The only thing I love more right now than the Spore Creature Creator is the chance of getting something for free. SurveyGizmo.com (online survey software tool) is offering a free year Pro account for making a mascot for them… no limit on submissions.

read more | digg story

We got iPhone fever with the rest of the world last Friday and decided to offer up a mobile based iPhone Poll application. We are happy to bring you iPoll. It actual works well in browsers and theoretically in other mobile phone browsers too. So give it a try even if you don’t have an iPhone. You can email the poll to friends and they can view it on an iPhone or in their PC’s browser.

Try it right here -

What can you do with iPoll?

• Build your poll on the fly. You can use an iPhone, a web browser, and quite possibly other web enabled cell phones. You can visit this page or go to http://iPoll.SurveyGizmo.com
• Email your poll to friends, family, coworkers, customers, etc.
• Watch the will of the mob, possibly change your mind, or help make a decision

read more | digg story

Safe Harbor

In 1998, The European Union Commission’s Directive on Data Protection went into effect and basically created a set of stringent privacy guidelines for the protection of personal data. It also prohibited the transfer of personal data to non-European Union nations that do not follow those guidelines. In other words our EU friends might not be able to use SurveyGizmo to get their burning questions answered. In steps Safe Harbor registration which bridges the gap between US and EU privacy laws. By meeting the Safe Harbor guidelines we can all get along. The really good news is that SurveyGizmo already met or exceeded these privacy guidelines, but now we have gone through the process to be able to say so.

HIPAA

HIPAA or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 is a US federal law that establishes standards for the privacy and security of health information. Once again SurveyGizmo already abided by the spirit of these protections, but is now all read up, quizzed up, and self-certified in both the HIPAA Privacy Rule and the Security Rule provisions. This means that we meet the guidelines from privacy perspective (we don’t share your data - nuff said) and a security perspective (we protected it and keep it private).

We fall under what is known as a “Business Associate” meaning that we are not the actual entity collecting the PHI (Protected Health Information — in HIPAA-speak), but service the organizations that do so. We used the free and truly wonderful resource from the University of Miami School of Medicine The Privacy / Data Protection Project. It’s full of tons of useful documentation, but they must believe like we do that there is no reason you can’t have some fun while doing some serious learning.

Continue reading about SurveyGizmo, the only online survey tool with both HIPAA and Safe Harbor certifications.

The deadline for this summer’s submissions is coming on fast on March 31, 2007, so apply now to TechStars with your new idea.

read more | digg story

“We couldn’t help but notice all the searches for myspace survey functionality. So here it is — surveys you can embed in MySpace (or other difficult CMS systems)!”

Read more about surveys on MySpace

The so called Training Effect is a little bit of a mystery. Apparently I ‘Overreached” or “over trainied” today even though I didn’t really feel that that was the case. I attempted to stay my Zone 3 (70-80% of max heart rate 131-150 bpm) but that felt like I wasn’t really moving. I experimented with finding my true rather than calculated max heart rate, but that’s another article.

Anyways day one was

• 1 hr 26 min
• 4 miles
• 1263 feet of ascent
• Avg heart rate 154
• Max 183, Min 107

more to come…

So three things we’re important to me altitude monitoring, PC connectivity (no Mac support anywhere in site, bummer), and overall good system design. The devil is frequently in the details and the difference between a joy to use and nunsaince is difficult to accertain until you use it yourself (I haven’t actually used em yet, that will be the next article).

Suunto T6

Polar AXN 500

I ended up picking the Suunto T6 (and it should be here tomorrow) because of few factors.

1. The AXN is frickin heavy, but this was only a small factor. I could have dealt with it. Both watches look enough like regular watches to be used everyday. I am to lazy to switch watches just to take a quick run.
2. I hate hassles and I saw online that the IRda connection the Polar uses to talk to the PC for data upload can be a hassel sometimes (I have a Dell Inspiron 8600 with built in IR but wasn’t sure it would word). Polar could do a MUCH better job telling you which computers are know to work well or have a test app or something, but the answer is spend another $70 on their USB IRda and didn’t want to mess with it. The Suunto T6 uses a simple cable which no one seems to complain about.
3. Many folks say the Polar software is more mature that the Suunto, but the Polar folks do a really poor job of showing you the software at all much less why it’s better. I’m not saying Suunto met all my expectations on explaning their sofware but they did have a PDF on how to improve training with it and that swayed me alot.
4. The Suunto has their EPOC training system in the T6. The EPOC is like a Vo2 Max and is used in the software to help you maximize your target zones while working out (apprently). Polar’s system of OwnZone is left out of the AXN 500 why would you do such a stupid thing. Their product differentiation just left me no watch that had the options I desired.
5. In many ways I bought the Suunto because they did a better job of marketing it though there is still room for improvement (I would love to take a crack at their website). I was able to figure out their product and the understand the software that’s included which gave me a better over all idea of the total system.

