The link to this article whizzed by in my feed reader and as it turns out the article is very, very good: true, clear, concise and very to the point:
Design Multilingual Websites: A Beginner’s Guide on Hongkiat.
Archive for the ‘web design’ Category
Design Multilingual Websites: A Beginner’s Guide
Sunday, February 28th, 2010On the danger of downloading themes
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010This is something I had not bumped into before, but today I downloaded a free WordPress theme to adapt to my own wishes (which usually involves a whole lot of hacking and slashing), but this one took some extra time because it was riddled with invisible links to several commercial sites, apparently to boost them via the bots that usually visit blogs. The crappy part was that the code that published the links was actually encrypted to prevent removing the links. This particular creator even went so far as to change the default WordPress ‘Meta’ links to his own site.
Translation: if I hadn’t been hacking my way through the code I wouldn’t easily have found the semi-hidden links, so anyone just downloading and using this theme or one like it will inadvertently aid these somewhat immoral practices and end up with a slightly crippled blog.
Update: After finding that all of their themes have these links etc. I’ve decided to name and shame: the free templates came from wpthemescreator.
Update 2: Some more investigation even found some hidden encrypted code in the theme that inserted links to the creator’s site quasi-randomly in the blog’s links and probably the footer as well. Yechh. I’ve decided to still use the cleaned up theme but remove any link to the creators, even though that is normally against my principles.
Drawing a Song or “Pintando una Canción”
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009This. is. just. beautiful.
Pintando una Canción (translated: “Drawing a Song”) is a mind blowing, gracious, fluid en well-executed semi-interactive Flash animation. Just amazing. Wow.
Have you taken the survey yet?
Monday, August 4th, 2008If you haven’t, and you build/develop web sites as (a part of) your job, you really should take the ALA 2008 survey:
Now there’s a thought: URL as UI
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008Adam Darowski has a very interesting post up on his blog (link) on using the URL as a direct-access user interface. I completely agree with what he’s saying, I use the described way of URL hacking as well to see if I can access other parts of a website, but I’m often foiled by completely unreadable URLs or URLs that rely on code numbers or hashes. A quote:
If people use your site enough, they’ll want an even faster way to reach the content they want. They’re not browsing anymore. They are power users. They know what they want. Give them a nicely hackable URL to do this.
Read the full article here.
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