There’s a really useful trick over on one of Jeremy Keith’s websites about fixing innerHTML for Internet Explorer. I can’t say I’ve had a lot of trouble with this bug, but this fix seems to make light work of it if you’re doing AJAX-y stuff inside forms.
Category: Quick Links
VistaPrint – business cards for (almost) free
Warning: I’ve found out since writing this article that VistaPrint are well known for being involved with dubious charges. I’ve not been stung (yet) but Buyer Beware.
This weekend has been a bit of a washout, what with me having another wave of not-wellness yesterday and the weather turning bad today. Still, every now and again I take a look at by new toys and it brings a smile to my face.
On Friday my new business cards arrived from VistaPrint, and they’re great. Not necessarily because they’re well printed, but they are, or because the design is cool, and it is, but because they cost me under £4 for 250. How come, I hear you ask? Well, I just paid for shipping, the actual cost of printing was free.
It seems that VistaPrint are a company that can’t help but give things away, and that’s the sort of company I like. So head over to their website, register with your email address and you’ll soon be getting emails offering you fantastic deals. If you have a business that requires any form of printed literature (business cards, brochures, leaflets, postcards etc) then I would highly recommend them.
I really want to claim my 25 free glossy leaflets, but can’t think of a subject to write a leaflet about. Any suggestions?
N-Studio – glimpse of the otherworld
Just occasionally I see a website that makes me stop and catch my breath. So it is with N.Design Studio, which is retro and modern, funky and smooth all at once. Like an Ozric tentacles track it envelopes you and makes you drift into a land far, far away.
Of course we can’t all do designs like that, partly due to the fact that clients wouldn’t like )or indeed get) it, but mainly because us lesser mortals just can’t do illustration of that magnitude. Well done to the n-studio guys.
A soupcon of things
I have a couple things I’d like to say. I’ll put them in a definition list, because it’s my HTML Element Of The Day*.
- Royal Northern College of Music relaunches websites – with standards!
- The Royal Northern College of Music has recently relaunched its website, and I took a quick look expecting to see the worst. I have a special interest in this particular site as firstly my dad works there, and secondly my ex-company went for the contract to do the site a few years ago. We didn’t get it, but I still think my design is better.
- Ho hum. So I expected to see tables-galore, a feast of spacer GIFs and all manner of other nasties. Instead I find validation, sIFR and the Joomla content management system. Not quite perfect (then again, what is?) but lovely all the same. But my design is still better.
- Horizontal inline stacking bar charts
- OK, so the name might not be all that snappy, but I quite like my little idea for a sparkline-esque chart. I won’t bother explaining it too much, it’s just a collection of images in a line that have their total widths adding up to 100 pixels (or whatever you want to use) and the width of each individual image as the percentage of that value in the chart.
Here’s an example for a voting system. Users can vote good (green), average (orange) and bad (red). In this chart you can easily see that the good and bad votes are roughly equal, and the average votes are less. Easy, yes? It needs a bit of working on, but I’m fairly pleased with it.
* This probably won’t happen again, so in reality the definition list is my Only Ever HTML Element Of The Day. You get what you pay for.
The season of sniffles is among us
For the second time in three weeks I feel myself coming down with some kind of cold (or ‘man-flu’, if you will). Today work was pretty awful, sneezing and coughing and trying to keep breathing so it’s not really surprising I left with the distinct feeling I didn’t get anything really wothwhile done.
The one thing I did do which turned out OK is I helped to redesign some tables of information in a particular piece of software. They were bog-standard grey outline tables, but we made them all pretty – mainly by trying to make them look like an iTunes table. Ah, Apple, we sure are grateful to your designers.
So I’m off to bed, now I’ve got some vitally important things done. But before I go I wanted to link to Chris Heilmann’s CSS table gallery which is a great resource for table-based stylings. Chris is, of course, more known for his work with JavaScript, but he’s obviously no slouch with design either.