also really happy that Laura is joining me in the quest for learning JS – she is already making use of it on her newly launched photography site: → lauramoreno.net

commonKnowledge – new design

prisca — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 14:25:43 +0000

As I have now joined the Commonknowledge Collective – I thought it would be nice to give the member a little something as a little welcome gift from me. The current site has been up for a while as far as I understand and certainly does looks old in visual style and setup. So I worked on a few facelift ideas and proposed a new design. Though the current site is setup using Joomla (which I am sure is a good platform to use though it seems a bit too heavy for such a small site) – I felt using WordPress would be more effective. I setup a online demo to show this new setup and I am hoping the cK members will agree.

keep clean lines from existing design – but ‘revamp’ layout to a more modern style
using a clean and minimal style to suit the majority of cK members working within the technical side
keep random image within header
I know this is a popular feature – including the overlap – but the distortion and quality of images as well as the illegibility of the cK title on top of certain photos persuaded the designer in me to come up with a new approach trying to keep the random combinations but improving – hopefully ;) – on the overall header.
I edited the images (discarded a few which were too poor in quality or which did not fit the new dimensions) – and set up 5 random images (one of the collections of randoms uses my images as I did not want to move away from the existing categories) – this can be changed, of course…
create a fluid layout to fill the screen
this can be a very personal preference – I myself am very fond of fluid and flexible layouts aesthetically and also use them for better usability.
typography as prominent design element
…I love the use of larger type for headers instead of using bold, for example….
colour scheme – strong and vibrant to brighten up the clean lines and add impact
to keep within a more ‘techie’ colour scheme – I went with the green found in many photos. Using a dark teal – offset with a bright lime green. I know htis is quite strong – but I hope you will like it ;)