published over 3 years ago (28.04.2005 00:00)

clean web design is worth it

Last Sunday – five days ago – i did a very quick redesign of my "business" website. it's now one single static html page, dressed up with css and some images for headline text. semantically marked up, that is, put <h1> and <h2> tags around the headlines, no tables for layout, and so on. valid xhtml 1.0 transitional. the page weighs 7.45kB – including the images.

And ta–da: Google already picked it up and ranks me #1 … very nice. ok. #1 for my name. (which is an improvement over not appearing at all. like before.)

for the headlines i used the fahrner image replacement technique. that way it's possible to use custom fonts and nice text rendering for the headlines. nevertheless non-graphic browsers - and search engines - can still read the headlines, since they are present in the html as well. :-).

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published over 3 years ago (17.04.2005 00:00)

(a)eero saarinen

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published over 3 years ago (15.04.2005 00:00)

experiment 1.2

»I was visiting the New England Aquarium a few months back, where I was angry over the ridiculously steep entrance fees to go check out a bunch of fish.
I can check out the fish for free at my local supermarket, where they are conveniently packed on ice, making them much easier to see than when they are hiding behind coral and rocks.«

»The people behind me in line were not amused, giving me the kind of looks normally reserved for elderly immigrants trying to pay for their groceries in Italian lira.« read more …

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published over 4 years ago (03.04.2005 00:00)

so many toys, so little time!

CSS Fiddling

Instead of rebuilding from scratch (using a framework or blogging system i have yet to pick) i played around with the CSS trying to make the page look a little cleaner.

Ruby

Ruby is a modern scripting language from japan, with a quite different but concise syntax and feature set.

a simple example - creating and looping over an array

… in ruby:

theBig5 = %w[lion rhino buffalo leopard elephant]
theBig5.each {|x| puts "a #{x} is a big and dangerous animal!"}

… the same in php:

$theBig5 = array('lion', 'rhino', 'buffalo', 'leopard', 'elephant');
foreach ($theBig5 as $x) {
  print "a $x is a big and dangerous animal!\n";
}

… and in javascript:

theBig5 = new Array('lion', 'rhino', 'buffalo', 'leopard', 'elephant')
for (x in theBig5)
  document.writeln('a ' + x + ' is a big and dangerous animal!')
}

… and in c#:

string[] theBig5 = {"lion", "rhino", "buffalo", "leopard", "elephant"}; 
foreach(string x in theBig5) {
   Console.WriteLine(x);
}

Ruby on Rails

… is a framework for quickly building web applications. The basic components and architecture are already there (filesystem layout, database access, conventions, clean urls, logging, etc.) is already there, relying on standard patterns. So you only implement your stuff using the prepared structure. The application uses the MVC pattern, has some very neat features like ActiveRecords (Access/Modify database data through objects), Routes (Clean URLs without having to wrap your brain around mod_rewrite) and a command-line script to generate code skeletons you then fill with your code. very nice. so all you have to do is learn how to use that and you can develop web applications very fast.

Disclaimer: If you’re a ruby expert, please forgive me any errors or misconceptions. I have been playing with R and RonR for two days only.

XMLHttpRequest

by using this technology, the information on web sites can be updated without reloading the whole page. This way, the user experience is much more application-like. Instead of click-button – page goes blank – wait – new content is there, it’s now click button – wait – page is updated. A lot faster.

Online Examples:

this combination of web technologies technology is generally referred to as “Ajax”

No se puede tocar

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