Both Polar and Suunto websites suck
Let’s talk about websites, well both www.polarusa.com and www.suunto.com suck, but Suunto sucks less. That’s what it came down to. They both do a poor job of clearly of explaining the differences in watches and there is way too much momboo jombo.

Also both companies have secondary sites that try to build communities. The PolarPersonalTrainer.com which is like online training software looks slick, but the site was completely unuseable in 3 browsers on 2 platforms for me. I just gave up and wrote it off. The www.suuntosports.com also sucks pretty bad, but doesn’t try to be for online training and I already liked what I’d seen of the PC app so it’s not needed. Their site is about sharing workouts and stats but seems pretty dead from what I see. The signup process on SuuntoSports completely fails in Firefox and even in IE where it appears to work I never got the emails with my password after 3 attempts I gave up on that too. Oh well…

Where to buy a Suunto T6 or Polar AXN 500?
Prices vary widely all over the web for these watches even with in a single store. Both Amazon and Buy.com have the T6 on their site for $280 AND $450 with no way to see the difference. I really wanted to buy from PC Coach because they were so helpful with reviews on the website and a decent price of $320 for the Suunto T6. They called me back after leaving a message and were very helpful on the phone and coincidentally they are in Boulder, CO like myself. I went to look at the watches and they helped me decide on the T6, but they were out of stock!

I ended up getting it from Buy.com for $276 and they surprised me by shipping the same day. Thanks Buy.com (usually it takes 1-2 days to ship). I also found out that the watch hasn’t changed much so even though I’m likely getting old productI hope it won’t matter.I read about a few problems with firmware but that seems like it was short lived. Keeping my fingers crossed I get a good one but I can always send it Suunto for an upgrade if I have to. UPS says it should be here tomorrow!

The SurveyGizmo widget gives you the best of both worlds. Use SurveyGizmo to build custom surveys, but easily glance at your Dashboard throughout the day to monitor respo nses.

read more | digg story

The SurveyGizmo widget for Mac OS 10.4.3+ allows you to keep up with progress on your surveys and view in near real time the number of surveys In Progress, Completed, Abandoned, or Partially Completed. You also have handy links to Edit, Reporting, and Preview.

Read more about or download the Survey Widget here.

The new contact form and lead gen form templates are great for our WordPress survey plugin users. It provides a great and simple alternative to existing methods of adding a contact form to your WordPress blog.

You get all the power of a full featured survey tool (http://www.surveygizmo.com) with 19 question types, email invites, auto-responders, API data access in and out, and more.

You have total control over survey look and feel with a template engine very similar to WordPress. There are all kinds of options for reporting and data export.

SurveyGizmo can also take collected data and post it back to your own CRM database, SalesForce.com, Constant Contact, Aweber, or any other web form/API. The plugin uses the open API, so if it doesn’t suit you - build your own!

Check out the SurveyGizmo WordPress Plugin

This could be exciting with so much happening in the WordPress theme world with Widgets and Ajax working there way in left and right. I’ve been meaning to update my own theme run here and open it up public consumption. Now might be just the time!

But now it’s on to new things and rewarding possibilities. I am helping form a new company and we have some really cool things to come. It will all be announced soon enough, but in the mean time here is just a little peak to whet the taste bugs.

This is by far the best online survey application I have ever seen. It blows the doors off SurveyMonkey and it has a free level that might be great for most people. You can use it to create surveys, polls, contact forms, data collection, landing pages, you name it. If it’s got a form field in it they can do it.

I know the guy who built the app and he’s on the up-n-up. He is really open to suggestions — you can always let him know what you think. He responds to bugs or feature requests (when they’re a good idea!) lightning fast.

If you have have any need for a survey, data collection or landing page tool check out SurveyGizmo.com.

