optimiced | en

Step 1:

Open Silverback.

Step 2:

Resize slowly your browser window (Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE7 are all ОК) and…

Step 3:

…watch the effect. Cool!

There’s a discussion on how the quasi-3D effect was achieved using CSS + half-transparent PNG graphics — to me it reminds me the old video games; and looking at Steve, I instantly think of Nintendo’s Donkey Kong!

CSS rullz! ;-)

Smart tools as xScope 2 make me feel sorry sometimes, that I don’t own an Apple Mac! ;-)

If you work on a Mac and do (web)design, I recommend you to drop a look at Doug Bowman’s blog, where he wrote a detailed explanation about xScope (in short, this is something like Screen Calipers, multiplied by 10… or even 100!).

Argh! This is called Win-discrimination! :-D

Yes, it is possible.

No, it won’t work with a simple “copy-paste” of the two Google Analytics codes.

Read on, if you want to know the solution which I discovered by experimenting! :-)

* * *

Not a long ago I had to play a lot with GoogleAnalytics. I had also the idea of creating one GoogleAnalytics profile for the whole domain, and separate profiles for some of the sections in the website. Thus the statistics for the whole website and its sections could be tracked in an easier way, like if you were watching the statistics for separate websites, while having at the same time an overall look at the traffic for the whole domain. (I believe there are other means of achieving the same goal with GA, but for me the method above was the easiest to implement.)

So, I’ve created separate profiles in Google Analytics (one profile for the whole website and several others for the site sections), copied the HTML codes from GoogleAnalytics on each page, and waited for the results. 24 hours later I discovered that:

1) The first (for the whole domain) GoogleAnalytics profile works and gathers data (the code for it was always first in the html code in the pages).
2) The GA profiles for each section do not work (they show zero traffic), notwithstanding the fact that Google Analytics claims that the GA code is inserted correctly and works (the code for each site section was always after the general profile code).

The things at this moment looked like this:

<!-- GoogleAnalytics code for the whole domain -->
<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
_uacct = "UA-XXXXXXX-X";
urchinTracker();
</script>
<!-- GoogleAnalytics code for a specific site section -->
<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
_uacct = "UA-XXXXXXX-X";
urchinTracker();
</script>

Copy-pasting the GA codes one after the other didn’t work… After some research and googling around, I’ve found the following solution:

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Safari - with a brand new Windows version! Sounds almost incredible, but it’s a fact…

I saw the news by accident - dropped a look to the new design of Apple (MacOS X Leopard, being the reason for the new design, I guess), and from there clicked the Download Apple Safari 3.0 Beta… for Windows! How can you resist not to click such a link! :-)

Internet Explorer won’t have a version for MacOS anymore (unless Microsoft change their mind at some point). The last version was IE 5.2/Mac and that was ages ago…

And now Apple releases a version of Safari for Windows!

I downloaded the beta [Safari version 3.0.1 (522.12.2), to be precise] — I was curious, of course — I do not have constant access to a Mac, so even only for testing of websites in Safari this version would be of great use for me:)

Three things make impression immediately:

• Safari on Windows looks like Safari on Mac;
• some Windows functions don’t work (for example, you cannot scroll the page when you press down the scroll (middle) button of the mouse);
• font rendering looks very different - Windows doesn’t have any influence on the rendering of the fonts - nor ClearType, nor any other way of anti-aliasing (font smoothing) works…

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Smashing Magazine published today a very interesting article.

35 web designers were asked the following five questions:

• 1 aspect of design you give the highest priority to.
• 1 most useful CSS-technique you use very often.
• 1 font you use in your projects very often.
• 1 design-related book you highly recommend to read.
• 1 design magazine you read on a daily/weekly basis (online or offline).

The answers? You can read them in the article itself:-)

I put again my CSS clothes after stripping them off for more than 48 hours :)

Overall, this year’s CSS Naked Day was fun (my first participation, btw)…

Over 1600 official participants this year (see the full list at: http://naked.dustindiaz.com)! But rather less noise than when the first CSS Naked Day came…

But I’m happy I was in :-)

To promote Webstandards, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and semantic (X)HTML - this year again CSS Naked Day!

More information: two words by Dustin at his blog, at webstandards.org, and, of course, at the official webpage of the participants :) The list of participating websites is over 900 and growing (see also technorati).

My blog is first-time participator (for obvious reasons - in April 2006 optimiced.com didn’t yet exits;-), which means from midnight EET (East European Time, or GMT + 2h) all CSS styles in it will be disabled for a minimum of 24 hours — and if you wonder, why the design of the website looks so bare - this is the reason:)))

Well, Optimiced is not so beautiful at the moment, but a good cause requires some sacrifice, and I’m willing to do it:)

There’s a video and you should watch it.

Better with sound.

Better with sound on your THX-certified sound system, volume to the max:-)

(If you don’t happen to own such a system, err… Then use whatever sound system is available around;-)

The intro video (currently, the only video available to watch at the Minuscule.tv website) is great. I enjoyed it a lot - it was fun, fast-paced and beautifully drawn. The technique the guys and girls from Minuscule/Futurikon (Thomas Szabo, Hélène Giraud) use is quite unusual - they use a mix of real footage and 3D animation, plus real-life sound, very suitably selected.

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