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No really, here’s a website, Nice Web Type, that contains great info on “Nice Web Type”. Makes sense! Via Simplebits.

Filed by matteo at 10:47 pm under Web Design
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Here’s a really nice tutorial for creating almost–photo realistic woodgrain backgrounds in Photoshop. Highly recommended! Via Dan Cederholm.

Filed by matteo at 7:48 am under Web Design, Graphic Design
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In another great post from Digital Web, Paul O’Brien details the CSS Background property, from the basics to browser quirks and bugs. Great reading!

Filed by matteo at 12:59 pm under Web Design
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Here’s a really nice set of 31 free online tests you can use to check your website’s code validation, accessibility, speed, and search engine optimization. One of my favorites is number 16 for speed checking. Excellent! Via Cameron Moll.

Filed by matteo at 12:52 pm under Web Design
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Do you want to know the in’s and out’s of using PNGs? Read Jeff Croft’s article, Creative Use of PNG Transparency in Web Design, over at Digital Web. Very comprehensive!

Filed by matteo at 12:23 pm under Web Design
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Here’s a great new color scheme generator, called ColorJack. With a simple easy–to–use interface and lots of options, it is a great addition to the web design’s toolkit. My favorite set of options is being able to view your color schemes as a person with color–blindness (in all its various types) would. Excellent work!

Filed by matteo at 12:37 am under Web Design
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Here’s a great new article about copyrights on Vitamin. Not important, unless you create something and want it protected!

Filed by matteo at 1:49 pm under Web Design, Graphic Design, Art, Good Reads, Software/Development
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Here’s an excellent and very articulate article by Vitamin newcomer Mani Sheriar that gives us clear cut examples of coding standards–based html that allows easy site redesign, which is, after all, one of the reasons we code using web standards. Great job, Mani!

Filed by matteo at 1:30 pm under Web Design
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I’ve bookmarked this really nice article about typography and choosing the most readable type. You should too! Thanks for the article, Juan.

Filed by matteo at 1:30 pm under Web Design, Graphic Design
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Well, it’s been almost a year since I first started playing/working with Wordpress. And it has been four months since I switched my site over completely to using it. How do I like it? Well, I switched over to it, didn’t I?

In my first post, I had some initial misgivings about Wordpress, and some of them still hold true. They are:

• Code snippets are still sketchy. It works best if you edit in HTML mode. Then, if Wordpress inserts it’s own formatting, go into MySQL and update the database directly. So far, I haven’t done a lot of code snippets in my blog, so it hasn’t been too bad. I’ll revisit this at a future date.
• I found a way around Wordpress mucking with my formatting of text with a floated graphic as follows:
  • Instead of the following code (which is perfectly valid HTML):
    <div class=”float_lt”>
    <img class=”image” src=”http://www.elshaarani.com/photos/65.jpg” width=”350″ height=”245″ alt=”Arabic Calligraphy” />
    <p>Arabic Calligraphy<br />by Mouneer Al–Shaárani</p>
    </div>
  • I wrapped the img tag within a paragraph tag as follows:
    <div class=”float_lt”>
    <p><img class=”image” src=”http://www.elshaarani.com/photos/65.jpg” width=”350″ height=”245″ alt=”Arabic Calligraphy” /></p>
    <p>Arabic Calligraphy<br />by Mouneer Al–Shaárani</p>
    </div>
  • This one change stopped Wordpress from trying to close a paragraph that didn’t exist, thus creating a validation error. I can live with this.
• Wordpress doesn’t do well with anchor tags. Well, I’m using XHTML 1.1 where the anchor tag is deprecated, so that is a moot point. (I don’t get why the W3C took away the anchor tag, though! It can be really useful!)

Apart from these minor issues, I can say that I am loving Wordpress. What do I love?

• Themes! Once you get onto how Wordpress works, themes are actually quite easy to set up and use.
• Customization. This goes hand–in–hand with themes. Using Wordpress’ templating functions, you can easily change the look and feel of Wordpress to exactly what you want. You can even build really nice non–blog websites with Wordpress using various plug–ins. (A post on my favorite plug–ins will be coming shortly.) I’ve gone so far as to adopt this platform as a basis for most of my website projects. It is that good! (And really, why re–invent the wheel? Much of what we as web designers and developers do is integration of existing software that performs common functionality. Developing a new blogging platform just doesn’t make sense for most of us, so why should we?)
• Searchability. Wordpress has a great built–in search function. Why not use it instead of programming your own?
• Great anti–spam features, both in comment submission and in e–mail submission, again through the use of a few excellent plug–ins.
• Great user and developer communities. I’ve had great experiences getting information and help from various developers and from the Wordpress.org main site. These people are enthusiastic about what they do and it shows.
• Ease of setup. Many of the most popular web hosting companies offer one–click setup and deployment of Wordpress. It can’t get much easier than that!
• It’s free! Not only is it a great product, but it is free to use. What is not to like about that?

To sum it all up, I am a full–fledged Wordpress convert. With such a solid product and such excellent support, I have no hesitation about recommending it to anyone getting into the customizable blogging scene or even as a basis for small to medium–sized website development.

Filed by matteo at 1:23 pm under Web Design, Software/Development
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