terucada.com

Google Chrome – Our Verdict

admin — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:51:36 +0000

After extensive testing (and far too much coffee) here is our considered opinion on Google’s new browser.

It’s fast. Really fast. Except……
It is really slow handling Flash, which is almost as annoying as people who use Flash. Use it to check out this site if you have the patience. It was the fifth worst website of 2007 according to Vincent Flanders, whose site should be required reading for all web users.
It is basic. Really really basic. That is probably why it is fast, but….
It lacks a lot of the functionality we are used to – although remember it is beta, so nobody has had the chance to write any add-ons.
It scores higher on Acid 3 than Flock and renders very well.

To sum up, it is fast, simple and standards-compliant. As a browser it is good – very good. As a toolbox it is still beta so we won’t be moving away from Firefox in any great hurry, but the potential is there. Our hope is that this will sound the final death-knell for IE6 – see our post in the news section.

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Internet Explorer 6

admin — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:47:13 +0000

Whilst we will carry on supporting current IE6 users, for all new sites this carries an extra charge. And quite a large one at that. This reflects the extra work involved in dealing with legacy systems. IE5.5 for Mac is no longer supported – if you are using IE on a Mac, frankly you do not deserve a Mac.

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Something Looks Familiar Here

admin — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 23:02:14 +0000

http://search.cpan.org/~ni-s/Tk-804.027/pod/NoteBook.pod

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Google Chrome

admin — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:48:54 +0000

It is going to be a long night. We’ve got our hands on Google Chrome and started testing. So far Acid 2 seems okay and none of our sites break, but ye gods the UI is ugly. Obviously it is still in Beta and lacking a lot of the functionality we are used to, but it seems to be very fast and the rendering is good. And man, is it bright – sunglasses just to look at it.

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Web Desgin Tutorial #4 – Meta Description and Keywords

admin — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 09:09:07 +0000

Today, we are going to play with and tags, and the first thing we are going to look at is closure. Not the kind of closure your analyst talks about – something far more useful. Some tags – including – are ‘self-closing’. We saw in the previous tutorial the

and emphasised that valid XHTML requires that tags be closed. As always, there are little wrinkles, of which and are examples.
,
and tags have the same properties, but we will get to those later. Along with some of the more complex meta tags.

The two main tags are:

both of which are reasonably obvious. The description is…. well, the description of your site, which will hopefully be what shows up when a search engine looks at your site. Keywords, however, are a different kettle of fish – they are the keywords you hope search engines will look at for finding your site. There is some debate over whether these actually make any difference whatsoever and which engines take any notice of them, but hey – if they do make a difference may as well put them in, if they don’t it is not exactly a chore. Try and make sure they match the content of your site – loading it with names of famous people and prescription drugs is pointless because everyone had that idea years ago. Which may well be why search engines tend not to pay much attention to keywords any more.

At this stage you may be wondering why we are going through all this. The long and the short of it: these headers (with slight modifications) are going to be on every page of your site, and replacing them on a large scale can be a pain. Get them right the first time and save yourself a lot of typing. Don’t worry – things get more fun in the next post. Honestly.

The general format for a self-closing tag is:

As there is no text associated with the tag, we can just close it as soon as we’re done, although there are exceptions to the exceptions. Either way, you have been warned.

Technorati Tags: web, design, html, xhtml, meta

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Web Design Tutorial #3 – Head and Title

admin — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 09:08:46 +0000

In this tutorial, we will be looking at the tag and the related , <meta>, and <link> tags. We’ll leave a couple of other tags with <head> for later – specifically <base> and <script>. The <style> tag we will pass over, for reasons which will become clear. The <head> tag comes immediately after the <html> tag, and before the <body> tag. It supplies information to the browser which, with one exception, will not be displayed on the screen. Let’s start easy, and work up. If you haven’t done so already, download the <a href="http://www.terucada.com/resources/tutorial2.txt">base file from Tutorial #2 </a> and save it in a folder on its own with the name ‘index.html’. Either way, open in a text editor and change it so it looks like . . . <html> <head> <title>Hello World!

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Open the file with your browser of choice (or IE) and lo! the page has a title. Next up: tags.

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Web Design Tutorial #2 – Hello World!

admin — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 09:08:25 +0000

The first thing we are going to do is keep things simple. Well, sort of. Download this file, save it in a folder all by itself as “index.html”. Open it in your text editor of choice, and have a look. You should see this:

Hello World!

Hmm… I hear you say, that’s a lot of typing just for a “Hello World” page, and you would be right – but you only have to do it once per page. Let’s run through what goes on line by line….

The first line is the DOCTYPE declaration. This tells the browser that we are using a language called “XHTML”, that we are using version 1.1, and that we are using the “strict” rules, as laid down by W3C. Have a good look at their site – you’ll be seeing a lot of it as you follow these tutorials.

The next line – HTML the statement – is the start of…. well, the HTML and is swiftly followed by the body tag, which is the start of what actually winds up on the page. As we are using strict rule (which admittedly we have yet to explain), after the “Hello World!” line we play nice and close the tags with the and

So now, we have our first page. Next up – more tags.

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Web Design Tutorial #1 – Resources

admin — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 09:07:59 +0000

After nearly two requests, we here at the terucada offices are launching a series of three tutorials, all of which are interlinked. In these tutorials we will cover much ground, some of it helpful, some playful and some of which may even be useful. To follow along with this, you are going to need a good text editor, so go get one now. No, Wordpad will not do – Windoze users should head for Crimson Editor – and the nearest Mac store – hint:quite a lot of the things in these tutorials are not very easy on the Worlds Favourite Operating System without jumping through a few hoops. We’ll cover that in detail later. Mac users, head for Textwrangler. Those of you on *nix systems – look elsewhere, because we have nothing to teach you – we are not ignoring you, but the clue here is that this is a beginner’s tutorial, so emacs and vi will be somewhat sidelined as you need no lectures from us after compiling Gentoo from source….. One editor we will not ignore is Jed, the editor-of-choice round these parts. Go! Do it! More follows…..

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Favourites

admin — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 09:05:42 +0000

Ah… look at the lower right-hand portion of the screen. They are all there. Well, some of them.

xxM.

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Total Vaildator Advanced Tool

admin — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 08:57:47 +0000

The Total Validator Advanced Tool is one of our highest possible recommendations. We do however suggest that you only use it early in the morning or at that start of a long airplane flight – it will hunt down every error and tell you. In particular, if you set the depth high and check the “follow remote links” box, it will report on external errors – a truly horrifying experience at times. Download it here.

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