Are you mobile responsive? Er, mobile friendly? Mobile ready, even? Google wants to make sure you know. Check out this mobile web site analyzer. Enter your domain name; view the verdict. Mobile-responsive web design has been with us for a while. No mere trend. I started building sites with the flexible-width scheme in the early summer of 2013. That code & design sea change coincided with the shift to HTML5. Mobile-responsive sites simply react to the screen size of the device being used … [Read more...]
Welcome WordPress 3.6 — and HTML5
August 2, 2013 by
The up-to-the-second version of WordPress hit the Internet today. It's Christmas and Bastille Day all in one. Put on the party hats ... and start brewing coffee. The count brings us to WordPress 3.6, and true to WP upgrades it's named after a jazz master. This time, it's Oscar Peterson, the great Canadian pianist and "maharaja of the keyboard." (Yes, they've already used Monk. Geesh.) New elements include a built-in HTML5 media player accommodating native audio and video embeds. This is … [Read more...]
Entropy, links & redirects
July 11, 2013 by
"Entropy requires no maintenance," said the noted agnostic mystic Robert Anton Wilson. But your links do. People throw around the term entropy, to physicists' horror. It's hard to discuss accurately without getting into thermodynamics -- fun! -- but the pop-science bottom line is clear enough: Entropy increases. Things fall apart. Anyone who's owned a web site for a while knows that perfectly good links often go bad. 404 bad. Weird redirects bad. Strange spammy landing pages bad. We've … [Read more...]
Writing alt tags that matter
April 16, 2013 by
We all know about alt country, alt rock and now even alt classical, but what about alt tags? A little background: The alt tag (or alt attribute -- the proper name) replaces web site images for someone not able to view them. Such as blind people or dumb search engines. Alt tags are found in the html code that controls display of graphics. The tags were designed as an aid for people with text-only browsers or those with crappy dial-up connections who turned off the slow-loading graphics. … [Read more...]
