April Fools

Thursday, April 1, 2004 @ 4:04 PM • One Comment

I hate reading blogs on April Fools Day. Never know how much of what you’re reading is made up. So I quit.

It should also be noted that this is entry #100 on Thinkless. That’s not made up. And it seems like it took too long to get there too. Almost nine months. Everything in moderation. Of course.

Forms Follow Function

Wednesday, March 31, 2004 @ 11:23 PM • three Comments

Via Jay Allen, I came across this bit on accessible, stylish form layout which didn’t present anything entirely new to me except one thing which I wish I’d known before and maybe should have: you can nest form control tags inside label tags!

I know! Fucking rock! Right. I briefly used a (very nicely structured) table on this site for the comments form. Then I started trying to float labels and inputs to acheive a similar effect, but the effect I ended up with is that currently the comment form looks completely different in just about every browser on the market. A fucking mess.

Right now I’m working on that photo management thing I told you about earlier. Being a web-based application, it’s pretty much form after form after form, and I wanted them to look pretty. After trying about ten different ways, I ended up with things like:

<p class="form">
<label for="username">Username:</label>
<input type="text" name="username" id="username" />
</p>

And then I’d, say, float the label left and the input right and then apply various styles to the p so I could get a border between each piece of the form. Plus there would be a bunch of similar classes to deal with using textareas instead, or if I just wanted to use a p to enclose an actual paragraph for example. Turns out I can use the label in place of the p and everyone is better for it, especially me since I’m the only one that’s seen it. Not only is it semantically correct and accessible, it’s also way the fuck easier.

So between that and my spankin’-new copy of 37 Signals’ Defensive Design for the Web (which, several chapters in, is pretty neat), my forms should be fucking hot. And then eventually they’ll do something, and that’ll be pretty cool too.

Managing Different Content

Wednesday, March 24, 2004 @ 7:41 PM • One Comment

With very little fanfare, I foist upon you nickfindley.com. I’ve been meaning to foist it upon you for like a month now, but instead I waited. And I foist it upon you because I want you to tear it a new asshole. Design, copy, whatever. It’s supposed to be professional sooner or later. So it needs to be better than okay. Let me have it.

And that content management system I was working on a month or so ago — that was for nickfindley.com. But as you’ll notice, there’s only about six pages on the site. There’s not a lot of content to be managed. And since a third of the pages (the contact form and the portfolio) aren’t easily managed by a CMS, I said fuck it. There’s no point in having a huge folder full of scripts to maintain four pages.

But I’m reusing it, sort of. Bits and pieces of it will hopefully be powering some kind of photo management/photologging tool. Although Movable Type works better than I figured it would, I think I can do a little better. I’ve been wrong before, but I’m bored right now. So watch out for that.

Additionally: Since I’m soliciting feedback on nickfindley.com, I may as well ask for some pre-feedback on the photo thing, i.e. what people would like to be able to do with it, besides the obvious minimal functionalities.

Like I sort of said, I want it to do what MT is doing for me now, which is to use a single setup to run a photolog and maintain several photo galleries. And I’m guessing with my system, when you set up a new gallery, you’ll be given the option to make it either a regular gallery or a photolog setup. A photolog would give you rotating front page content, and maybe commenting ability. I’m still undecided on comments, because I have to imagine that the majority of comments would be “cool pic,” give or take maybe six or seven characters. And maybe I’d work in a way to post multiple photos in a grouping, like Mike (and probably most other photobloggers).

Anyway. What I’m probably saying is that I’m going into this trying to suit my own needs, which is indeed what’s most important, because chances are I’ll be too much of a pussy to release my code to the masses, but ideally I’d like it to be for other people too. So, whether you have a photolog or a photo section on your site or not, what do you think should come in an application like this? I’ll try to be a bit more coherent about this as I progress, but for now do my brainstorming for me because I have a fucking headache from trying to figure out what I was trying to code a month ago.

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