Weblogism

“Dans” and “ST-tidningen” have been awarded the A4 Redesign Award 2004, resp. in magazine and newspaper categories. The aim of this contest is to improve the quality of Swedish papers and magazines design and typography-wise.

Good opportunity for me to link to A4 site which I really like. Both for its looks and its contents:

A4 är en designbyrå med bas i Stockholm och medarbetare i flera länder. En sak som skiljer oss från många andra grafiska formgivare är vårt intresse för ordens betydelse, inte bara deras utseende.

A4 is a design office based in Stockholm and employing people in several countries. One of the things that make us different to the other designers is our interest for the meaning of the words, not only for their look. (According to my rough translation)¶

Vincent Connare interviewed on the Snog Blog. I’ve always cursed Comic Sans but never blamed its designer. What I indeed hate about Comic Sans is its misuse. It is used in contexts which just do not suit, like in calls for tender, in internal notes in companies, on menus in bars and restaurant both in Paris and Malahide, near Dublin, and that really irritates me.

And I’m happy to see – even though not quite surprised – that Vincent Connare thinks the same: he likes his work but it is all about use. Just the occasion for me to link to his website, which has a pretty unfortunate name if you speak French. And to his Magpie font.

It looks like I discover a new amazing CSS trick every second day… I am among those who make their drop shadows the brutal way: I open a picture with The Gimp and go with a selection tool, shrink selection, Ctrl+K for a plain border and then a quick filter to actually drop the shadow.

Today’s article in A List Apart by Sergio Villarreal just makes me look plain stupid. It is a fairly easy way to get a drop shadow without even opening an image manipulation program. And it does the trick also with text. Easy, but someone had to think of it. And someone did… That’s what I like in CSS. It looks like you can do anything: you just have to think of it.

And every day, someone comes up with a terrific way of using the lethal weapon – even though it is more than probable that this trick has been around for quite a while and I didn’t come across it before. That would make me look even more silly. In public.

Alpha Channels in PNG don’t work with IE, as we have learnt to our cost. It never occurred though that it might be an IE limitation until I read one of Dave Shea’s posts yesterday; for me, who’s rather limited mentally, that was just because of the PNG format. And we would struggle just to get the right transparency (not to talk about The Gimp: I still haven’t figured out how to make a PNG transparent.

But the culprit was elsewhere. And the post mentioned above provides a link for a (somewhat complicated) solution – using AlphaImageLoader. The thing is, once the property behavior is used, the stylesheet doesn’t validate anymore. That’s why I reused WebFX example and inserted a piece of JavaScript to enable the Alpha channal and to validate. The result can be seen here. The drawback? A FOUC bug of some sort. I’ll have to think about that one.

This post is worth mentioning for two good (and personal) reasons. First of all because it deals with types. And also because I’m fond of Stockholm – and of Sweden, where I lived for one year. I happen to go there about once every month and when I had read the first “version” of this post, I thought it was an excellent idea – and decided I’d do the same for my very own pleasure. That’s how I ended up wandering around in Stockholm’s streets, with Ellen’s digital camera, trying to spot all those signs I had seen before.

Also, maybe worth mentioning, Sweden is the country where I bought my first book about typography… Of which I should take a photograph any time soon!

Source: Typographica.¶

Ellen spotted this – excellent – letter from The IT this morning:

Madam, – In announcing the commencement date for the workplace-smoking ban, has Minister Martin fully thought the matter out?

Not a word have I heard about what must be one of the most important aspects of its implementation – namely, the decommissioning of ashtrays.

Will the Minister confirm that he intends to set up an independent body (with appropriate powers of search and seizure) to supervise the disposal of these soon-to-be-redundant objects? Following State-wide collection of tens of thousands of them from pubs, restaurants and offices, they could perhaps be displayed on the plinth at Leinster House where he, and we, would see tangible evidence that they have permanently been put beyond further use.

Some should, of course, be retained by the National Museum for the enlightenment of future generations. – Yours, etc.,

BRIAN GAFFNEY

#+end_center

No, just kidding…

As I looked into the mirror, looking at my red eyes and pale face, I said to myself: “You should really go to bed earlier.” Last week, I went to bed at 3am every single night and my body happily followed that hectic rythm. The result is just what you’d expect: I was unable to sleep before 4am. Not to say that was a pretty tough Monday morning when I had to fight with my alarm-clock around 7.30am… Anyway, as I just cannot seem to think straight, I decided I would interview myself to collect my own thoughts about Weblogism.

