I have just put online a new version of prettyPhoto, this version now supports titles.

As usual, if you have any comments/bugs feel free to leave a comment in the main prettyPhoto post.

Head to the project page to view the latests changes.

The agency I’m working at has just launched it’s new website. It’s a full flash website with a full HTML equivalent for people without flash and to help SEO.

It’s our first attempt at making a flash website fully SEO friendly, which is pretty cool.

Since I don’t do any flash I wasn’t implied in the main site development, I have been in charge of the HTML version development.

To view the new site just go to: http://www.cloudraker.com
To view the new HTML version of the site go to: http://www.cloudraker.com?noflash=true

Let me say first off, that I’m am more than happy with the response I had for my pretty comments jQuery plugin. More than 1500 people visited my blog last month and more are coming just for that bit of code. Really, I am impressed, never tought I’d get such response.

I have been on vacation for 2 weeks, I’ll be back at work and in fully working shape next week. That means I should get more active. I’m currently working on another jQuery plugin that takes the standard browser drop downs (we all know they can’t really be styled with css) and give you the ability to customize them. The script is started, pretty advanced, I only have some issues with accessibility and needs to test it some more to make sure it doesn’t break anything in the forms when you use it. The name? Pretty dropdown You can see I am very inspired
Thanks again for all the positive feedback!

Blogged with Flock

Yes it’s true, a blog post over at the ie blog state that the new IE8 passes the ACID 2 test.

For those who don’t know, ACID 2 is a test case designed by the Web Standards Project to identify web page rendering flaws in browsers and authoring tools.

Up until recently only Opera, Safari and Konqueror were successfully passing the ACID2 test. Firefox 3.0 should pass it too.

Good sign for the future!

Blogged with Flock

I’ve been in some situations where I need to support a company doing the back end on some templates I produced. The problem is that those companies often have little knowledge of web standards, XHTML/CSS and such, and my templates….well they’re standard based.

Got me to think about how recognized is a web integrator in the industry. Most companies don’t seem to recognize this as a full time job, some of them sees it as a programmer job, others sees it as a designer job. In a company where your specialty is developing back end you sure don’t care much about the front end. But it IS important. The whole user experience depends on how the information is presented to the user, how the website reacts and how the site “feels”.

What’s the point of having a whole flow where you define wire frames, use cases, technical specs of a website and provide HTML templates on which all you have to do is plug your code when in the end it’s in big part dumped cause of “technical difficulties”. Having this knowledge in house can save you tons of work, time and money. Not only that, but the overall product will probably be a whole lot better.

Because you’re behind the scene, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t care about what’s happening up front!

Blogged with Flock

The Email Standards Project is an organization that works with the various email clients developer to improve web standards support and accessibility in email.

If you ever had to develop an HTML template, you know how hard it is for it to render properly in all the webmails and desktop based email clients. The main problem is that most of those clients don’t support HTML all at the same extent, some are pretty good at it, others plainly suck. The website provide a very useful documentation on which client support what.

The project is still very young but we’ll wait to see the mail clients developer response on this project, lets hope they also want to make our life easier