Tantek Çelik on the Box Model Hack – updated for 2008!

By

On August 18, 2008

In Design, Tech

I’m trying to redesign my portfolio and keep this website up to date. But the code has been revised and iterated continuously since 2001. This site at least is in XHTML and uses CSS for layout. So that’s good. But I’m using Tantek Çelik’s Box Model Hack, and frankly, it makes my CSS ugly and adds extra complications that may not be needed.

But every time I look up info on the Box Model Hack via Google, I get all kinds of results from 2005 (see above). Web design and coding have changed a lot in the ensuing three years, and all I want to know is if I should still be using it. (Luckily, somehow I completely missed the Holly Hack.)

So, at lunch at WordCamp 2008 on Saturday, I button-holed Tantek Çelik himself (the person who devised the Box Model Hack) to ask whether or not I should still be using it. He answered with a question — to paraphrase, “Does your site still need to work in IE 5 for Windows?”

So the answer on the Box Model Hack for 2008 is this: If your site still needs to work in IE 5 for Windows (the version of IE that has a broken box model), then you should still be using the Box Model Hack. If it doesn’t, then you don’t.

And it looks like 98.2% of those people browsing my work site in Internet Explorer, which is the most common browser family used to peruse ecovote.org, are using either IE 6.0 or 7.0. So I think I can get rid of it there.

“#1 Matt” and WordCamp 2008

By

On August 18, 2008

In Culture, Design, Tech

WordCamp 2008 happened on Saturday in San Francisco, and it was good.
WordCamp2008 - The State of the Word

Highlights were many and often. In no particular order:

Liz Danzico and Jane Wells talked about the great usability work they’re doing for WordPress, and showed off some of the modifications they may or may not make to the current WordPress interface.

Tantek Çelik talked about microformats (and I got to ask him about the box model hack – more on that later).

Stephen Spencer (of NetConcepts, of Madison) provided some interesting tips on search engine optimization that were new to me.

Kathy Sierra (who writes books about Java) gave an amazing presentation that turned my ideas about designing websites upside down. Really! She started out with a trick question: Which testimonial is better: a. “This company kicks ass” or b. “This product kicks ass”? The answer, of course, is c. “I am awesome.” The basic question anyone who makes anything should be asking is, “how can my product make my users be able to kick ass?”

The LOLcats guy, Ben Huh, was there talking about “viral virility”! He made lots of good points that were perhaps overshadowed by the lolcats that illustrated his presentation and distracted everyone with their hilarity.

And of course Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress and Automattic, noted that the State of the Word is strong.

(Incidentally, Matt noted that he wants to be the #1 Matt on the web again. [He used to be until some guy who dances for gum, uh, whose site I actually like, took over.] So I’m indulging his wishes by linking to Matt here.)

For way more details, read Andrew Mager’s liveblog of WordCamp 2008. He was one of the people I actually talked to there… a really cool guy who happened to be at Virginia Tech last year and created a powerful community site. He was also the unofficial conference mascot once he applied a temporary WordPress tattoo to his forehead.

Here are a couple of my WordCamp photos (more later).

Note on location: It was held at the Mission Bay Conference Center on the weirdly isolated UCSF campus. (Biking in from BART, it was almost impossible to figure out which building was the conference center… I figured it was the biggest building I could see, and I happened to be right, but none of the permanent campus signage indicated where it was! One would figure that the most people coming to conferences on campus would be the people least likely to know the campus — so why wouldn’t they put the conference center on the permanent maps? Unfathomable.

But overall WordCamp 2008 was a real improvement on WordCamp 2007 (which I also thoroughly enjoyed). The venue was more comfortable in almost every way. Last year, at the Swedish-American Hall, it was really hot, there was no room for all the livebloggers attached to their laptops, there was only one track of talks. This year, the venue (and the food!) was way better and the vast majority of the speakers were informative and interesting.

10 Best Twitter Tools for WordPress Blogs

By

On August 15, 2008

In Unfinished Thoughts

10 Best Twitter Tools for WordPress Blogs

My answer to someone who wants to be funnier in person

By

On August 15, 2008

In Amusing (if only to me)

I decided to post this here as an oblique response to my own earlier post. And why waste my writing solely on someone else’s website? (Why not waste it here, too?)

