Andy Boyd

I’m really interested in best practices/web standards lately and I like the ‘Dogma’ written by Eric Reiss.  It seems to make sense, and it outlines good general guidelines to consider when developing a website: 

Web Dogma ‘06

1. Anything that exists only to satisfy the internal politics of the site owner must be eliminated.
2. Anything that exists only to satisfy the ego of the designer must be eliminated.
3. Anything that is irrelevant within the context of the page must be eliminated.
4. Any feature or technique that reduces the visitor’s ability to navigate freely must be reworked or eliminated.
5. Any interactive object that forces the visitor to guess its meaning must be reworked or eliminated.
6. No software, apart from the browser itself, must be required to get the site to work correctly.
7. Content must be readable first, printable second, downloadable third.
8. Usability must never be sacrificed for the sake of a style guide.
9. No
   visitor must be forced to register or surrender personal data unless
   the site owner is unable to provide a service or complete a transaction
   without it.
10. Break any of these rules sooner than do anything outright barbarous.

 Read more here:

 http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/dogmas_are_mean

If you are developing a community site, blog, cms, etc…  This is a great article in writing secure code to prevent you from XSS attacks or JavaScript injection:

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/secureyourcode2

Within the past month Yahoo.com and CNN.com have changed their homepage from 800×600 resolution to 1024×768.  I think that means it’s time for the old 800×600 standard to take it’s place on the shelf (along with the <blink> tag).

I’m into Google… They have a lot of great stuff going on, but I just saw the new snap.com site, and I must say it is pretty interesting.  It is Ajax powered which looks/feels cool, but it is a little slower than using the standard google.  The feature I really like is the preview pane of the page you are interested in….

There are so many CSS navigation tutorials and techniques.  This is a great ‘library’ of some popular CSS navigation techniques.  There’s nothing new under the sun… so instead of trying to create your own from scratch, use this:

http://alvit.de/css-showcase/css-navigation-techniques-showcase.php

Google is probably one of my favorite internet companies. They are always coming out with something new and useful.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/05/10/google-trends-launches/

Here is a great analysis tool to compare search words/phrases. Looks to be useful in things such as adwords, etc.. There are other web apps out there that do similar types of analysis, but in the world of search engines, Google is king! Might as well use their analysis tools.. don’t you think?

Thought that was a good title for this post… I’ve noticed the past day (or two) that the MSN.com site loads with errors in Internet Explorer. That just seems really stupid to me… I mean msn.. Internet Explorer.. You would think they could prevent those types of things.

This sparked my interest. It looks pretty cool… If I could try it .  It’s a ‘web 2.0′ bible search engine.
Take a look at http://ebible.com and read about it at http://blog.ebible.com/

Here is a cool little script which loads the content of an article in a div.  A nice effect…

http://www.dhtmlgoodies.com/index.html?whichScript=ajax_dynamicArticles

Well this isn’t computer related but I couldn’t resist.  A naked man in a barrel of rum… and no one found out until the rum was gone.  I know a few hungarians who won’t be drinking rum anymore…
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12631404/