Q. Hello, seb, you look damn tired.

A. (sighing) Don’t even mention it, I’m just shattered.

Q. Do you mind me asking what you’ve been doing to look so crap?

A. May I remind you that c*** is a fairly rude word?

Q. Oh, excuse my French.

A. No offence. Anyway, to answer your question, I’ve been working on sites, including Weblogism. For the moment, the site online is just an early release, still to be finished.

Q. What’s your opinion so far about your site?

A. Well, too blue, I’m afraid. I had done the layout at some late hours of night a while ago, and now that I stare at it right now at work, I just cannot help but thinking that it’s darn too blue. Apparently, the lettering is also somewhat too small. That’s a pity because that’s probably the only thing I’m quite happy with.

Q. So everything’s not that bad…

A. Oh God no! Weblogism has just reached its aim: teach me how to develop a web site in a proper and satifying manner. It uses a tableless design – pretty fashion, eeh –, URL rewriting to have nice and human-readable addresses. I still have to add lots of functions that run in my head, but so far, I’m not that unhappy with it.

Q. Do you think there’s anyone reading those lines out there?

A. (smiling) I must admit I have no clue. I don’t look at the stats. It looks like people are being a bit pissed off – oops, beg your pardon – irritated by the fact I write in English. They think I just show off. Don’t know what the heck I could be showing off…

Q. Just one last question: don’t you think writing a blog is just a narcissistic thing to do?

A. Well… I guess you’re allowed to ask and I’m sure every blogger on Earth just wonders why he does blog. Of course, I think it is narcissistic but still, I think some of the things I write in there interest some people.

Q. Fair enough. What about we grab a coffee right now?

A. (cheerful) Good thinking, Batman!

I had to use this striking Pink Floyd-like Reuters photograph.

¶

I use URL rewriting for the site I’m currently working on in order to both provide the users with more user-friendly addresses and improve results in search engines queries. However, since all the URI have been modified, I have to take into account :

• that the users may have kept the former addresses in their bookmarks,
• that the search engines still index the former addresses.

I have therefore been led to create a plain custom Error 301 page to deal with those two problems. It is not finished yet since it must still make the difference between the two cases, but it does a great job so far for redirecting the user on the right track – and the right page.

First of all, I added in my .htaccess file the former pages to associate them with the error 301:

RewriteEngine On

    #Former URI

RewriteRule ^(.*)plan.php$ http://mydomain/?a=plan [R=301]

RewriteRule ^(.*)accueil.php$ http://mydomain/ [R=301]

RewriteRule ^(.*)rdv.php$ http://mydomain/?a=rdv [R=301]

[…]

Those pages are redirected with a 301 error code.

Then, I must specify the address of my brand new 301 error page:

# Any other name would suit better, I guess
ErrorDocument 301 /301.php

And here’s what I do so far in this page:

<?php
$uri_deplacee = $_SERVER[’REQUEST_URI’];
$nlle_uri = "";
$prefix = "/";
if (strpos($uri_deplacee, "news.php") > 0)
{
ereg("id_news=([0-9]*)$", $uri_deplacee, $regs);
$nlle_uri = $prefix."news,".$regs[1];
}
else 
{
switch ($uri_deplacee)
{
case $prefix."plan.php" : $nlle_uri = $prefix."plan"; break;
case $prefix."accueil.php" : $nlle_uri = $prefix; break;
case $prefix."rdv.php" : $nlle_uri = $prefix."rendez_vous"; break;
default: break;
}
}
?>

The first if checks if the page is news.php which is a page displaying the news item whose id is provided by the query parameter id_news. Since the news pages now call the news this way: http://mydomain/news,45, a little regexp is necessary to strip all the useless bits and find the id of the news to build the new URI. The else is a plain switch to redirect to the right page. I’m sure there is a way to use the URI used for the redirection in the .htaccess file, but I haven’t thought that far yet.

Then, the page displays a little text warning the user and redirects towards the right page thanks to the following meta:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="3;URL=<?=$nlle_uri?>" />

Don’t forget to provide the user with a link to $nlle_uri as well, just in case the redirection wouldn’t work.

The next step is to analyse the referer to the page, in order to know whether the user came here via a search engine or simply because of his/her outdated bookmark. More refinements to come, then.