Page 14 of 33 (323 total articles)
  • July 18, 2008 in Friday Blog Clips

    5 for Friday | The Week's Best Blogs (7/18/08 Edition)

    This has been an interesting week on Mirificam Press. I especially enjoyed the reader comments and questions I received this week on and off the actual blog. The topic of vocation seems to be one that hits home with a lot of web designers. Moving on to the topic of links, Devlounge posted a great introductory tutorial to the PHP library cURL. In case, you've never used it or are new to PHP, cURL allows you to transfer data to and from outside servers on the server side. Devlounge uses the example of pulling an RSS feed down from Digg.

  • July 16, 2008 in Web Design Worldview

    Glorious Web Designer: Talkin' 'Bout My Vocation

    What's the most important job in the world? This question sounds like something a curious young child would ask his parents. Fireman... Policeman... Doctor... I don't know little Johnny; what do you want to be when you grow up? It seems silly to those of us who have grown up and chosen a vocational route—something we rarely think about. But it is typically the simplest and most basic questions whose answers carry the weightiest consequences. Closer consideration reveals that this question is actually utterly profound, and answering one way or another can dramatically affect the way you live your life. It is one of the most basic teleological inquiries and digs deep into the heart of human purpose. Is web designer the most important job in the world? If not—if it's just an unnecessary peripheral, then why am I not dedicating my life in some way to a vocation of real importance?

  • July 14, 2008 in Design Tips & Tutorials

    Pushing the Limits (Part 2): A Simple Four Column CSS Layout with a Little Divitis

    CSS works very well for designing one and two column layouts. It's shaky but workable on three-column layouts. But if you want a four column layout, you have to get downright creative. This article presents an easy, straightforward method for designing a four-column CSS powered layout without deviating too far from the semantic model. Granted, Jeffrey Zeldman would accuse me of a slight case of divitis but at least this method doesn't revert to tables or improper use of unordered lists.

  • July 11, 2008 in Friday Blog Clips

    5 for Friday | The Week's Best Blogs (7/11/08 Edition)

    I wanted to start this week's 5 for Friday by saying how pleased I have been at the comments on the article Truth Claims and the Future of Web Design. I think both agreers and objectors have kept the conversation amiable and intelligent, which is more that I can say for a lot forums on similar topics.There were a lot of great resource lists out there this week. I included four in this week's 5 for Friday but I could have filled all five slots if I wanted to. But I figured that wouldn't be very much variety, so I included Devlounge's incredible photo gallery tutorial. Also, the list of cheat sheets by Six Revisions is one you should definitely bookmark. Anyway, here they are.

  • July 9, 2008 in Web Design Worldview

    Truth Claims and the Future of Web Design

    "What is truth?" Pontius Pilate asked this question almost 2000 years ago. At the time, he had no inkling of the infamy which was to follow these words through the millennia. He asked the question as a jaded cynic—he had no interest in knowing the truth. In fact, his question is of a rhetorical nature, implying simply that there is no truth. And yet, in asking this question he hit the very crux of the human condition. Our view of truth is the Rosetta Stone for how we interpret life, relationships, ethics, vocation, and even design. It's the foundation of our worldview. Without a firm grasp on the popular views of truth we encounter, we will find ourselves in situations where our speech is lost in translation. Remember, when we talk about truth here, we are talking about the whole ball of wax. We're asking, What is reality? What is right and what is wrong? What really happened in history? What is real? The question extends out to every area of existence and has enormous implications for the future of our work in web design. In order to clear the haze, we'll start by looking at some popular views of truth and then we'll move on to the historical Christian view of truth and why it conforms to reality as no other view does.

  • July 7, 2008 in Design Tips & Tutorials

    Pushing the Limits (Part 1): The Perfectly Semantic Three Column CSS Layout

    Building a three or four column layout on the web without the help of a table can be a difficult task. The CSS3 spec proposes a perfectly tailored solution; but, unfortunately, CSS3 support is spotty at best even in modern browsers. We're stuck with CSS2 until that changes, so we might as well make the best of it. There are a number of ways to overcome the lack of multi-column support in CSS and none of them is very pretty. The three-column layout is the easiest to achieve without stepping outside the semantic boundaries, so we'll start there. Then in the next few articles we'll move on to the rarely explored waters of four-column+ CSS layouts.

  • July 4, 2008 in Friday Blog Clips

    5 for Friday | The Week's Best Blogs (7/4/08 Edition)

    Happy Independence Day to all you American readers. I'll be spending my day with my family eating hot dogs and relaxing. To everyone else, I guess it's just another Friday. The link selection this week is deep and diverse, and I recommend reading every single article. But if you only have time for one, you need to check out A List Apart's tutorial on Faux absolute positioning. Faux absolute positioning is another method for building multi-column layouts in CSS.

  • July 2, 2008 in Web Design Worldview

    Analyzing Web Design Through the Christian Worldview Lens

    Is there really a Christian way to analyze design? Can non-religious works of creativity still be considered Christian? What makes a design good or bad? If you're a Christian designer and you haven't considered these questions, you probably aren't analyzing design from a Christian worldview. More importantly, you're probably consenting to a broken worldview without realizing it. It's imperative that we understand the answers to these questions and apply historical Christian principles consistently and relentlessly to our design critiques. We do our creator a disservice when we allow ourselves to be ignorant of the unique and realistic view he has provided for us.

  • June 30, 2008 in Programming & IT

    Beyond Redirect: Using ReWriteRule in .htaccess

    Mod_rewrite is an Apache module that can be accessed from .htaccess files to perform all kinds of complicated URL manipulation. A few months ago I posted an article called Beat Your Website into Submission with .htaccess explaining how to use several .htaccess features to do helpful tricks; but I didn't really touch on mod_rewrite or RewriteRule. Since then I was involved in a project that required extensive use of mod_rewrite and I've come to truly appreciate its power and usefulness. The main mod_rewrite function, RewriteRule, is powered by regular expressions. Regular expressions are used to search blocks of text for specific patterns. I barely have enough room in this article to scratch the surface of regular expressions; so if you need more detail in that area I recommend this website. For the purposes of this tutorial, though, I'll be sticking to commonly used URL rewriting tasks.

  • June 27, 2008 in Friday Blog Clips

    5 for Friday | The Week's Best Blogs (6/27/08 Edition)

    After looking at this week's links, you may be wondering, "What's with all the free brushes?" Well, I'm not really sure. There was a sudden influx of articles this week featuring free Photoshop and Illustrator brushes and I decided to jump at the chance. Who knows how long it will be until the next brush article. There were more than just brush articles this week, though. I'm really interested to see what happens with MagCloud. It sounds a lot like Blurb.com for magazines. Also, you may have noticed that the new Mirificam Press design is continuing to change. I wish I could blame it on "settling in" or "listening to my readers and taking suggestions", but the truth is, I've just been restless and indecisive about it. You can expect any significant changes to be finished up today.

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