Archive for February, 2005

License change

BY 2.0 logo
In the changes done over the weekend, there is one small, but significant. All of my works (grouped under the name Sparks) are now licensed by Creative Commons Attribution (BY) 2.0 license.

This truly allows you to use this code on any sort of web site – commercial, private, non-profit – any. The only thing you need to do is to give due credit. You can do that by:

  • linking back to my site, either from the page where you use some of the Sparks or from the about or colophon or similar page
  • retain / add the comment into respective .js or .css file

Thank you.

Rest of the content, like actual posts, photos and graphics, are fully copyrighted by me. If some specific content is published under different license, it will be noted on the page in question.

Why the change from previous BY-SA license? Well, I was regularly waving off the SA part of the license for the ADxMenu (by far the most asked about), thus I wanted to make it easy for everyone.

Design I can smile at. It was about time.

I was an artist. I used to create things that would make people go ahhh. I used to create web sites that people talked about.

When I look at the designs I did last year, there were maybe only one I could brag about. The rest is generic, nothing out of the ordinary. It was really depressing to think about that. Header, footer, two or three columns. Blocky, all damn blocky. And I really like to break blocks.

Where the hell has my artistic sense gone?

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This blog runs WP 1.5 now

WordPress, the blogging software platform I‘m using, has reached version 1.5. The news of it has spread and all reactions are really positive – I have not seen any negative comment yet.

I downloaded 1.5 on the soft-launch day, but had no time until this weekend to actually try it. I read the announcement, read the reactions and reviews, but I was mainly interested in two things:
/category-title/post-title/ permalinks and themes.

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Small update

I have updated the example listing with an example of menu with horizontal submenus. This was asked several times and I got time to do it last week while staying at home, recovering from the flu (or some similar thing).

During development, I accidentally found the problem in IE, with .htc. If you have some :hover rule which is empty, IE will throw “invalid pointer” error. I updated all .htc files to fix this – they are all now in .21 version.

Yasmeen. Refined.

Yasmeen-Ghauri.com, my cute little pet site, is moved to the sunny side of the world – DreamHost, CA. Since I have all positive experiences with DH so far, I decided to move YG site as well.

General pages should be quicker as DH, being hosting provider, has a lot more bandwidth than Finsoft does. Old site used ASP thus YG.com once again presented itself as a perfect playground to learn new stuff – PHP.

Naturally, the Talk section (news and articles) now runs on WordPress instead of MT.

Design refacto…err, refinement

There are thousands of sites of this type: shrines, houses of worship, galleries, etc. My site is probably the only one that validates :) and does not use tables for layout. Visitors have no interest in technology used and by-right should not need to – the only thing that matters is the download time, especially content waiting time. I addressed that part of the story with the previous design.

Second aspect of good web site is its usability and accessibility. With this redesign (an evolution of the previous design) I focused on simple refinements (if this was C# code, it would be called refactoring). I looked for the things that:

  • would improve the overall usefulness
  • move the navigation speed few gears up
  • better emphasize important parts (visual eye-catching)

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