Personally I hate Internet Explorer 6. It’s a web browser that doesn’t speak web, a browser that pretends to be able to do what it’s used for. This isn’t what makes it truly annoying though, nor what makes it my digital enemy, and without a doubt a problem in the world of websites. What causes the friction between me and it is the fact it just won’t die. Recent reports show that there is still roughly 30% of people browsing the internet who still use IE6. Microsoft says it’s shipped with XP; we support XP, meaning we need to support IE6. Indeed most of the users still using it are coming from offices or so, that hasn’t had their browsers updated and probably don’t feel the need to neither update nor want the hassle or cost since IE6 works… in its twisted poor language interpreting way. With sites like http://deathtoie6.com/ and big online brands like YouTube now displaying “We will be phasing out support for your browser soon” to users either forced or damned to use IE6 for the time being, there is only but hope that eventual backwards compatibility and life support will begin to be switched off.
However, in the mean time I was linked to probably the most awesome Internet Explorer party there is.
I myself am a beloved Firefox fan (http://www.firefox.com) but do keep my vista up to date on both my laptop and desktop which means I’m running IE8 on both.
So the question was how does someone that escaped the plague of IE6 actually go about testing in it. The answer is IETester: http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage
This tool doesn’t just provide you with IE6 mode, but also IE5.5, IE7 and IE8.
Great for testing compatibility and making sure that what should work and look ok does work and look ok. It does randomly crash every now and then but who can blame it.
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From now on I’ll be writing a small blog post to go along with finished project stuff as they are added and likewise with portfolio work. So without further a due my first project blog post is Underwater Escape, which is definitely my best digital art work so far and a good start to my project posts. Underwater Escape depicts a small red possibly outlawed rabbit riding a shark. A sense of action is added by the green laser beam being fired and dodged by the shark. I planned to fit explosions into the picture as well so that it would consist of rabbits, sharks, lasers and explosions but decided it would be best to keep the picture less busy. Created at a resolution of 1920×1280 in Photoshop and hand drawn on my tablet. I’ve started to make more use of filters and Photoshop tools and features as well now.
Underwater Escape: http://www.beakable.com/projects/photoshops_and_drawings/underwater_escape
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After the large influx of sudden visitors from smashingmagazine.com there was an increase in the amount of people viewing and clicking the Submit button on my contact page. I guess it was a case of seeing a button and clicking it to be enthralled by what was to proceed.
Sadly and I’m sure to many people’s displeasure nothing would occur, well when I say nothing, I mean the clicker would gaze upon nothing and my inbox would receive another blank or quickly filled in email.
But now, behold, I give you a button. A button which will most definitely perform and hold up to high expectations. A button that won’t only send me an email, but will give the clicker the much desired button clicking delight they seek.
Feel free to test it out, input is now required in the contact form before you’re able to click send but if you dont have anything to say feel free to fill it with garbage.
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I was over the moon recently to find that Beakable.com had been linked to from SmashinzMagazine.com (http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/30/50-fresh-portfolio-websites-for-your-inspiration/).
Under a post titled “50 Fresh Portfolio Websites for Your Inspiration” my site was amongst some amazing pieces of work that I would never have thought I’d be placed next to. The site refers to Beakable as “Iain Hamilton’s portfolio is interesting and unconventional. Maybe funny characters in the header make up the core feature that singles out this design.”
This really did make my day.
I wasn’t too sure about the changes from the frog and Jason rabbit to the snail and salt shaker, and when I do get some time I will be thinking of some new characters. However I definitely won’t be changing my header away from my cartoon styled drawings now.
It’s also worth giving a mention just now to Dustin Morris (http://www.dewtone.com) and Christine Mackey (http://www.studiom-productions.com) who both provided me with work over the last year which without a doubt took my level of design from nothing to actually being reasonably presentable now. Both of them persisted from space increases of one or two pixels to colour shade changes that over the last year greatly improved my eye for detail and positioning as well. It will be interesting to see how I improve over the next coming year.
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For the last five months I’ve been doing a lot of SEO work for the Glasgow storage company Aabsolute Self Storage (www.aabsoluteselfstorage.co.uk), and recently came across a pretty neat little tool. Website Grader (http://www.websitegrader.com/) is one of those many tools that attempts to give you rough data on your site and provide feedback on your pages. There are quite a lot of similar tools out there which do this current statistical judging but the Website Graders interface, speed and even feedback such as Digg submissions and del.icou.us book mark info is rather cool. Also while I’m writing up about SEO I just finished reading the book “The Truth About Search Engine Optimization” by Rebecca Lieb, (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Truth-About-Search-Engine-Optimization/dp/0789738317) and can highly recommend. It doesn’t go into technical detail on web page coding at all, but does provide some very good information on the marketing side of things as well as how the search systems work. Definitely worth £11.99 to anyone who is planning on doing search optimizing.
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Recently Aabsolute Self Storage was after a way of modifying and adding to pages or “tweaking” as they put it. As I had already created the pages I wasn’t at all sure of the best way to go around creating an editor for them. I was told members of staff were quite IT savvy but I still wanted to stay away from HTML editing or plain phpBB code insertion. Again suggested by Craig (http://undefinedbehavior.co.uk/), without a shadow of a doubt I can recommend TinyMCE as an excellent text editing tool. Anyone familiar with WordPress or even Microsoft Word will straight away feel at home with the look and layout of this tool. Obviously there is bit more work needed than just adding it to a site if you are wanting to be able to save/edit/overwrite text, but it does offer great help as you know whoever will be assigned to editing will have no problem orientating their selves around the GUI. TinyMCE can be found at http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/.
Posted in Web Apps | 1 Comment »
Recently a job popped up to modify a current Flash ActionScript 2.0 site which had a custom cart that sent the user to a PayPal page. The changes where to make the custom cart use the PayPal Merchant Pro API so that it ran the whole purchasing process within Flash. As simple as this should be there, is a lack of support or documentation kicking about on doing this within Flash. So after searching and working out how easy it really is I thought it would be a good idea to post about it, as the amount of questions and forum posts I came across asking if it’s possible and how to go about it was rather extreme.
This guide will cover the rough basics of creating the link beteen Flash and the PayPal API using a simple sendandload. It should be easy enough to adapt and tidy up to produce a proper transaction form.
The first, and quite possibly the longest step is to head over to http://sandbox.paypal.com and setup a sandbox account. You will need to acquire both a personal and business account within your sandbox. Once you have set up a businesses account you will also need to go through the process of upgrading it to a Merchant Pro account. Eventually you will be given the following details: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Coding | 8 Comments »
Here’s a small useful web developing tool I was linked to the other day by Craig over at http://undefinedbehavior.co.uk/ (his site is currently under development but try writing beakable into his sites console interface, pretty nifty). It’s a JavaScript colour scheme designer http://colorschemedesigner.com/ which like many similar tools matches up adequate colours for your primary choice. What makes this colour scheme creator tool more intuitive though is the fact it offers a “Light Page Example” and “Dark Page Example” meaning you can instantly get a rough idea on how the colour scheme would look within a visual template example.
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Well it was bound to take a long time to finish when the only real time you’re allocating for your web portfolio is between work and episodes of Lost. Luckily and probably thankfully the way it’s turning out, the mind blowing shambles which is Lost has come to a halt for another eight months; which means without further ado I can finally present my portfolio at a completed level http://www.beakable.com. Although a basic version of the site has been running for the last month or so, it was still in dire need of some brushing up and tying up of loose ends.
I still expect to be tinkering away at different parts of the site over the coming weeks and hopefully improving on its overall feel.
Posted in Beakable | 2 Comments »