We are only considering candidates located near Boulder, Colorado who are willing (and experienced at) working from home; or candidates available to work in our HQ offices in Warren, Rhode Island (75 minutes from Boston.) The position is for an advanced-junior or intermediate level candidate, but a prior history of success in collaborating remotely is essential for either locations.

• Solid knowledge of XHTML / CSS / JavaScript
• Strong design and layout skills
• Good understanding of Web Standards, usability, and accessibility practices, or a willingness to pick them up
• Hand coding chops are essential, experience designing in dynamic sites, some knowledge of PHP or MySQL a plus
• We work with busy publishing schedules, so strong organization skills and a commitment to keeping deadlines is a must
• Bonus points given for keeping up with the latest ideas in design and code. Who is your favorite designer or blogger?
• Demonstrated ability to work independently, as well as, take art direction
• Usual software skills are assumed: Photoshop, Illustrator, code editor, FTP, etc.
• Absolutely must have a portfolio of samples. Please include links to an online portfolio or a list of urls. Also please include a brief description of your role for each sample. This is also your opportunity to explain where you might have done anything different had you been completely in control of the final product.

MarketingSherpa is an equal opportunity employer offering great benefits and an opportunity to grow, plus a highly visible place to demonstrate your great Web, online ad, and email design skills. We will push you to become one of the best, user-centric, Web designers on this planet, and we’ll continue to reward you as you grow.

Please forward your portfolio, resume, and salary history. You need to be eligible to work in the US. No recruiters or 3rd parties. Send Here

If you want to check it out right now you’ll have to submit your email for a beta and wait till they send you an email. I learned about it from Mike Davidson’s blog who left Disney/ESPN to launch this startup. Here is Mike’s take on the first day of Newsvine beta.

Here is a short feature run down:

• Read news
• Comment on news
• Chat live about articles
• Vote for the popularity of an article a la digg
• Write your own article
• “Seed” interesting links from around the web a la digg
• Tag articles a la del.icio.us
• RSS in lots of flavors
• Embed Newsvine RSS in your own site, like I do with my digg and del.icio.us links

I look forward to seeing how this plays out. I am also curious to see what the business model/revenue stream turns out to be. It’s not clear to me if this is going to be a paid service in the future.

The design and usability is great. Davidson is to credit for that I’m sure. You can see his hand in it. It is very easy to figure out, navigate and explore. Try to get on the beta list and check it out.

I looked at all kinds of implementations from Photo Matt’s Asides, Coldforged , Yet Another Asides, Mini-Posts, Not Really Asides, as well as just using a separate “asides” post category. Then it struck me that I could kill two birds with one stone.

I have become a huge fan of digg.com through their podcast digg nation (also available free through iTunes). I have also dabbled in del.icio.us social bookmarking. Contributing to digg and delicious basically serve the same function as the asides I wanted.

Well now I have my del.icio.us and my diggs on my home page. I went ahead and added this while upgrading to WordPress 2.0.
To me this is even better than any of the plugins or hacks, because I don’t have to open up my blog to post one. I can add them right from the browser while surfing through two great Firefox extensions, Digg This! and del.icio.us extension.
To add these asides lists to my WordPress template, I only had to add a couple snips of JavaScript available from each website.

• del.icio.us linkrolls JavaScript
• For digg look at the bottom of your profile page for “add this feed to your website.”

No muss, no fuss.

• 3 websites with several thousand pages of content
• an eCommerce system (shopping cart)
• web analytics, traffic, sales tracking
• create a new homegrown integrated system to manage content, sales, customers, contacts, research, events, marketing, and just about every other thing we touch
• 8 weekly email newsletters
• 2 busy blogs
• and a Partridge in a pear tree…

In the 4 months (yeah I know this post is way over due) I’ve gotten my hands in just about everything.

Email Eye Tracking

The day I started I found out I had just a few hours to get 6 creative email samples ready for live user eye tracking studies by our friends at www.eyetools.com. We compared HTML email designs of things like single vs. multiple product shots, use of large graphics vs. mostly text, sidebars on left vs. right. We measured where the users looked, how long they looked, and if and where they clicked. Let me just say WOW the results were very interesting; I was quite surprised in some cases. You want the data? Well go buy the guide, we do this research for a reason. ;-)

New SherpaStore Shopping Cart - Now with Web Standards

The biggest project has definitely been the redesign of the SherpaStore shopping cart with web Standards goodness. The store launched Thanksgiving week after four months of work squeezed into two. This is the first time I’ve had to deal extensively with porting over dreadful home rolled CMS content to a new system. Does this look familiar?

