Jan

05

A more useful 404 for wordpress

Web Development

I stumbled upon a great article by Dean Frickey, entitled A More Useful 404, which discusses the need for blogs (and other pages) to have a more elaborated 404 page. I couldn’t agree more with the fact that most website out there offer very slim possibilities to their users to find what they were looking for on your site. I immediately thought that it would be a great little plugin to add to the ever increasing collection of wordpress plugins out there (about 3758 as I write this). To my surprise, and delight, someone had already written a plugin for it, creatively called Useful 404 (Also found on wordpress’s download site). I was happy to find that this plugin works great on wordpress 2.7, which is fabulous by the way.

Unfortunately, I may have to tweak the plugin a little bit since it is missing what is, in my opinion, the most important feature of a customized 404 page, which is to offer the user a list of possible candidates that actually exist on your site. This feature is apparently already available in another 404 plugin called Smart 404 (Also on wordpress’s download site), but this one doesn’t seem to function on WordPress 2.7 yet. Anyways, I highly recommend the plugin Useful 404 for now. Simple to install and does the job very nicely for now. Any other 404 plugins out there?

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Oct

07

ALA: Long Live the Q Tag

Web Development

I must redirect anybody interested in learning more on how to render the Q tag correctly for IE/Win users to the new A List Apart article by Stacey Cordoni. Unfortunately, IE/Win does not yet support the Q tag and is making hard for developers, who wants to keep their web site accessible to screen readers, to use it. As usual, the article is precise, concise, and very interesting. So yes, “Long Live the Q Tag”!

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Sep

12

ALA Sandbags: Revisited

Web Development

The picture used in this example is A List Apart’s own picture and is used on this blog to show how to create the effect originally posted on ALA.

I recently bought Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman, which I mentioned in an earlier post, and do not stop learning. It is one of the best purchases I have made in a long time. Whenever I take the time to sit down and read a chapter (or two for that matter), I just can’t stop. So, I recently decided to subscribe to the RSS feed of A List Apart to get my fix of web standard compliant advices and tricks to add to my webpage. Last week, I was delighted to find a post on how to create a wrap around text effect, like the one in this post, which I had previously observed in action on Mike Davidson’s site.

I presume that Mike [Davidson] had computed the “sandbags” by hand, which would be fine, I guess, if you only have to do it once or twice a month, but could end up being a very long process. However, the article in question: “Sliced and Diced Sandbags”, promised to automate the process using a little php script, written by the author himself, Rob Swan. Automate the process it did. And very well I might add. It is based on the transparency values stored in png files, but let’s not get into the details. Explaining the nuts and bolts of his script is not the point to my story today.

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