Wishing you all a good weekend with this little awakener…

While looking for something completely different I stumbled across this article by Jeffrey Zeldman. It explains in detail some issues related to the DOCTYPE which I’ve never thought of.

You’ve done all the right stuff, but your site doesn’t look or work as it should in the latest browsers.

You’ve written valid XHTML and CSS. You’ve used the W3C standard Document Object Model (DOM) to manipulate dynamic page elements. Yet, in browsers designed to support these very standards, your site is failing. A faulty DOCTYPE is likely to blame.

This little article will provide you with DOCTYPEs that work, and explain the practical, real–world effect of these seemingly abstract tags.

What I really was after is explained in detail at Pat’s Place in the article about how to Attach icons to anything with CSS. I’ll post a follow-up on that subject later as I’ve just implemented the technique described on this site.

I will during the weekend spend some time looking into the DOCTYPE issue, and maybe get some answers to why IE does strange things when you least expect it.

Watch and learn as these guys make the treadmill look fun…

The Flash driven line and area chart from amCharts is a great way to display data dynamically on your site. All the data needed are stored in a separate XML file, so updating is done in seconds. You can zoom a selected period just by clicking and dragging, turn on/off each individual graph and all values are shown when hovering. Yet another XML file allows you complete control over every colour, size, font and background.

I’ve just added the comic strip “Help Desk” from ubersoft.net to my sidebar by including a few functions to the main functions.php file (actually just by doing an include() to make updates easier) found in the /wp-includes directory in WordPress.

These functions automagically look up ubersoft.net to check if a new comic is out. If yes it will create a thumbnail with a link to the original, otherwise it will simply state that nothing new is out. To make it even prettier I’ve used the Lightbox add-on to have it open on top of the page so you wont have to go anywhere.

When I get around to it I’ll create a drop down menu with links to previous comics. I’ve just created a hidden DIV layer that will reveal the “Help Desk” comic by calling a tiny JavaScript. Drop me a line if you are interested in getting the code on your own WordPress installation.