<font color=black><div class=”headline”>Page Headline

<li>This

<li>is really

<li>a big mess

</div>

Yikes! I can’t praise the Xstandard editor enough for how helpful it was in cleaning up this kind of code into well-formed XHTML goodness. I like it so much that I’m even willing to put up with the fact that I can’t use it on my Mac, so you know it’s good (they say a Mac version is coming). The design was basically kept the same (we’ll fight that battle later) and won’t be winning any awards, but usability was the focus and these improvements were made.

• Pages are 30-50% smaller
• entire design easily controlled through a CSS file
• new slug based SEO friendly page names
• Much better SEO throughout
• new CMS built ground up
• template system built in the style of WordPress
• Very nice site search through AtomZ integration
• streamlined checkout process to reduce cart abandonment
• and it even validates! (at least it did tonight at 9:27pm)

The new templated content management system was built by our php genius Christian Vanek after I turned him on to the WordPress way. So now I have a set of functions calls I can manipulate the presentation layer with in very flexible ways. The business logic layer is completely abstracted and either layer can be manipulated with out touching the other. We can also do A/B testing with different templates, see live data in designs under development, and create unique Landing Pages on the fly.

Oh yeah and a few cartoons

One day it was decided that cartoons for a just about to be launched marketing campaign were actually pretty terrible. So that meant I had a week to find a new cartoonist, get 10 new cartoons drafted, and set up the campaign to fulfill as 10 days of automated emails.
Well I was lucky enough to find Dan Rosandich of www.danscartoons.com and he pulled all nighters with me to get the cartoons done in record time. The campaign ended up pulling in several thousand leads, so all in all it was a success.

Lots More to Come

I love this job. I can touch just about every kind of technical marketing/online communications arts there is. So what’s next? We’ll there is the redesign of www.marketingsherpa.com, two new WordPress Blogs to launch, HTML newsletters to redesign with CSS… and then there is always next year.

I was looking for a super simple way to Play/Pause, and move to the Next/Previous track in iTunes.  And before you speak — I don’t want to have to invoke the Quicksilver window.  Frankly I wanted to mimic the buttons on my Dell laptop.

The Stand alone SizzlingKeys looks quite nice, appears to do everything I need, and is free, but if I could get what I wanted from an application I already have then all the better. Elizabeth Lawley talks about quickly searching for albums with QuickSilver and Dan Schellenberg wrote about automating browserTunes and Quicksilver but neither quite fit. I listen to iTunes all day on shuffle and all I want is a way to pause when the phone rings or skip a song I don’t want to hear.

Setting up Quicksilver Triggers for iTunes control

As it turns out this is drop dead simple. Make sure you have Quicksilver with the iTunes Plugin installed (Quicksilver -> Preferences -> Plugins). 

1. Under Triggers hit the + sign at the bottom to make a new Trigger.
   
2. Under "Select an Item" type "Next" and "Next Song" should appear. Leave the action set to Run Applescript and click save (you can’t assign your shortcut here).
   
3. Now under the column "Trigger" double click "None." Here is where you need to be slightly careful. QS seems to be a little persnickety about the shortcut key. If you get change your mind like I did several times I often found I had to delete the trigger and start over. I ended up choosing F-13 for next song (more on choosing keys in a sec).
4. Now add the "Previous Song" trigger and the ‘Play-Pause." I really like the  Play-Pause trigger because it always toggles  back and forth and will even launch iTunes if it’s not running!

Choice of Quicksilver Trigger Keyboard Shortcuts

These keyboard shortcuts are available everywhere in your Mac so you need to make sure that you don’t chose keys assigned in other applications. At first I thought choose really complex key combination like Ctrl-Opt-Cmd-> for Next Song, only to find out that turns up the Gamma or contrast on my screen in weird way - Strike One! Then I realized I didn’t want multi-key combos. I wanted a single key to press when the phone was ringing.  So I thought that F-14-15-16 would make great Prev-Play-Next combo, but F-14/15 are taken for brightness control - Strike Two!

So how about that big F-13 key - would make a great "Next" button which is likely to be the most used. I wanted F-11 to map to "Previous Song" and F-12 to map to "Play/Pause." I did have to go and reconfigure Expose and the Dashboard shortcuts to use F-9/10 instead of F-11/12, but now it’s perfect - Home Run!

