website

Written at 17:56, on Monday 3 March 2008. Tags: personal website .

As the World Wide Web continues to evolve, people use it for increasingly personal and social purposes. The current social networking sites are quickly gaining critical mass, moving the adoption curve forward from an early majority to the late majority. In the Netherlands, Internet usage in is still rising, and the skills of surfers continue to improve. According to the Dutch bureau of statistics CBS, more than 2 million people have designed a webpage.
As we put more of ourselves online, our identity expressions become more and more shattered throughout the web. Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm and Hyves all represent a small piece of me and my online identity. Bringing these all together will take a couple of years, although with developments like OpenSocial, OpenAuth and OpenID the first building blocks are in the pipelines.

Anyway, the whole reason of this introduction is that I’ve made a small step in consolidating my Web presence – I have now merged my portfolio into my blog. I really liked the design of my portfolio so I tried to keep as many aspects of it as possible, and only made small tweaks as necessary (although there are many of them…). There are some big improvements to the design though, mostly fixing mistakes from my last redesign.

Written at 10:29, on Monday 9 April 2007. Tags: website .

Despite being awfully busy with client work and study, I managed to finally integrate a proper feed aggregator on this website. I’ve installed the Simplefeed Drupal module for importing feed items as content. This allows me to aggregate all my Del.icio.us links on this website, give it a permanent archive and allows you to comment on these links. So don’t hesitate to do so!

I’ve also updated my feeds, and while the current URL’s should continue to work, please update your feed reader to point at:

• Journal feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/JeroenCoumansBlog Only blog entries here (low volume)
• Elsewhere links feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/JeroenCoumansLinks My del.icio.us links, regularly updated.

• Combined feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/JeroenCoumansNl The combined blog and links feed.

Written at 08:25, on Tuesday 25 July 2006. Tags: website .

Thomas Baekdal was bored and created Web2DNA, a script which parses your website and visualizes the elements that are on them. The cool thing about it is that semantically meaningful elements will appear brighter, so the more valid your website, the better your result will look!

Written at 12:11, on Monday 17 July 2006. Tags: javascript webdesign website .

This article refers to the fifth version of this website.

As I promised in dynamic text zooming, I made some improvements to the text controls. I also added the option to switch to a light design (click on the lightbulb!). All thanks to the use of CSS for presentation, semantic XHTML for structure and content, and Javascript for interaction and behaviour.

Written at 11:48, on Saturday 1 April 2006. Tags: webdesign website .

A typical website has several “standard” elements which appear on each page, such as a logo, one or more navigation area’s, a content area and a footer. Most of the time, these elements are also displayed in this order: logo at the top, content in the middle, navigation at the top and/or sidebar, and footer at the bottom. This visual configuration is also a clear hint at the relative importance of each of these elements: the brand or identity at the top is relatively more important then the copyright information at the bottom. Sounds straightforward, doesn’t it?

Written at 08:23, on Thursday 9 March 2006. Tags: drupal personal website .

This website is now powered by Drupal! I’ve tried to keep as much of the old content, theme and functionality as possible so you should see little difference, besides a splashing new homepage and various little tidbits. Learning about Drupal, getting to know how it works, reading the documentation and scouring the fora took a couple of days. Setting up the content, the menu’s and the taxonomy, and migrating everything took approximately a day. Migrating the stylesheet and creating a new theme took another day. Finetuning every little bit of Drupal to fit exactly the way I like it took approximately a week. —(Yeah, I’m a perfectionist. I wish I had this much time to finetune client websites!)— Old links should still work (well, most of them, anyway) and I’ll probably make some URL aliases for the most common broken ones. Some of the things which I noticed while working with Drupal.

Written at 17:15, on Friday 7 October 2005. Tags: accessibility usability webdesign website .

This is just a collection of hacks I’ve implemented for my Textpattern installation, and a note on update management..

Written at 16:51, on Tuesday 30 August 2005. Tags: accessibility webdesign website .

Garret wrote about his Textpattern hacks quite some time ago. One which I’m surprised which wasn’t integrated into the recently released first stable version, aptly named version 4 yet is that there are no <label> tags for the comment form. Adding these in the presentation comment form is trivial, of course, but then your site won’t validate anymore because Textpattern doesn’t automatically generate the id parameter for the form elements. And as everyone knows, the reason for this is that it provides an explicit association to the form control for assistive technologies. For example, a screen reader will read the associated label for a particular form element if it has been marked up with a label.

So, how do you add <label> tags for the comment form while still keeping your site validated? Here’s how.