Atomic Playboy

I hereby acknowledge that I am a fanboy.

I’ve known for quite some time that he’s the divine being behind Dive Into Accessibility, but I’ve never read it until now. Oh boy, is there ton upon ton of great tips for creating a good site there.

In my previous rant I complained about a site. They made lots of accessibility mistakes that could easily be remedied if they merely follow Mark’s helping hand.

I’ve taken notes on what to incorporate for the template overhaul scheduled for next week — I’ll be using Smarty instead of MovableType for the visual stuff. MT will just generate the contents, Smarty will handle the layout. It’s rather time-consuming to write templates directly in MT.

Hey, I’ve never claimed to have a life of my own. I live through other people’s blogs instead.

It’s not like I have insightful, interesting stuff to write here. I just ramble on about whatever happens to be on my mind at the moment.

I’ve found a bunch of courses I’d like to study. Most of them I’ve already done once, but due to the severe depression I suffered from then, I have very poor grades. Can’t say that they represent my actual skills and knowledge on the subject.

Academedia have pretty much all the media-related courses I need. If I don’t get the job at Connex, I’m planning to study something there full-time.

Mark Pilgrim has noted that the Microsoft redesign is an accessibility disaster. Zeldman has noted that it is a web standards disaster. I’m not going to complain about microsoft.com, though; I’m going to complain about Vuxenutbildningscentrum, the site you’re supposed to use when applying for studies. Ye gods, what a mess. Sure, it has a pretty nice visual layout, but you can forget accessibility and standards support.

To start with: the site is contained in a popup. There is absolutely no reason for this. The site would look better in a normal browser window instead of a popup with a size defined by them (although it is resizable).

How is a blind person supposed to navigate their site? They don’t use alt attributes for images. There’s no DTD. <font> tags galore. They use javascript in <a> tags to redirect you, instead of plain simply stating the link target in the href attribute.

Bobby’s verdict shoots them down in flames. Someone should be sent to the firing squad for making a site like that.

I found a nice new RSS aggregator for Windows called Feedreader. It still has some quirks and missing features, but it’s a good start and fully usable as it is.

One thing I found lacking in AmphetaDesk was being able to set separate update intervals for each feed. Feedreader can update in intervals between 5 and 60 minutes — 60 is a bit too low, but it will be increased in the next version. I update news sites like Slashdot every 15 minutes, and personal blogs every 60 minutes; though they’ll be increased to every 2-4 hours once you can have larger intervals. It’s not like people write that much in their blogs.

Well. I’m going back to working on the templates.

Hey, I’m in the IRC Quote Database. Fifteen minutes of fame.

Next week I’ll see VNV Nation live. Can’t wait.

Ha. Did I go to bed? Nope. I now have five and a half hour until I am supposed to wake up. I’m so screwed.

Plans for the immediate future:

• Thursday: fly down to Kristianstad and visit my family. I miss the dogs.
• Saturday: Me and Chris go down to Lund for some roleplaying. It’s time for the final episode of the Gemini episode.
• Monday: Or possibly Tuesday. I go back to Stockholm.

More plans. I’m going to apply for a job at Connex, working in the subway. I’ll apply for a few courses at Komvux in order to improve my grades. I can do a few courses on evenings even if I get a job. I already have most of the knowledge in the courses I’ll apply for, I just don’t have the grades to prove it. That’s what I want by studying them again.

Congratulations, this document validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict!

Me da man. Well, that’s enough work for tonight. Now I’ll just order a flight ticket to Kristianstad (I’m going home to visit family and friends over the weekend), and then sleep.

It’s aliiive! Didn’t take too long to get a basic template for the front page up and running. I’ll add the other templates later. The sidebar is also pretty barren at the moment. More stuff to fix.

Archiving system done, but no templates yet. MovableType configured and complete, but no templates yet. In other words, all the various templates will be the next step. But at least you can read what I’m writing. Please wait with the bitching about errors until the templates are up, the place is a mess until then.

Test #2. Fooling around with archive templates.

Am testink reinstallation of MT. The database is working, it just looks like crap since there are no templates yet. That’s the next step.