Michael Bolton - yuck - next song! 

Show iTunes Artwork and Title for Current Track

As an added bonus return to Quicksilver->Preferences and go to the iTunes item which should have appeared after installing the plugin.  By clicking "Show Artwork" you will see the song artwork (if you have any) pop-up with the track name as songs change. It was weird at first while I was work but quickly grew to love it. And what if want to see again after it fades away - simply hit your Play/Pause shortcut twice and it will pop back up.

See all the photos here at Flickr

The picture is from my new camera phone of the last project I’m doing for ClickData.com. I start at MarketingSherpa.com this Thursday.

I’m very excited about the new job. A year ago I wrote down what a perfect job would be for me and this has every item right down the list including working from home! More info to follow.

All Apple is giving these poor owners is a $50 gift certificate or an extra year of Apple Care service contract. That’s cheap. Can Apple possible justify the loss of good faith and bad press versus the cost of having just done right by these owners in the first place?

I’ll bet it has a lot to do with being held to the fire by Wall Street. It seems like well run private companies have more leeway to make good when things go wrong.

If Microsoft screws me it’s all just par for the course. I’ve come to expect it. I never buy a Microsoft product because I want to, I buy it cause I have to. Not the same with Apple, where I relish spending my dollars with them. I love Apple and their products so this is just like getting the shaft from your best friend.

Some of my personal CSS Reboot favorites in no particular order are:

• Ben Saunders
• Sazziest
• Duoh!
• Patrick Haney
• gatoking
• kide.org
• Slightly Remarkable
• b.b. home

Traffic on my site is way up

I recently installed Jeff Minard’s WP-plugin version of Shaun Inman’s ShortStat. This has got to be my favorite plugin -it totally rocks! I get instant feedback on hits, referrers, visitor’s countries, and more. I now I actually have some traffic to track!

I’d really need to thank Roger Johansson for the shout outs on his site and Stylegala about my recent article, Manipulating Definition Lists for Fun and Profit. His post spawned tons of others and lots and lots of traffic. I’d really like to meet that guy someday, if you don’t read his site yet, well… just do it. There was also referrer traffic coming in from some other nice sites, one really fantastic looking German site (dig his blogroll!), and a couple other sites in Spanish and one translation in Catalan by Arnau Siches! Since I only read English I have no idea what they said (If you speak 2 languages you’re bi-lingual. If you speak 3 you’re tri-lingual. What are you if you speak only one? - American LOL).

Thanks to everyone for pointing traffic or stopping by. I’ll have Part II of Manipulating Definition Lists later this week.

This is was also my wife Toi’s first Corn Camp, as well as -

• her first time backcountry skiing
• her first time backpacking
• her first time camping on snow

All in all of lot of firsts for her. It was also the first time Corn Campers got fresh Thai food cooked by a real Thai chef, in additional to Chef Gallo’s famous sushi night at 12,000 ft. Another cool first was having some kite skiers in attendance. These guys could tack up the valley against the wind at incredible speeds while catching occasional big air then softly landing.

Unfortunately we had one girl break her leg on a ski decent. We all rallied and as it turned out had prepared reasonably well for such an eventuality. There were snowmobiles available to aide in the rescue and she was driven out to a hospital in Durango and operated on the next day.

We also sacrificed a Sponge Bob to the snow gods. We filled him up with bits and pieces of scrap paper with any regrets, guilts, or other baggage you want to rid yourself of written down on them. He was then ritually burned at the sacrificial stake to the cries of the mob - “burn him!”

So go check out all the photos here.

Have you ever wished you had more options or flexibility when it came to marking up WordPress Link Lists? I wanted a WP link list that could display in multiple columns with varying amounts of text, have the text below the image/link, a groovy background, and basically look nothing like your typical list.

If you haven’t been there yet, take a look at my Portfolio page which is marked up using this technique. A lot of my inspiration for this came from Douglas BowmanCSS SlidingDoors which has proved incredibly useful (it also allows my sidebar background to expand dynamically). The Sliding Door idea is that you use two HTML elements, one inside the other, each with half of a graphic, and as they expand or contract the graphic backgrounds slide to adjust for different sizes. Bowman used <li> and <a> in a horizontally expanding menu. I’m using <dt> and <dd> with vertical flexibility.

Marking up WordPress Lists as Definition Lists

If you’ve played around with WP lists you probably used get_linksbyname to display your lists.

