Yesterday saw the biggest change to the Google homepage since 1998. They replaced the minimal, functional and revolutionary design of the original – which has remained largely unchanged for 12 years – by adding a Bing-like background image that you could change, but not remove.

Now, a few hours later, Google normality is restored; the ‘Change background image’ link is there, but it’s something you opt into rather than not being able opt out of.

So it turns out this was a ’24 hour experiment’ to publicise the feature which, when you think about it, had to be the case otherwise Google’s famous themed logos would have become redundant, and that would seem very odd given their popularity.

Still, it’s surprising that Google appears to be so afraid of the growth of Microsoft’s search engine that they decided to do this.


Typekit really need to improve the way they do their user-agent detection. At the moment, it seems that if the user-agent-string doesn’t contain either ‘Firefox’ or ‘Safari’, then Typekit won’t work, even when the rendering engine is capable of rendering the fonts.

This isn’t an issue for many. But it is if you’re using a development build of a browser, or you’re using a Linux distribution with a modified version of Firefox that, due to licensing restrictions, can’t use the Firefox branding. In this case, the user-agent string will contain the development name of the browser, such as ‘Shiretoko’ or ‘Namoroka’.

In Firefox, changing the user-agent string in about:config to ‘Firefox’ will solve this problem. In Chromium (the development build of Google Chrome), you’ll need to launch the browser with a command something like this:

chromium-browser --user-agent="Firefox/3.5.5" --enable-remote-fonts

Recent builds of Chromium now support @font-face, so you might not need the -enable-remote-fonts option.

Hopefully, Typekit will improve their browser detection by checking the rendering engine in the user-agent string, rather than simply the browser name.

We cannot have a web on which a 140 character utterance of criticism against someone else causes a torrent of abuse against the offender and a front-page BBC article about the offendee’s intention to quit because of it.

Yesterday, Twitter user Brumplum criticised Stephen Fry by calling his tweets boring, and Stephen Fry reacted by threatening to quit Twitter. We’ll look back on this and see how silly it all is, and in future BBC editors with publish more important news.

At last, I’ve finally knocked this site into a shape I’m happy with. You’ll find no crufty div soup round here. It’s all HTML5 goodness and it works on IE8 and IE7 using Remy Sharp’s magic HTML5 enabling script.

I found HTML5 to be a bit odd at first, but as I started experimenting with it, the simplicity and meaningfulness of HTML5 mark-up started to sink in. The best way to think of the new elements is something like this:

• use <header> and <footer> in the obvious places, this negates the need for <div id=”header”> and <div id=”footer”>
• use <section> for the main sections of the page eg. <div id=”content”>
• use <article> where you would have <div class=”post”>
• use <aside> where you would have information related to an article, eg. <div class=”date”>
• use <nav> for your navigation links

Then, instead of using IDs and classes, you use CSS selectors to select parts of the document tree to style. I found the W3C’s table of CSS3 selectors invaluable for this. I’ve mainly used CSS2 selectors for compatibility with IE and older versions of Firefox.

I’ve also made use of the @font-face selector to embed Museo font for the heading styles. There’s a good list of free fonts available for embedding on the Web Fonts Wiki.

I must give credit to Croc Camen and Alex Gibson for their inspiring work with HTML5. I haven’t had this much fun with web design in years.

Dammit… I knew I was pushing my luck with IE5/Win and that graphic to the left. For those of you using IE5.0, you’ll notice that this image has gone a bit awry. This is because I decided to put a drop shadow on the image and the only way to blend it in was to incorporate some of the table formatting in the bitmap itself. Of course, if Microsoft bothered to implement png compatibility into IE5.x/Win, I wouldn’t have this problem; I’d just create an image with partial transparency in Fireworks, save it as a 32bit png file and Bob’s your uncle. I might just do it anyway and suggest that people on a PC use Netscape 6 instead. It also looks as though IE5/Win is resizing the table cells on the left even though I have told it not to. Hmmmm. Bare with me while I iron out the flaws… normal service will resume soon.

OK. So it’s redesigned and it validates, but I’m not there yet. Now I’ve got a layout done in HTML tables, I’m going to replace them with CSS formatting in the near future. I suppose I’ve been working with tables for so long, it’s tricky to stop using them.

Phew… it’s been a struggle, but here it is: the all new frownland.com. This site is now more standards compliant than ever before [validated to XHTML1.0] and should load like the proverbial ‘muck’ off a shovel now that I have streamlined everything. However, I have absolutely no idea what the page looks like on anything other that IE5 for the Mac… I’ve only got the W3C HTML Validator to trust. In an ideal world, this should be all I need… unfortunately, life isn’t like that is it? Maybe one day.
I’ve still got a bit more work to do though, like get the archives linked up, replace those images on the right [stuff from the old design], and add some more content to the bottom of the page, but that’s about it. Overall, I think it’s an improvement… more ‘chunky’ I reckon. Anyway… enough geek talk, standby for more of the usual – comment and links on stuff that matters: art, design, photography, science, technology, music, everything.

