Mike Smullin
Personal Blog
Achilles’ Heel of Tabless CSS Design
02074 days
by
in Development
By now most people have noticed the Achilles’ Heel of tabless CSS design is currently the inability to align footers to the bottom of the window. (eg. always at the very bottom until content actually overflows)
Currently you can only achieve this effect in all browsers with *gasp* tables—but it’s different now in XHTML 1.0 Strict than it was in HTML 4.01 Traditional.
For some CSS purists, that fact is an acrid pill to swallow. I tend to agree with Eric Meyer though—don’t try to map table design mental models onto CSS—it’s a recipe for heartache; practicality over purism.
In my case–designing a WordPress template–I used the THEAD, TBODY, and TFOOT tags to distinguish between the blog’s template header, content, and footer. Like so:
<table cellspacing="0"><thead><tr><td>
<h1><a><img /></a></h1>
</td></tr></thead>
<tbody><tr><td>
<div id="content"></div>
<div id="sidebar"></div>
</td></tr></tbody>
<tfoot><tr><td>
<p>Powered by WordPress.</p>
</td></tr></tfoot>
</table>
Then I used CSS to get the table to fill the full height of the window. Like so:
html, body, table, thead, tbody, tfoot, tr, td, h1, img {
margin:0;padding:0;border:0
}
html, body, table { width:100%;height:100% }
thead td, tfoot td { height:1px }
td { vertical-align:top }
Remember: This solution is Section 508 Accessible, Well-Formed, and Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict markup.
Not too bad once you understand it.
WordPress Sort Category Posts By Title
422082 days
by
in WordPress Plugins
I have written a plugin for those who have been asking for a quick way to sort posts in category view alphabetically by title, rather than the usual chronological order.
This is important if your readers don’t care when things were posted.
This plugin was designed for WordPress 2.0.2.
Download it here: sort_category_posts_by_title.zip
To install, simply extract to /wp-content/themes/plugins and Activate from inside the WordPress Plugins panel.
Banners vs Contextual Ads
02102 days
by
in Learning
This is something I’ve been trying to say for a long time now.
From Aaron Wall’s SEO Book:
Banners vs Contextual Ads:
Many web surfers have become banner blind and ignore the top part of a page. Banners have horrible conversion rates.
I do not usually use the default banner size unless I feel it fits well with the site design. The best revenue options are usually link rentals or context-based text ads.
Good advertising does not look like advertising.
One site that I work with sells links for over $500 a month per link and only made about $30 a month off AdSense. Other times AdSense can make far greater profits. Depending on the market, it may be best to use one or the other or a combination of both.
This is especially true for me because I use Firefox with the AdBlock
extension and Filterset.G extension installed. I haven’t seen a banner
ad in almost a year.
Blogger JS Pagination Hack v1.0
192104 days
by
in Development
Since Blogger doesn’t want to provide the feature for some reason, here is a simple JavaScript that will achieve the pagination effect you’ve been looking for on your blogspot.com blog.
Aaron Wall’s SEO Book
22109 days
by
in Development
What better way to proove that you understand SEO to the world than to write a book about it and make sure it is the #1 rank on Google, Yahoo, and all major search engines? I love this guy’s approach.
On his blog he promises “a new chapter every day” as he himself is a consultant and always learning new and better ways to optimize content for search engines on the web.
I read his blog, I have his book, and I would recommend both!