<ul>
 <?php get_linksbyname('portfolio', '<li>', '</li>',
  '', TRUE, 'rating', TRUE, FALSE, -1, FALSE); ?>
</ul>

You can see what all the TRUEs and FALSEs are at the WordPress Codex get_linksbyname template tag description. It basically says ‘run through my list and start each item with an opening list element, place a break between the image/link and description, and then close up the list tag.’ This is great, but puts some confines on the display possibilities of the images and descriptions. Nothing says though that you can only use list tags. Try this on for size –

<dl>
  <?php get_linksbyname('portfolio', '<dt>', '</dd>',
   '</dt><dd>', TRUE, 'rating', TRUE, FALSE, -1, FALSE); ?>
</dd>
</dl>

You will end up with a definition list structured like this -

<dl class="portfolio">
  <dt>Image/link 1 </dt>
  <dd> Description 1</dd>
  <dt>Image/link 2 </dt>
  <dd> Description 2</dd>
  <dt>Image/link 3 </dt>
  <dd> Description 3</dd>
</dl>

Now I can control the margins, padding, float, etc. of the description text independently of the images because it is wrapped in its tag. And in case you are wondering where I put my call to get_linksbyname, I created a template named Portfolio with this call on it, and then assigned it to a Page named the same thing. Already pretty cool, but wait–there’s more with this Ginsu knife set.

Styling Fluid Multi-Column Definition Lists

Have you noticed everything in WordPress can look like a list? That’s because they are lists! This is great semantically, but starts to look tired to me. One of my requirements was that my link list appears in two or more columns, so the screaming lists! lists! lists! subsides a bit. Second, I want the description text to sit below the image/link. And third, I want a nice background that adjusts to varying text lengths. I may be using this technique to style WP links with an image above and description below, but you can also use this for any kind of information with headings in the <dt>, or anything else you can think of. Let’s start by defining the Definition List. In my Blog design I needed a fixed width for my <dl>, but a fluid example shows more of this technique’s flexibility. Check out the example here and be sure to play with your browser’s width.

dl.portfolio {
	width:80%;
	}

Here is where we start getting the elements to behave fluidly by floating the <dt> left. We also attach our first “Sliding Door here. The background image is attached to the top of the <dt> and to the bottom of the <dd> (see below). The two overlap or slide past each other to meet in the middle. I use a single oversized image, an idea borrowed from Roger Johansson’s CSS Teaser Box. The <dt> height allows for the size of my portfolio images that I assigned in the WP links admin, and the width is enough for the entire background to show. The zero margin and padding get rid of browser defaults.

dl.portfolio dt {
	float:left;
	background: url(images/twoToneBox.gif) no-repeat left top;
	width:240px;
	height:70px;
	margin: 0;
	padding:0;
	}

(image curtsey of Arnau Siches’ Catalan translation - thanks!)

The <dd> is slightly trickier. We float this left, but give it the same top margin as the height of the <dt> to push it down, and a negative left margin to pull it beneath. Using this technique we get the stacked look we want and maintain fluidity. The <dt> and <dd> will both float and stack up left to right filling the width assigned to your <dl>.

(image curtsey of Arnau Siches’ Catalan translation - thanks!)

dl.portfolio dd {
	float:left;
	background: url(images/twoToneBox.gif) no-repeat left bottom;
	width:210px;
	height:70px;
	padding:1px 21px 0 10px;
	margin:70px 0 40px -240px;
	font:normal 14px/1.2em Palatino, Times, Serif;
	color:#bca88c;
	}

If you’re familiar with the CSS box model you’ll notice that the width of the <dd> is reduced because of the padding I have introduced for the text. If you’re really sharp, you’ll notice that my total box width (210px + 21px + 10px = 241px) is 1px more than it should be. I don’t know why, but my layout collapsed on itself in FireFox with the proper width and adding a single extra pixel seemed to fix it. The <dd> has the other half of the Sliding Door background fixed to the bottom. I set the <dd> height large enough to accommodate the lengthiest text I will have. In some applications you might not need <dd> heights–you can just allow them to respond dynamically to the amount of text–but in this case the grid layout would be messed up if one box flowed up into the space created by a shorter box above. I also set some rules on how I’d like the text to display adjusting the font and color. Lastly, I toss in some extra styling for the images in our <dt>. I give it a border with 4 pixels of padding to make it framed in white. Then I added a hover effect to the image. Don’t forget–WordPress makes the image a link. If IE respected :hover properly I could have used img:hover, but since it doesn’t I used the img as a descendent selector on the a:hover pseudo-element, and it seems to work fine.

