This site is no longer updated but kept as it still get lots of traffic. You can find more updated information about me at jenswedin.com.

December, 2008

xhtml + css — 2 Comments
31
Dec 08

My top lists for 2008

Here are some of my lists for this year, a little bit of music, a little bit of photos and a little bit of statistics for my blog.

My favorite artists (according to last.fm)

1. Bruce Springsteen
2. Daft Punk
3. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
4. Stevie Wonder
5. Aretha Franklin
6. Duffy
7. Bob Marley
8. Wu-Tang Clan
9. Gnarls Barkley
10. Jay-Z

My favorite songs (according to last.fm)

1. Duffy – Serious
2. Storyhill – Storyhill – Give Up The Ghost
3. Daft Punk – Face To Face / Short Circuit
4. In Flames – The Mirror’s Truth
5. Aretha Franklin – Ain’t No Way
6. Isolation Years – Isolation Years – That’s All There Is
7. Daft Punk – Around The World / Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger
8. Ray Anderson Alligatory Band – Ray Anderson Alligatory Band – Drink & Blather
9. Juvelen – Juvelen – Watch Your Step
10. Daft Punk – The Prime Time Of Your Life / The

Songs I loved (according to last.fm)

1. The Smashing Pumpkins – We Only Come Out at Night – december 2008
2. Slayer – Eyes Of The Insane- september 2008
3. Justice – Newjack – september 2008
4. Stevie Wonder – If Your Love Cannot Be Moved (feat. Kim Burrell) – juli 2008
5. Jadakiss – Don of the Dons (Put de Ting P… – februari 2008
6. Obie Trice – Got Some Teeth – februari 2008
7. Gioacchino Rossini – William Tell Overture (abridged) – februari 2008
8. Musiq – Onenight – januari 2008
9. Pharoahe Monch – Desire Featuring Showtyme – januari 2008

Flickr

Photos posted to Flickr 2008: 126

35,927 veiws since I started using Flickr

Most viewed images since starting using Flickr
design-makes-me-happy design-makes-me-happy 4,359
Swift dump Swift dump 920
statistics for jedisthlm.com statistics for jedisthlm.com 785
Leker med spikpistolen Leker med spikpistolen 255
Roger and Peter-Paul Koch Roger and Peter-Paul Koch 254
Brittish dudes Brittish dudes 221
Elvis överst som vanligt Elvis överst som vanligt 217
Jens Jens 194
Boat in the canal Boat in the canal 173
Nya bordet Nya bordet 143

JediSthlm.com

  • 18,723 visits
  • 31,072 Pageviews
  • 1.66 Pages/Visit
  • 00:01:04 Avg. Time on Site

Most popular referrers

1. jankoatwarpspeed.com
2. libpng.org
3. sitepoint.com
4. images.google.com
5. juicystudio.com
6. robertnyman.com
7. icant.co.uk
8. en.wikipedia.org
9. stumbleupon.com
10. artzstudio.com

Most popular content

1. / (frontpage)
2. /2008/03/27/flexible-CSS-buttons/
3. /2005/01/25/khtml-on-windows/
4. /2004/10/13/gui-for-pngquant/
5. /2005/07/08/ie-min-width-position-fixed/
6. /2006/03/16/manfred-a-pngquant-GUI/
7. /2005/06/13/best-swedish-website/
8. /2005/11/14/google-analytics/
9. /2007/12/28/top-32-articles-you-must-have-read-2007/
10. /2005/03/17/more-on-colours/

External keywords (google)

1. IE min-width
2. khtml windows
3. konqueror for windows
4. pngquant
5. optgroup CSS
6. min-width IE
7. CSS optgroup
8. IE7 standalone
9. konqueror windows
10. coding fonts

xhtml + css — No Comments
29
Dec 08

Top 63 articles of 2008

2008 is coming to an end and it has really been a great year, so many great articles and blog posts about XHTML, CSS, design, accessibility, usability, semantics, ID & UX and other things related to the web. So if you haven’t read the articles in this list you really should, they are the top of tops, the cream de la cream.

Here are my top 63 list of best articles 2008 in no specific order, thank you all for a great year.