New stuff at altsense.net:
A Eulogy for Design
Preview Goree – an experiment using javascript and photography.

subsist.org [a site that has been on the back burner for a year and a half now] is going to be collaborative, jam packed with content, eXtensible [as soon I get my head round all this DOM, XML, CSS, PHP stuff) and anti-commercial. Over the last year or so, I’ve designed and re-designed almost to the point of completion and then given up. Version 1 of the design can be seen here [complete with usual DHTML scroller] and here are the beginnings of version 2 of the design [I was getting really ambitious with this one]. I soon realised the site was getting just too big for one person to manage… so I gave up and started doing this site instead [I also wanted to stop playing it safe with greyscale palettes and decided on this stupid yellow]. So… I’m in the the process of re-designing subsist.org yet again and this time I’m going to do something that is within my reach.

So when is IE5/Win going to have full support for PNG (Portable Network Graphic) files? This format is far superior to the common GIF format because it generates smaller file sizes, renders more quickly on browsers and supports neato tricks like alpha transparency [which means you can create fancy ‘see-through’ graphics]. At the moment, PNG is the graphic format of choice for Flash developers as the Flash plugin has full support for this format. But for non-flash web designers, it’s not looking too good. Whereas Netscape 6* [for all platforms] and IE5/Mac does have full support for PNG, IE5/Win doesn’t – which means it will be a long time before PNG has its day [and it’s been waiting for about 4 years].
For more on PNG, read:

Whatever happened to PNG? [Webmonkey]
The Story of PNG [slashdot]

*OK… so Netscape 6 is particularly bug-ridden, but in my opinion, it is the second best browser out there after IE5/Mac.

Darn permalinks… they’ve inexplicably stopped working, so I’ve had to remove them until I work out what’s going wrong.

Design tweak on its way.

I think the only way we’re going to survive the apparent slump in the world wide web design industry is to lift ourselves out of this trend [we are just talking about front-end design here right? Surely some of the ‘back-end’ heavyweights, Yahoo, Amazon etc. are thriving]. On the surface, we are seeing an over-saturation of design for it’s own sake; sites so overladen in their own self importance that they forget the importance of the customer. The last few years has seen a huge appetite for this type of approach; clients are willing throw lots of cash to agencies who can come up with the sweetest eye-candy. It’s time to move on, but until the telecoms companies get their act together and a world-wide broadband network is in place, and the internet takes its next evolutionary step, things are going to continue to stagnate around here.

frownland.com is pleased to help drum up some interest in explodingfist.com. Speaking of classic arcade games of the 80’s, I was more of a Yie Ar Kung Fu fan myself.

Thanks to James at One Day Soon for highlighting how various blogs [including mine] render on the WebTV browser. I downloaded the emulator the other day and I was expecting my site to be horribly mangled so it could be fit onto a PAL/NTSC resolution screen. Fortunately, the damage is pretty minimal; some of the table formatting is slightly messed up and the CSS defined table borders are missing but otherwise, it’s OK.

I’ve got 12 hours to teach a group of photography students on how to get a website up and running. Bearing in mind that most of them know little about web design [or computers in general for that matter], I think it’s going to be pretty difficult in the time I’ve got. I’m tempted to teach them how to create and maintain a weblog which would compliment an online folio of photography work. This would not only teach them the basics of HTML and FTP etc., but also, I think it would help to enthuse them about online culture in general and the importance of keeping a website fresh with content.

CPP | 2000 – a half-finished greyscale dhtml site by me.

According to Corey Eisman [toegristle], you can download a WebTV emulator from
here. Thanks Corey.

Happy Birthday Jeffrey, and thanks for the link!

Another Matt Jones weblog [Creative Director of news.bbc.co.uk no less]. Although I think the BBC News site is excellent and I read it regularly, I have one quibble: why don’t any of the articles contain hypertext? I would have thought a public service organisation like the BBC would be the first to maintain web design standards that help make the Web what it is. Presumably, the reasoning is that people might click on a hyperlink to another site, not like what they see and think to themselves ‘I’m not paying my licence fee for this rubbish!’, hence the list of related links to the right with a disclaimer underneath.

A browse through the technical stats for this site shows that I’m getting a few visits from people using WebTV. I haven’t got a clue what this page looks like on WebTV, so if you’re one of these visitors, please let me know if this site is readable or not (especially if you’re 6 feet away from the TV sitting on a comfy chair eating your dinner). I’m also getting a few visits from users of a browser called ‘SpaceBison’ – if only all web browsers had such cool names as this.