dl.portfolio dt img {
	background-color:#fff;
	padding:4px;
	margin:15px 0 0 15px;
	border:1px dashed #d78e7d;
	}

dl# portfolio dt a:hover img {
	background-color:#f5dbc0;
	border:1px solid #d78e7d;
	}

See the final example with css here. Well, that wraps up part 1 of Manipulating Definition Lists for Fun and Profit. I tested this on a Window XP box (I’m saving my pennies for a Mac) using Firefox 1.04, IE 6.0, Netscape 7.1, and Mozilla 1.6, and they all seem to work great. Opera 7.2, on the other hand, continues to piss me off. [update - Opera 8.0 works fine] If any Opera diehards can fix this layout for that browser I’d be pleased to hear about it, and if you experience problems on platforms other than the evil empire please let me know.

Translations - Catalan by Arnau Siches

The May 1st Reboot has been going for 5 years and though not exclusive, is heavily Flash oriented. The CSS Reboot was formed as a sort of add-on project by B. Adam Howell & Matthew Pennell to highlight the CSS/Web Standards based sites.

There are new articles after a hiatus so long it looked like I left the planet. I have also added a new photo gallery with images from my around the world trip and two years living in Asia. It’s powered by Todd Dominey’s awesome slideshowpro that I’m absolutely in love with. SlideShowPro also handles the random snap shot photos from the home page.

Enjoy.

I did publish journals and some photos as I traveled at my site traveljunkie.org, but the new shots have now been spit shinned and polished for viewing pleasure. I shot these on a 3 mega-pixel Sony Mavica that burns the photos to a mini-CD. It was a great system to travel with: virtually unlimited shots, cheap and light weight media, good controls, and Carl Zeiss lens. All in all I was really happy with it (the rig is for sale by the way if anyone’s interested, $100 with lot’s of goodies - just drop me a line).

I flew from home in Boulder, Colorado and visited in order Portugal, Spain, Morocco, France, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

You can check out the galley here powered with my fancy new slideshowpro. Towards the end of that trip, I met the incredible Thai women that would become my wife. I ended up moving back to Thailand for two years and visited several more Asian countries. More photos to follow.

This was our last hurdle and we are good to go. We had a mega hour wait in line with couple hundred other visa seekers at the Bangkok US Embassy and then a 10 minute long meeting with a friendly chap. It was easy after everything else we’ve been through to get that far.

See you all on November 16th!

• A small apartment (or house) in the greater Boulder area for around $600
• An all-wheel drive car, like a Subaru or something, under $10k hopefully
• A permanent web development or marketing position for me or any contract jobs, small or large
• A position in a restaurant kitchen (preferably Thai) for Toi

I figure with all my friends asking all their friends the net cast is pretty large, and we just might get a catch with some of these. Thanks everyone.

I’m leaving on a jet plane, don’t know …

Tell me you didn’t just say to yourself “when I’ll be back again…” We actually have plane reservations now. We get back to Denver 6:05 PM on November 16th - wooo whoooo! That’s after exactly 23 hours and 15 minutes of travel time spread over 3 flights, with stops in Taipei and San Fancisco just in case you were wondering.

Now all these plans are based on the November 4th Visa interview going well, but we have every “i” dotted and “t” crossed in our 2,127 forms, so we think it’ll be fine.

We should be back in the U.S. by November 16th or so, and we can’t wait to catch up with everyone.

Our wedding will be held over three days, December 3rd-5th. We are having it at a mountain get-away in Estes Park, Colorado. We want our friends and family to spend a few days with us having fun rather than just a crazy one-day affair.

Our lodge sits right on the doorstep of Rocky Mountain National Park. It has six bedrooms, space for a camper if you’ve got one, two hot tubs, several decks, its own lake, and great views everywhere.

What more could you want?

The original plan was to have the Thai wedding right before we left in November, but the monks put the kibosh on that, because November is an odd numbered month and therefore not auspicious for weddings and such. So they consulted the monk almanac and October 23rd came tumbling out as the best possible “big day.” This wasn’t terribly convenient as it’s the last day of Toi’s internship at the Sheraton and a few days before her final exams, but you can’t argue auspiciousness with a monk. I’ll give you some insight into my wife, at first she said she wanted to have the wedding in the morning and then go to work that afternoon. I put the kibosh on that. So a deal was struck to have a very small, simple wedding on the 23rd and then a bigger reception/going away Party on Nov 12th.

