Leaving a reasonable time for addons, extensions and themes to catch up, we’ve now installed Firefox 3.0.

Immediately, an anomaly appeared on the front page of the Sibagraphics site - a bottom scroll bar. This turned out to be from the top flash animations, one of which was floated right and the other left from id css instructions within the objects themselves.

This was simply solved by removing the ids and putting them in divs around the objects!

The site validates and is similar in all browsers, even the annoying and insecure IE6 which 24% of viewers worldwide still apparently use. Many of these would be corporate users who have unique company software reliant on that dodgy old M$ version.

Rather than use the M$ Virtual PC software in order to run two versions of IE, we found the very handy free Tredisoft solution, which will install standalone versions of IE from IE3 - IE6 if desired. Works a treat and naturally is not bulky and cumbersome!

Enjoy some of the new wallpaper we’ve added to our collection, from our recent photographic adventures in our own backyard.

These include two photos of Alistair, the peacock which has adopted us, a lovely white bauhinia, a butterfly obscured in a shrub, and a delicious elegant hippiastrum.

Another quick and easy upgrade to the new Dexter model of Wordpress. Posts can now be easily tagged as well as categorised.

The latest Site Reference newsletter reiterates the important rule we’ve known and abided by since we began our business in 1998 - DON’T USE FLASH INTROS no matter how much clients may insist, grovel and beg.

“Please, don’t use a Flash intro on your website. You’d think everyone would realise they’re a bad idea by now, but every web designer still gets clients who just don’t seem to realise that Flash intros are universally mocked and hated. Don’t be one of those people.”

Here’s a list of some of the reasons why flash intros and indeed why pure flash sites should be avoided at all costs.

• Flash intros delay site visitors finding what they came for.
• Gratuitous animation is superfluous.
• Without html content, people without flash enabled will see nothing on visiting your site. Neither will search engines.
• Flash design breaks the browser back button.
• People who need to increase text size because of bad vision will not be able to do so with text integrated in flash. Use of html allows people to choose larger or smaller text sizes if they so desire.
• Link colors don’t work so you can’t see where you’ve been and which links you’ve yet to visit.
• The Find in Page browser feature won’t work.
• Text translators won’t work.

To counter these problems, when animation is required and actually adds something to a site, we always include descriptors within the flash object tag, title tag, and noscript tag. The web page also will have ample text content including text navigation.

Just say NO to flash intros! (and to flash only sites).

Over the weekend, I cobbled together another handy javascript method for foiling evil spam bots, whilst making life easy for web developers. The script below enables you to change the subject of the email as you go as well - you could add other variables like a link title too if you wished. Functions are very useful devices!

Firstly, the content of email.js:

function sibaem(subject) {
var username = “emailprefixhere”;
var domain = “whatever.com”;
var atsign = “@”;
var address = username + atsign + domain;
document.write(’<’ + ‘a’ + ‘ ‘ + ‘href=’ + ‘”mailto:’ + address + ‘?Subject=’ + subject + ‘”>’);
}


Save the above as email.js in your scripts folder and link to it in the head of your document like this:

<script src="scripts/email.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Then in the body of the document, call the function with the following code where you want an email to appear, for example:

<script type="text/javascript">
<!–
sibaem( “Website enquiry” );
document.write ( ‘email me</a>’ );
//–>
</script><noscript><a href=’contact_form.php’ title=’Complete my contact form’>contact me</a></noscript>

If you wish to make the user changeable and for the email address to be visible to the human eye on your site, here’s the content of email.js:

function sibaem(username, subject) {
var domain = “whatever.com”;
var atsign = “@”;
var address = username + atsign + domain;
document.write(’<’ + ‘a’ + ‘ ‘ + ‘href=’ + ‘”mailto:’ + address + ‘?Subject=’ + subject + ‘”>’ + address + ‘</a>’);
}


and here’s what goes in the body:

<script type="text/javascript">
<!–
sibaem( “youremailusername, Website enquiry” );
//–>
</script><noscript><a href=’contact_form.php’ title=’Complete my contact form’>contact me</a></noscript>

This year, we send our best wishes for prosperity and peace - it’s about time all of us had a bit of a rest from interminable bloodshed over resources, religion and global supremacy. Rather than using reason to develop a logical, secular code of ethical behaviour which considers the best interests of fellow human beings as well as their own, it seems too many humans depend upon crude instincts and irrational brutish faith to justify baseless feelings of cultural superiority and barbaric slaughter of and stealing from other humans.

To celebrate our alternative peaceful vision for enlightenment in 2007, we’ve made a desktop wallpaper featuring Ganesha, a Hindu deity symbolising intellect, wisdom and prosperity.

We’ve also taken the time to add some of our latest artwork and greeting cards to our online art gallery.

Enjoy!

Located in the Sunshine Coast hinterland, Spark1 Studios offers musicians state of the art music recording equipment in a superb environment for inspired performance production.

Sparky has produced albums for musical luminaries such as Gemma Doyle, Paul Fogarty and Radha.

Sibagraphics has transformed the coding of the Spark1 site and added a resources page along with other improvements.

Cooran photographer, Jon Neilson has added some superb shots of Japan and Magnetic Island to his site. My particular favourite is the Snow Garage - architecture in Japan is sublime. Also of note is the suspended Bonzai Tree.

Jon continues to show his interest in water transformations.

Using the imaginative java applet found here, you can create an image of your site. Below is what my site looks like.

Enjoy the new desktop wallpaper available in three sizes on this site of Peter Frankenfeld roses and some lovely dahlias growing in our backyard and which I captured on my Canon G6.

Finally I found time to update the Sibagraphics art gallery - long overdue. It now sports the latest Coppermine gallery software and the few additional art works I’ve had time to accomplish this year.

Finally got a chance to spring clean my hard drive and retrieve all the web site backgrounds and borders I’ve made and not used on client sites. These new free web backgrounds and borders - red, blue, pale blue, navy, grey, orange, pink, green and multi-coloured - are available for download in the Sibagraphics backgrounds and borders sections.

The very handy Future Google Pagerank Tool has now been installed on Sibagraphics to avoid opening IE in order to view page rank and since the google page ranker in my Firefox URLInfo has died.

This tool also has the advantage of being able to measure PR of hyphenated URLs, which the Googlebar doesn’t seem to manage.

While I have long been a fan of fixed width 3 column site layouts, here’s a reference site which has a library of percentage based column layouts.

Looking forward to trying them with images in some of the columns. I have employed my own three column div layout designs on several of my sites using a fixed width method - for example view source at Success Foods, the Medicine Room, Ground Events, Mike Jackson, Eurofilter Asia Pacific and Richard’s Corner.

I’m trying out the GeoID Site Visitor Locator, a nifty little tool from Search and Go which enables instant knowledge of last site visitors. Search and Go are harnessing the power of Google Maps.

Check it out from the icon at the bottom of the page.