  1. The Aurora concept
  2. The Google Chrome Comic
  3. Static Maps API Developer’s Guide
  4. Swedish National Guidelines for Public Sector Websites in danger?
  5. Introduction to WCAG Samurai errata for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0
  6. Wrangling Widgets
  7. User-Centered Design and Usability: Its Role in a Project
  8. Opera Web Standards Curriculum
  9. Introducing Ubiquity
  10. Yahoo Stencil Kit
  11. Yahoo Search BOSS
  12. BluePrintCSS
  13. Introducing Geode
  14. Thoughts on developing with the Adobe AIR framework
  15. Do we really need Microformats?
  16. Interface Developers have to be available from start to end in a project (and work with real live code)
  17. Favorite terms about web developers
  18. Should we continue to use relative units vs. relying on page zooming?
  19. State of the accessible web 2008
  20. Hammerhead: moving performance testing upstream
  21. Project:Possibility
  22. State of Performance 2008
  23. Follow the 10 ground rules, or fail on the web
  24. 5 Exciting Things to Look Forward to in HTML 5
  25. Top 10 Web Platforms of 2008
  26. Semantic Web Patterns: A Guide to Semantic Technologies
  27. WCAG 2.0 is a W3C Recommendation
  28. Introduction to WAI ARIA
  29. Grid design basics: Grids for Web page layouts
  30. Flexible Fuel: Educating the Client on IA
  31. Getting Real About Agile Design
  32. Understanding Progressive Enhancement
  33. Writing an Interface Style Guide
  34. Contrast and Meaning
  35. Art Directing with Looking Room
  36. Contract Killer
  37. A Festive Type Folly
  38. Fonts and the Web
  39. Javascript in Modern Web Design
  40. SEO Guide for Designers
  41. @font-face in IE: Making Web Fonts Work
  42. Display Type & the Raster Wars
  43. Preparing for HTML5 with Semantic Class Names
  44. Clarify. Simplify. Implement.
  45. How Web is different from print
  46. 11 Expert Tips For Enhancing The User Login Process
  47. Reddit’s Flawed CAPTCHA: Adding Insult To Injury
  48. wp-Hyphenate 1.07 beta
  49. Migrating from WCAG 1.0 to WCAG 2.0
  50. Yahoo! OpenID Usability Research
  51. JavaScript and screen readers
  52. 10 Easy Steps to Great Website Optimization
  53. Why Verbs?
  54. The linguistic command line
  55. 10 Futuristic User Interfaces
  56. 10 Amazing Visualizations of Social Networks
  57. Explaining Web 1.0, Web 2.0 & Web 3.0
  58. Where to Find Open Data on the Web
  59. TimThumb PHP Script Released
  60. The Best Tools for Visualization
  61. Prototyping with XHTML
  62. Quick Turnaround Usability Testing
  63. Search Behavior Patterns
xhtml + css — 1 Comment
22
Dec 08

The future of 24-timmarswebben

In a few days (dec 31th) Verva, the Swedish Administrative Development Agency is closing down and together with them their guidelines about usability and accessibility, the 24-timmarswebben. This is is incredible sad, much work has been put into these guidelines and are used by many in the public sector.

Right now the guidelines has been moved to a new site by Peter Krantz, one of the authors behind the guidelines. This is a private intitative and all salutes to Peter.

So if you think that 24-timmarswebben is important, I’ve created a petition to save the guidelines. Please sign up and send the URL to anyone you know that think the guidelines should live on.

xhtml + css — 13 Comments
13
Dec 08

Access a local Mac server from Windows in Parallels

I work on a mac, both at home and at work. When I work on my site chwisgi.com I work locally on a local webserver (MAMP). This is great as I can work on the site without the need to access the net, I can work off-line you could say. When done something I upload all may changes to the the net (production server). I use Coda which works nicely for my coding needs. To check that everything works I mostly see that it works in FireFox and Safari on Mac. When I want to check how the site behave in Windows and Explorer I have Parallels where I have installed Windows. The problem I had with Parallels was that I could not access the local webserver (MAMP) that I used on the Mac. So if I wanted to see how the site looked in Windows I had to publish my changes to the production server and then check it in Explorer. That is not good.

Let’s see if we can fix this! First some information about my network. The Mac is on the 192.168.1.x network range and the IP is 192.168.1.143. The Virtual Windows is on the 10.211.55.x network range which is default when installing Windows in Parallels. The local webserver (MAMP) is running on localhost and port 8888.

When I say that I cannot access the local web server it’s not really correct. It worked if I hit http://192.168.1.143:8888 in Explorer on Windows and look at static HTML pages. But when I have a more dynamic site it didn’t work. The thing is that my dynamic site uses the ‘localhost’ as the DNS name, so when I hit http://192.168.1.143:8888 it was directed to localhost:8888 which isn’t the correct place in Windows (but is on the Mac).

I tried to use the HOST file on Windows to map the 192.168.1.143:8888 to localhost:8888 but this didnt’t work. I tried to create an alias on my Mac in MAMP, this didn’t work for me either. I searched on the net and finally found a solution.

The solution is to setup a Port Redirection in Windows, this sound kind of geeky and probably is.