I am still trying to get a handle on the exact wedding details, because it’s a very fluid plan in motion. I thought that monks would be running the show, but now apparently we just walk to the temple and give them some goodies to make merit, so we top off the “good luck” tanks prior to tying the knot, then we head back home alone. And they take this knot tying thing quite literally in Thailand. Toi’s mother who according to the new monk-less plan will now be officiating the ceremony will tie up Toi and me in a big ball of white yarn. Well actually, she’ll bind our hands together with white string that has been blessed at the temple.

Toi and I are foggy on what comes after this, but there is going to be some gift giving, but not the way I thought. We have to give all of our guests gifts,and the more important the person the better the gift! So who is going to be in attendance? When we moved up the date from Nov. to Oct., Toi’s mom suggested just immediate family, mom, bro and sis that’s it, but did it stop there… what do you think? Toi needed a couple of important people in her life there, and then they said, “but you have to invite _______ and how could you forget _______.” Good ‘ol mom and I were thinking alike, but now it’s totally out of control. Current estimates are somewhere between 10 and 40. The plan to have the ceremony at Toi’s house, which might hold 7 or 8, is completely blown. No one other than me now seems non-plussed by the lack of a plan, location, guest list, or feeding arrangements. I just want to do right by Toi and give her the kind of wedding that she has always pictured, trouble is she never had a camera so loose sketch might be more appropriate.

Oh well, “mai ben lai” as they say, which loosely translates to “don’t worry, be happy.”

Here is a run down.
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View the design - 100% CSS wholesome goodness!

UPDATE: If accessibility is important to you (why would you be reading this if it isn’t) you might like to take a look at this other post of mine The Most Accessible and Useable Survey Tool. Thx.

I was honored to have my Accessibility Games Design featured at the css Zen Garden, a showcase of css design work.

The idea for this sprung out of the controversy around the 2000 & 2004 Olympic websites being inaccessible to disabled users, because of their out dated coding techniques. They Olympic committee lost a lawsuit in which $20,000 damages were awarded to a blind man in Australia, because the 2000 Sydney Games website violated the Australian web accessibility laws. Read more about a case for Olympic web accessibility here. There is a similar law in the UK and in U.S Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act has the same rules for websites of the federal government and its vendors.
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Some great movies I have seen over the last month that I’d recommend: Spartan, Secondhand Lions, Big Fish, The Magdalene Sisters.
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Impeccable timing.

After 6 months of chef’s school for Toi I am doubting that is a profession I want my wife to be in. I just read “Cutting It Fine” the British analogue to “Kitchen Confidential” A great and fascinating book and it makes me want to read Kitchen Confidential, but it paints a bleak picture about working in todays restaurants, even the nice ones. My hats off to those fine people, who work harder than I ever imagined for less than I thought possible. Note to self: Institute chef tipping.
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We have passed through 3 of the 4 steps for the Fiancee Visa. All the stacks of paper work are done - I-129F, DS-156, 156k, 157, 169, Police background check, Medical report, yada, yada, yada. We are just waiting for the last step the Visa interview at the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok. They could get back to us with a date anytime anytime in the next 4-10 weeks. Do you think there might be a few other U.S. citizens trying to get fiancee visas? Well you’d be right! Take a look at just the August list here! We are just cogs in a wheel.
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I finally got around to getting my own blog up (short for weblog if you didn’t know). I’m going to post on whatever comes to mind about work or my life. Stay tuned if you’re interested. And please post comments that’s what it’s here for. For my technophobe friends it’s super easy! Read a post (click on the Post Title) and then at the bottom just add your name, email, and comments - that’s it… Really! Try it… You’ll like it.

I also tailored my own personalized Theme switcher, try clicking on the small colored boxes at the top of the right column. Collect them all! What’s your favorite?
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a few ideas if you need some…

• REI - registry # GR157216 - click here
• Target - filed under Scott McDaniel click here

other wish list goodies…

• Sleeping bag or outerwear for 4′10″ girl who gets cold easily
• Ski tickets or lessons

My mother’s address if you need it

Katie Roberts
10500 Irma Dr. #22-107
Northglenn CO 80233