Brandon Wang

A New Way to Order CSS Rules

Here’s a new way to order your CSS rules: instead of ordering CSS rules alphabetically, try ordering them contextually. By ordering this way you save yourself the hassle of going through your alphabetical list, humping from W for width to H for height when they should be together.

1. Sizing (width, height)
2. Positioning (position, z-index, float)
3. Padding and Margins (padding, margin)
4. Typography (font, line-height, text-decoration)
5. Color, Background, Opacity (color, background, opacity)
6. Borders (border)
7. Content Specific Settings (list-style)
8. Usability Hacks* (text-indent)
9. Miscellaneous

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Take the Time to Design (Please)

Good design is timeless and just simply so important. When you visit websites like CNN.com or a design blog, you simply don’t realize how important the role of the design is. It is the unspoken warrior, not overtaking your content but rather pushing it forward.

Recently GeoCities shut down, and a portion of the Internet shut down with it. It represents the loss of millions of table-based websites, the final whisper of even more websites with bad graphics and cheesy animations.

So one would think that in this age, for a major company or a major website to not hire a decent designer, not take the time to design, not take the time to think, it would be insanity, would it? Akin to selling Lamborghinis from behind a McDonalds?

So why is it, that as a student, I have to deal with bad design all the time? It’s one thing to see WordArt in a fellow classmate’s PowerPoint (I spoke out on that), but to see this on a major websites?

That’s ridiculous, and it makes me mad.

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When Outsourcing Bites Back

Recently I visited my own literature blog soul log I was completely shocked when a popup came up, advertising a get-rich-quick website, featuring a very fat person marveling at how he made $14,596 at home using Google, complete with a stupid narration and photographs of fake checks.

soul log does not employ any sort of advertising. I experimented with Google Adsense as well as networks like Entrecard but they never really worked out. I have several widgets on the page, notably a page view tracker (for public view), a private Google Analytics tracker, and a Maps Among Us visitor map.

I examined the source code but there was nothing interesting. Then I decided to inspect the page, and, tada, I found two scripts in the header, added using document.write() or some other devious method.

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Proposing <bdo> for Hiding Email Addresses

There are so many methods of email address hiding, the most popular being using the MailHide service (which basically CAPTCHA-protects your email address), embedding your email address in an image, and using unescape() and JavaScript to print the email address.

All of these methods work but they all have caveats, and there is no method that can be used that will, in effect, not have caveats. By far the most usable method is the JavaScript method as it allows the user to select the email, but the downside is that JavaScript has to be enabled.

That’s why when I found out about <bdo> I was surprised people weren’t using it more. I hope with this blog post to be able to alert people to this usage, and perhaps, give myself more insight on this practice with your comments and such.

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Featured on LH (What I Learned) + Affinity Update

I (or rather, my workspace) got featured on Lifehacker a while back. I got home, turned on my computer, and opened up my email and out popped 50 emails, half of them from my contact form. I didn’t know what happened until the 18th email, where someone congratulated me for getting featured.

Wow. It was amazing, seeing all the comments, all the views. Google Analytics wasn’t reporting any new views (it seems to have a day lag) but I knew people were looking: my website went down with all the views, I got more comments than before, and I felt good.

It’s amazing how the world treats us: it seems to be so passive and it waits to let us reap results. As of writing, this website has gone through its seventh revision already. Although I call it version 6.5, there’s been more, I just don’t want to look so desperate.

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Why Is Software So Selfish?

I recently got a new router (D-Link DIR-655), and with it came a neat feature called SharePort that allowed me to plug in a USB printer into the router and have it shared with the entire network. I thought it was a great idea, so I plugged the printer into the router and fired up the network printer dialog.

Thirty minutes later, I wasn’t thinking this “feature” was so neat anymore: it wouldn’t work at all, no matter what I did with it. Finally, I gave in and put in the CD into my computer. Lo and behold: the SharePort installer.

Once the software was installed, everything worked, although the interface was less than sleek. But now whenever I need my printer I need to have a memory-consuming software running.

Really, guys? Is this the best you can do? And for that matter, isn’t this what all software does?

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Reflections on Blogging, and New News

I’ve blogged for four years now and I started when I was eight. I didn’t know how to code; I didn’t know about design or programming. All I knew was that I wanted to write, and I wanted my voice to be heard.

That was a while ago. I’m now twelve, the creator and writer for three blogs, each on diverse and different topics. One of them, my literature blog, was the original one I had. It now has over three hundred articles (325 at time of writing) in its archives, all written by me.

Yet still, nobody knows about me. My literature blog, with its many articles, barely registers views at all.

The world is cruel yet reasonable: it makes you learn every single life lesson painstakingly and with great price. I thought I would become the next Seth Godin of blogging. To keep it short? I didn’t.

But in these writings, I’ve found out so much about how people perceive those who blog, and so much about how not to write a blog. I’ve tripped over so many cracks and stumbled over my own feet so many times. Continued »

[Update] A Personal Disaster

Recently my home was hit with a disaster: a power surge that I had thought would never come hit my house. The damage was all-around, but most crucially, the complete work room was knocked out.

Things that were broken were my computer, my dad’s computer, the router, the modem, the VoIP module, the printer, the surge protector, and the light switch (now stuck on hi). It’s been a great personal blow to my family and because the router was knocked out I could not get Internet for many days.

I am now using the Internet from my laptop, my dad has stolen my mom’s computer (from downstairs) and we have purchased new routers, a new computer, and lots of other stuff while everything else that was broken gets fixed. Continued »

HTML5 for the good?

HTML5 is a huge step forward in terms of web usability, of web coding, and web design. It makes things incredibly easy to do, clean, and makes websites suddenly have a no-frills attitude. How easy is it to type in a simple code line <video src=”blah.avi”> on your website? That wasn’t hard, right?

So I suppose you’re happy, right? And in a way, you should be happy. Because instead of hours of work, bam, that took three seconds, right? You didn’t need to convert it to .flv to watch, heck, you didn’t even need a video player to come with it. Just pow, one line of code.

But is this too easy? Continued »

Firefox 3.5 Color Profiles Not That Great

I know, I know, color profiles are great for photographers, but here’s a quick rant: although colors are richer and prettier, when users mess around with the default controls in their browser and they enable color profiles, backgrounds and images that designers have color-matched to fit in are suddenly mismatched.

It’s easy to tell where a background image picks up and starts off suddenly. This is a huge problem, because a lot of people are going to want to mess around with their settings and enable color profiles. Designers will now need to save to PNGs and forfeit IE6 support (which wasn’t that important to begin with, but still).

Instead of enabling it for everything, each photograph should have a specific setting saying “yes” or “no”, and browsers should obey it. It makes sense that the developers for Firefox have turned it off on default.

[http://www.dria.org/wordpress/archives/2008/04/29/633/]

Stunning Silence v.1.1.2 [WordPress theme]

Note: this version has been deprecated.

Stunning Silence: a WordPress theme with alluding beauty and a beauty all around, from the backend to the front-end. This is a theme you will want on your blog. Featuring a huge options page for hard-core customizing and a simple modern look on the outside, it is great for your blog.

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The Battle Of Fonts, and the Future of Typography

For what has seemed to be the longest time, I had no care for fonts. Words were words, and nobody cared about how they were spaced or whether there were orphans or not.

Then I came across two magazines: one with incredible text, and one with the most ugliest layout I had ever seen. And by the layout, I mean the typography: ligatures weren’t used, line height was horrible… from that point on, I realized the importance of typography.

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