I don’t know how much it would help to try any particular techniques, or specific kinds of things to say, or joke structures, that other people suggest. Because what makes you funny is probably exactly what makes you unique. What works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for someone else, obviously.

So the key is being yourself.

Turn off the internal censor.

Just say what you think is funny or (better) whatever occurs to you naturally in any given situation. Don’t try to be funny.

You should have an inner confidence that you’re funny, but you also shouldn’t expect anyone else to think you’re funny.

Self-deprecation is good, but not necessarily required. You can say something funny about something else without drawing attention to your own humility (real or false).

That said, considering how you describe yourself, deadpan humor may be the key.

Since you mention you’re funny in print but not as much in person, a funny thing to say if you bomb might be “That was hilarious on paper,” or “That would have gotten a huge laugh on MetaFilter,” or “That was way funnier when I submitted it to the New Yorker.” For example.

My favorite running gag is, when someone says something unintelligible, or makes an irreproducible sound, to say “That’s what I always say.” The underlying humor (to me) is that what I always say is “That’s what I always say.”

Clearly I’m a fan of the self-referential and the absurd. And, frankly, I’m far more interested in entertaining myself than anyone else. But that seems to work for me most of the time.

(This was my answer to an AskMetaFilter post.)

George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” 1946

By

On August 7, 2008

In Communication, Culture, I Hate Politics, Life, Miscommunication, Picky, picky., Rants, Recommendations

Apparently I’ve never posted a link to this essay by George Orwell. Now I’m rectifying that situation. Read it now.

From George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” 1946:

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a “party line.” Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, white papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.

I probably should actually watch this at some point…

By

On August 6, 2008

In Unfinished Thoughts

Since I’ve seen/heard it referenced so many times.

Video Ruku » Strongbad teaches how to draw a dragon (Trogdor the burninator)

Yes, I know I could just go to homestarrunner.com.

Welcome to Twin Galaxies

By

On August 4, 2008

In Unfinished Thoughts

Made famous by King of Kong, it’s Twin Galaxies.

Greenwald on the anthrax story

By

On August 4, 2008

In I Hate Politics, News

Here’s something important you may have missed: Yes, the U.S. Army scientist under suspicion for perpetrating the anthrax attacks of 2001 died recently, right before he was to have been indicted.

But it’s come to light that, immediately after the attacks, numerous sources told ABC News and others that the anthrax was linked to Iraq because it was laced with Saddam Hussein’s chemical calling card (my phrase).

That turned out to be a lie, yet ABC News is now obstructing the truth by refusing to out their sources.

In “Journalists, their lying sources, and the anthrax investigation,” Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com makes a case for why they must reveal their sources (emphasis mine):

…numerous experts in “journalistic ethics,” such as they are… agreed that while the obligation of source confidentiality is close to absolute, it does not extend to a source who deliberately exploits confidentiality to disseminate lies to the public. Under those circumstances… a reporter is not only permitted, but required, to disclose the identity of the source who purposely used the reporter to spread lies.

Troll provides secret to defeating trolls

By

On August 1, 2008

In Communication, Culture, Life, News, Spam

In “Malwebolence – The World of Web Trolling”, to be published in the next New York Times Magazine and available now online, a troll reveals the secret of how not to be trolled:

…the Theory of the Green Hair.

“You have green hair,“ he told me. “Did you know that?”

“No,” I said.

“Why not?”

“I look in the mirror. I see my hair is black.”

“That’s uh, interesting. I guess you understand that you have green hair about as well as you understand that you’re a terrible reporter.”

“What do you mean? What did I do?”

“That’s a very interesting reaction,” Fortuny said. “Why didn’t you get so defensive when I said you had green hair?” If I were certain that I wasn’t a terrible reporter, he explained, I would have laughed the suggestion off just as easily. The willingness of trolling “victims” to be hurt by words, he argued, makes them complicit, and trolling will end as soon as we all get over it.

Aha!

It’s not about a hurricane. It’s about America.

By

On July 31, 2008

In Unfinished Thoughts

Trouble the Water film – Hurricane Katrina from the ground

Page 17 of 45

Previous

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén