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On holidays, and I just finished reading HTML5 For Web Designers by Jeremy Keith.

It’s really easy to embed videos from sites like YouTube and photos from sites like Flickr into your own web-site. But what I’ve found recently, is that the embed size options don’t quite fit my site. So, for example, on the Subprime Crisis post just a little earlier, the smallest size offered by YouTube was 320×265. However, 320 pixels is too wide for my layout (at least on the front page). In the past, I’ve resorted to the calculator, or even Excel to find the height required for a preferred width, say 230 pixels. Now, I’ve made a little online app to do it for you:

Embed Resizer

Sydney Anglican Media has changed the domain name’s of their two key sites.

A informal little survey, to find out your feed reading preferences.

So, after the last article I continued working on the beta. I took the comments on board (sort ot)… and turned on the beta version. It’s now the live front page of the TAC web-site.

If you’re in a feed reader, pop on over to the actual site, and you’ll notice I’ve spruced the place up a bit.

What first got me into blogs, was some of the fantastic web design content being produced by the likes of SimpleBits, StopDesign and others in my regular reading list.

When I was first understanding web standards, I had heard many proponents talking about semantic mark-up. By this, they meant using HTML elements for the structure they provided to a document, not the visual style they produced. That is, using h1 for a heading rather than to produce big bold text. (ps, the book on Web Standards is just about to be re-released (and revised) as a second edition: Designing with Web Standards (2nd Edition) by Jeffrey Zeldman (affiliate link) – note, the actual cover will be green).

Microformats extend that idea structuring basic sets of data to allow easy formatting for humans as well as something that can be understood by machines – all using current web standards.

The smh.com.au re-design (I previously mentioned) has gone live. What do you think?

A while back, the company that we use to provide a search facility (free) for Toongabbie Anglican, decided they would add advertising to the search results page. Now, I don’t mind that too much because it is a free service, but recently I’ve noticed (and had pointed out to me) that the ads being presented as “Sponsored Links” were not in fitting with our site. For example, if someone search for “baptism” the Sponsored Links on the search results page provided a contrary point of view.

Just finished off the Men Meeting the Challenge Conference site for a ministry based in our Church.

I agree with this QuickTime rant. Apple really has lost the plot asking users to pay for the privilege of creating Quicktime media, by buying the “Pro” version.

One of the elements of web design that took me a while to “get” was colour. Not being a graphic designer, I didn’t have colour palettes popping into my head when required.