I’ve had a few enquiries about the ‘colab’ section and when it will be on-line. Well… unfortunately the answer is ‘not for a while’. I think I was a bit ambitious when I put that there, hoping that I’d have time to get something sorted out. Things are just a bit too hectic at the moment as I’m leaving my current job and starting another in a few weeks. So I’m not going to be able to afford much time on it over the coming months. In the meantime, you can be confident that I’ll be posting loads of [hopefully] interesting stuff here.

Jeffrey Zeldman wins the award for ‘how much hair you can stuff under a small blue hat’.

There is something fundamentally wrong with Jakob Nielsen’s argument in his latest alertbox and I’m having trouble pinning down what it is. I agree that mobile phones are poor devices for viewing online content and that their ‘form factor’ does not lend itself to interfacing successfully to the Internet. But he goes on to suggest that the future of mobile voice communication is through hand-held devices – primarily for Internet use – which have an ear/microphone arrangement for phone calls. I’m sure that if Jakob was to do a survey of mobile phone users, the percentage of those asked would prefer to speak into a small brick-like object than through a microphone on the lapel. This is simply to do with the fact that – in my opinion – people prefer to look as if they are on the phone speaking to someone rather than walking around seeming to speak to themselves. Mobile phones are annoying enough and I certainly don’t want to see a future when everyone in the street is speaking into the ether rather than to each other.

Thanks to Joe Jennet for the review of this site at coolstop.com [Today’s Pick 21/12/2000]. Much appreciated, thanks.

This site should carry some kind of health warning, or at least something like: “If you like full control of your computer, please exit this site immediately”.

An ultra-smooth DHTML scroller available for download at assembler.org [via 3.0]

Jakob Nielsens latest Alertbox on WAP useability.

One of these days, I will add a whole new set of images to the randomizer at the top. I don’t know about you, but I’m getting quite bored of the ones in rotation at the moment [except that amazing picture of a real-life UFO - I’ve actually had NASA on to me about that picture, they want me to remove it immediately for some reason]. It was taken by Dan, so why don’t you email him and ask him about his close encounter.

So yes, more images are definitely needed and don’t forget that – if you like – you can send a 400×170 jpeg, and I’ll include it there. The current theme – which happened entirely subconciously and I don’t know why – is ‘flight’.

I really like elixir studio’s work. Check this [via Stu]

So here it is, the all new design. I’ve spent the last few weeks trying add content and it wasn’t working out at all, it was like to trying fit an awkward piece into an even more awkward jigsaw puzzle. So instead, I decided to strip it all down and re-arrange the content across more html files. I don’t really have that much time on my hands to maintain content other than this blog, so I thought this route was the best one to take. As always, there is still more to do, like get the archives up and running and get the ‘co-lab’ section online. Anyway, I think it’s an improvement.

FlashForward 2000 should be renamed ‘CashForward 2000’ judging by daft prices of tickets (1000? – surely they are taking the piss). What a sorry state of affairs. I can sense a parody site on its way from somewhere.

Really busy at work at the minute, so postings are going to be few and far between for a while. The redesign is taking ages because I’m too much of a perfectionist. Its nothing major, there’s just going to be slightly more content to look at, as well as a section called ‘co-lab’ which will hopefully provide some kind of platform for collaboration in various projects that I haven’t thought of yet.

I’ve just downloaded Netscape 6 and I take back what I said about it a few days ago (that was a preview version so I was wrong to make judgement). It’s actually not bad at all – some of the graphics used could be a bit better, but its a vast improvement from the preview version (it seems as though alternate themes/skins can be used, which is cool – a k10k netscape skin?). All the CSS stuff that i’m working on for the re-design of this site seems to be working OK on Netscape 6 – at last, designers can develop for ‘browser a’ and be confident that it will work on ‘browser b’. Now I suppose it’s up to Netscape fans to download the latest version.

Getting CSS to work across different browsers is an absolute ‘mare. Thankfully, there are pretty good compatibility lists like this one at webreview.com which help out quite a bit.

Well… I managed to get half of the redesign done over the weekend but as ever, my tendancy to procrastinate like hell got the better of me and I ended up doing very little. From what I’ve done so far though, I think it’s an improvement. Should be online soon.
::.

I bought the Blue Jam CD on Saturday and it’s been disturbing me all weekend. It’s pretty shocking stuff, almost to the point where I feel quite ill when I listen to it. Chris Morris seems to have edited together all the darkest stuff from the radio series and most of it makes for difficult listening. It was filed under ‘humour’ in the record shop, it should be filed under ‘dark’ . Good stuff though.

subsist.org

Oh dear… what has happened to Netscape? Not only have they produced one of the worst-looking pieces of software I’ve ever seen (although Cleaner 5 is getting close it), it also looks as though they’ve failed to implement the standards that promised to make life easier for web designers. Why?