Monday December 08 2008
IE6 equation
Jeremy Keith wrote an interesting article titled The IE6 Equation over at 24ways. Here’s the bit on the equation:
Let’s say that t represents the total development time. Let t6 represent the portion of that time you spend developing for IE6. If your total audience is a, then a6 is the portion of your audience using IE6. With some algebraic help from our mathematically minded co-worker Cennydd Bowles, Natalie and I came up with the following equation to calculate the percentage likelihood that you should be using Dean’s IE7 script:
p = 50 [ log ( at6 / ta6 ) + 1 ]
Andy Clark left the first comment, with permission to steal for use in client contracts. I’ll be adding this to my contract when I get home later today.
As you mentioned client contracts, here is what I say about the issue in my standard Stuff and Nonsense client contract. (Feel free to steal, change and reuse.)
“If the project includes XHTML or HTML markup and CSS templates, we will develop these using valid XHTML 1.0 Strict markup and CSS2.1 + 3 for styling.
We will test all our markup and CSS in current versions of all major browsers including those made by Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera. We will also test to ensure that pages will display visually in a ‘similar’, albeit not necessarily an identical way, in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 for Windows as this browser is now past it’s sell-by date.
We will not test these templates in old or abandoned browsers, for example Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 or 5.5 for Windows or Mac, previous versions of Apple’s Safari, Mozilla Firefox or Opera unless otherwise specified. If you need visitors using these older browsers to see the same or similar visual design, we will charge you at the daily rate set out in our original estimate for testing and any necessary additional code.”
Tuesday August 19 2008
New Client
Yesterday I recieved the signed contract and deposit for my latest client. This is going to be a big site and I’m looking forward to doing it.
The interesting thing here is that the client chose a template to download. I unfortunately misread emails and purchased the wrong template and had to purchase the correct one. Anyhow I’m not impressed with template-help.com as both times I downloaded the archived files I had to re-download it multiple times due to crc errors in the zip files. I ended spending about an 1 for each template trying to get an uncorrupted version.
The mistake file that I downloaded was table based and I’m very happy I don’t need to build from that design. The second template is pure CSS, but it’s not exactly semantically written and there are some errors in the code primarily many semi-colons are missing. I know this as I went through the css files and indented them to increase readability - the original downloads looked like this:
#content h2{font-size:1.71em; font-weight:normal; color:#000000; font-family:Times New Roman; background:url(images/icon1.gif) no-repeat top left; padding:5px 0px 5px 40px; margin-bottom:9px;}
Mine now look like this:
#content h2{
font-size:1.71em;
font-weight:normal;
color:#000000;
font-family:Times New Roman;
background:url(images/icon1.gif) no-repeat top left;
padding:5px 0px 5px 40px;
margin-bottom:9px;
}
anyhow I’m ready to dive into this as soon as I finish the navbar I’m working on - it’s causing me headaches in one remaining section.
Monday August 18 2008
Way too long
The menu project I started has gone way over the amount of time i expected it to take. I estimated 2-3 hours and according to slimtimer I’m at 5.8 hours. I know it’s more because I’m still not consistent at turning the timer on.
Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Monday Aug 18, 2008 at 11:42 AM
CSS |
| tags:
css,
freelancing,
timetracking |
Thursday August 14 2008
Smokin’ Busy
Since the weekend I got smokin’ busy. From friday to Sunday I wrote a massive post comparing online slideshow services for my teaching blog. I also got in touch with my original client, but he hasn’t yet delivered the promised images. Also I am about to start a site design for a friend opening a business (yes he’s paying me) and was contacted by a language school in a nearby city about doing a site for them - still emailing back and forth.
finally I also picked up a small design project of replicating a menu built in tables and making it tableless as well as adding superfish javascript functionality to it. This was going well until I looked in IE and realized it was completely messed up. I don’t know why it took me so long to find the solution, but I had to delete one of the classes in superfish.css to get everything to render fine. Now I just need to tweak up the navbar a bit and send it to the client.
Later today, I’m meeting a local web designer (also a non-Korean) for a coffee to talk about design and life in Korea. Hopefully this turns into a good connection or friend.
Busy busy busy.
Monday August 04 2008
Superfish solved
I solved my recent problems with superfish menus. It seems that because I had built my menu prior to adding the superfish js and css files there were some conflicts and extra declarations that were not necessary.
I eventually decided to reset the superfish css file and then commented out my navigation css and started fresh using only the superfish code. Made modifications and voila, it works perfectly. Definitely a learning experience and worth remembering. In the end setting this up was much easier than I made it out to be. Because of the existing css code everything was wonked, once I got rid of that everything worked great.
The site is almost finished, now I just need to add content and style pagination.
Tuesday June 24 2008
Styling Code
As I mentioned in the previous entry I wanted to be able to style code on this blog. Coincidentally last night there was a thread on the EE forums asking the same question. In the end I discovered that when wrapping text in [ code][ /code] tags EE adds another div with a class codeblock which I was then able to style. It’s temporarily set to look like this:
.codeblock {width: 200; overflow: auto; background: #e7e7e7; border: 1px solid #666;}
Looking at this, setting the width doesn’t seem to be having any effect.
Hmm.. blog title is getting cropped in IE - will have to fix that soon.