1. First download the Windows version of the modified version of Rinetd

2. Take the two files and put them in a folder like ‘rinetd’ and put the folder in the root of C:

3. Open up the rinetd.conf file and change the IP numbers to 127.0.0.1 8888 192.168.1.143 8888

The first number is the local IP number on the mac where you have your have your site running. This should not be changed.
The second is the port. If you are running the MAMP the default port is 8888, change if you have something else.
The third is the IP number of the mac. Open up your Network tools on mac note the IP number, for me it’s 192.168.1.143.
The fourth is the port number on the mac, just use the same as the first port number.

4. Now we just need to start the Rinetd server. What I did was to start a dos window by Start > Run > cmd

5. Drag the rinetd.exe file into the dos window and add -c for custom path to the conf file.

6. Drag the rinetd.conf to the dos window, you should now have something like:

C:\rinetd\rinetd.exe -c C:\rinetd\rinetd.conf

7. Hit enter, if it works the cursor just blinks, no success message here. Just leave the dos window open as long as your are testing.

8. Start Internet Explorer and hit http://localhost:8888 and your site on the mac will should be shown.

Here is a shot of Firefox in Mac, IE, FireFox and Chrome in Windows side by side.

Mission accomplished!

xhtml + css — No Comments
7
Dec 08

Greasemonkey & Nordea

I was really impressed by the Helveticareader project, a Gresemonkey script that transforms the Google Reader into something that looks more nice. I’ve never used Greasemonkey scripts or userscripts as they also are called. Just to try it out I did some hacking on my own bank site, Nordea which I use quiet often.

The nice thing with user scripts is that you can insert your own code inte to the live site as you are using it. In my script I add a new CSS file (that are on my site). From the CSS file I can add a new design and layout of the Nordea site. As you can add stuff to the code I also added some HTML to the frontpage just to try it out. The welcome text is inserted by the userscript.

Userscripts are just normal javascript so if you are a javascript hacker this will be easy stuff for you. As this is my first shot don’t shot me. I’ve added some resources below if you find this interesting.

To use userscript you need

1. Download Firefox if you don’t already have it.

2. Install Greasemonkey plugin

3. Install my userscript

4. Visit nordea.se

So what do my userscript do with the Nordea site?

1. User a grid width of 960px instead of 740px

2. Use Helvetica (you need this installed on your computer)

3. Removes much of the visual clutter (head, navigation, search, related content, banners etc)

4. Maximize the width of the content.

5. Moves all your money to my account :) I wish, this script only works for the open public pages, not the eBanking service. Check the code if you don’t trust me.

Example of before and after

Resources about Greasemonkey / userscripts

1. http://helvetireader.com/

2. Greasemonkey tutorial

3. Userscripts.org

xhtml + css — No Comments
3
Dec 08

url(data:image/jpg;base64…)

This cool stuff. Check out the CSS code below. Here they have added an image to the CSS file by encoding (base64) it directly into the CSS. This code was CTRL + C from the Helvetireader project. Believe that this works in most browsers except the infamous IE. There is some work done to fix this, check Dean Edwards site below. The good thing is that the images are in the same file as the CSS, no more broken images. The CSS can be gzipped so it should not be any bigger than separate files.  The bad is that whenever you noeed to change the image you need to convert the new image. I’m not sure if there is any image programs like Photoshop that can save base64 file right away. Let me know if have any more information to this.

body {background: URL(data:image/jpg;base64,/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQEASABIAAD/
2wBDAAYEBAQFBAYFBQYJBgUGCQsIBgYICwwKCgsKCgwQDAwMDAwMEAwODxAPDgwTExQUExM
cGxsbHCAgICAgICAgICD/2wBDAQcHBw0MDRgQEBgaFREVGiAgICAgICAgICAgICAgICA
gICAgICAgICAgICAgICAgICAgICAgICAgICAgICAgICD/wAARCAFKABsDAREAAhEBAx
EB/8QAGQABAQEBAQEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAECBAMI/8QAFxABAQEBAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
ABESE//EABQBAQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD/xAAUEQEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA/
9oADAMBAAIRAxEAPwD6pAAAAAAABAAAASgUCgUEAAABAAAASgUCgUAAAAGQAAAKBQ
KBQQAAAEAAABAAAASgUCgUEAAABAAAASgUCgUEAAABAAAAQAAAEoFAoFBAAAAQAAA
EoFAoFAAAABkAAACgUCgUEAAABAAAAQAAAEoFAoFBAAAAQAAAEoFAoFBAAAAQAAAEAA
AB47A2BsDYOboB0A6AdAc3QDoB0A6A5tgbA2BsGQAAAf/Z) left bottom
repeat-x !important;}

Here is example of my own picture that has been translated into base64, should work in most browsers except IE.

Elvis