Scott Yang's Playground

Darren Rowse the “ProBlogger” raised a question — liquid or static blog layouts? I kinda agree with Chris’ comment here that liquid layout is more difficult to master than fixed width (give me “flex” attribute in XUL!!), however I do not think it is webmasters are necessarily lazy if fixed width design is implemented. In [...]

Stupid thing I did this week: In the process of moving Bargain Blog back to my own home server, I somehow rsync’ed my entire design/test site, including the robots.txt, which contains deadly commands to forbid all bots/spiders! No wonder for the last few days my AdSense ads on that site are totally irrelevant, and CTR [...]

Saw this interesting Dilbert comic yesterday. As the executive board of the consortium review board exists only in a perfect world, so is the web standard. Imaging the new Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 8 that only serves XHTML 1.1 Strict documents. However, if the browsers are designed to be compliance tolerant, then why all [...]

Jeremy Zawodny looked at October search engine referrals to his site, and try to make sense why Google refers significantly more visitors to his site than Yahoo! or MSN, especially when the statistics released by search engines were actually comparable. He concluded that: There are two ways I can think to explain this: People who [...]

Via ProBlogger. Jakob Nielsen wrote an interesting article on the top ten design mistakes. While Jakob has been famous for not applying his own suggestions (useit.com as evidence), he has actually made some very good points in those articles he wrote. Now, let’s see what else I need to do to improve this blogsite:

Real Simple Sydication Version 3. RSS 3 Lite has been drafted, to provide yet another feed format on the Internet. Why oh why? And where can I find the “compatibility” mentioned? Ain’t the whole idea of XML about how you can build on top of the existing standard, provide compatibility, by mixing tags with different [...]

rakaz: Migration guide for Atom from 0.3 to 1.0. Very useful for blogware developers to move to the new web standard. Now I just hope someone can fix Python universal feedparser to handle Atom 1.0, as I noticed that TextPattern 4.0 is already doing that by default.

Horror! Horror! When I typed in unsw church into Google this morning, and there came the shock. Our FOCUS church website is no where to be seen in the first page of search result. Second page, third page… and I have finally found our lonely website sitting there in that horrible page 6, together with [...]

Just spotted the Campus Bible Study Forum when I visited CBS’s website to check out some information! And I am now the proud registered user number 23!! Too bad that user registration require moderation, which is actually a good idea for a ministry site like CBS. Thus I shall post my feed back here, since [...]

It has been under my todo list for at least a year, and the development has gone through multiple iterations of trial, error and completely re-work. Yesterday morning I have finally decided to switch our church website, FOCUS-UNSW.org, from my old home-build content management system to the new Drupal based site. Not just switching the [...]

Some guy at decloak tries to argue the superiority of layout using table tag, over the web standard using CSS. Go and read his arguments, and have a big laugh. It is the people with this kind of mentality that are keeping the web from moving forward.

del.icio.us direc.tor: Johnvey Hwang’s high performance AJAX web service broker. This script is very neat. Setup a bookmarlet. Visit del.icio.us. Click on the bookmarklet, and it instantly transforms your ugly del.icio.us web interface into a fancy AJAX-driven DHTML interface. What stands out is this implementation does not require a middle man as service broker. It [...]

There is an interesting discussion on Slashdot, reflecting what Bennie Smith (of Double Click) has previously said, about the end of free Internet contents when advertising blocking get included in web browsers as standard feature. I used to hate banner ads, popup/pop-under ads and even Javascript text ads that I will try to avoid if [...]

wg: A pocket guide to inspirational sites – lots of eye-candies, and a great list of CSS enhanced sites for self-evaluation. Also great place to look for design ideas for up-coming sites.

Moved! I have moved this project to my new programming/Internet blog — Permalink Redirect WordPress plugin. About I am not sure why the WordPress people insist that, GET /2005/05/29/foo-bar HTTP/1.1 is exactly the same as GET /2005/05/29/foo-bar/ HTTP/1.1 If you have not spotted the difference, one has a trailing forward slash ‘/’ in the URI [...]