Your turn to rip me a new one.

Having screwed around with all the options for declaring color values I came to the conclusion that rgb is the way to go. I have a bit of a shift and it screws my perception of contrast so now I rely on the arithmetic instead of what I think I see. The really difficult part are gradients using rgba where you have a variation in the opacity that lets part of the background color through. You have to sample across the whole element to avoid regions that are not easily read. As long as I am above 170 I know that it is readable, and I quit worrying about pretty a long time ago. Its about content; and as long as the content has enough contrast they cute shiny bits and pieces will take care of themselves.

New Englanders are close enough to us that we would be happy to have them; especially if they already know how to spell correctly.

When I am posting I generally follow the conventions of the American version of Pidgin English; but it really doesn't matter because I am such a lousy typist that some of my post are incomprehensible anyway.

 

I made some changes to the site over the week, just interested in response...
http://www.cutcodedown.com/

Will be funny when people call this outdated looking, when it follows the majority of Google's Material Design -- only thing I didn't use was their animations since to me animated transitions for thing like navigation are more of an annoyance than an aid. I click on something, you'll impress me more by having what I want to go to... well... show up as fast as possible, not after some dumbass loading animation.

Though good for a laugh, I was noticing that G+ which is supposed to follow MD ignores significant portions of it.

Mostly I went to high contrast flat buttons, overshadow for depth (since MD is supposed to give a 3d appearance), lower contrasts on the content areas, and swung an axe at the "news/social" bar, and replaced the background image for a simple CSS gradient instead.

Originally I was going to go white and borderless in the content area apart from box shadows, but I don't entirely see eye to eye with MD/Flat 2.0/Flat Plus/Whatever the blazes catch phrase is trying to be spammed by news writers this week.. There's some good ideas in there, but a lot of it seems to piss on accessibility -- and you guys should know by now, I put accessibility and content WAY out in front of "Gee ain't that purty"

But I think it overall feels much cleaner and neater. Still need to make a new '90's style "Best viewed with" that's 2x res though since I'm going retina friendly.

OH, I also killed off the official G+ and FB plugins, using simple links so it works even without scripting, trapping them with js to window.open and show counts by accessing their respective API's.

Which you know their official plugins are BS when this simple change reduced the size of the site 60%.

I have a question, are there any advertising providers that DON'T need a megabyte of scripttardery just to show and track an advert? You know, 4 to 8k of scripting's job?

 

I like your site Mr. Death Shadow. The content is all above my pay grade but I think it looks great. The way the pictures are captions looks great. Your use of wit when talking about something kinda of boring serves you well

 

And... maybe it's time to add a leaderboard ad somewhere at the top?

 

Sorry, want to gain legitimate users who might leave ads enabled, instead of diving to for the adblock thanks to that getting in the way of what's important on the page, the content.

As it is I trust advertisers about as far as I can throw the big stick, my using them at all on the site is more an experiment so I'm at least familiar with how it's done nowadays after nearly 16 years of never even seeing advertising on sites that wasn't deep web scam artists bull. See, I was around for the dotcom bubble, and -- rare as it is Elon Musk and I are on the same page about something; we're in another bubble -- and it's gonna pop any time now.

Which will be far more entertaining as unlike last time where most of the companies who over-invested had liquidity through brick and mortar business, most of todays web speculators have no hard assets to fall back on.

So far adsense has been... less scummy than expected, but still pretty scummy. I'm going to be using that spot to go through three or four different advertisers over the next couple years for an article on "the state of advertising".

Honestly, I'd make more just having a donate button like my other site that I'd likely ever see through shitting on my content with ads.

Mostly I just want to see if it's still the ineptly coded inaccessible train wreck of bloated slow crap it has always been... and... yeah. Not really doing a lot to change my opinion... though I do like the new "responsive" ads. I'd like it better if they hooked window.onresize (possibly with a timeout?) to re-load an appropriate size ad, but it's a definite step up from "you have to make a pixel sized area for it" asshattery that's been online advertisers way of telling anyone who cared about making accessible websites to go **** themselves.

 

Re-did my directory handler to match the website...

http://www.cutcodedown.com/for_others/?C=M&O=D

I also made it more mobile friendly by stripping table format off it at narrow sizes and throwing in generated content to say what things are.

I'm still trying to decide if I want to give the option for 2x resolution to the icon tilesheets for the file types. Not sure it's worth it. Likewise I'm probably axing the sort direction images for UTF-8 characters.

Any thoughts?

 

Why do you not want to make your nav. buttons disappear into a mobile friendly menu? I am sure you'll keep adding more sections to your site and as a result more buttons and eventually it will start looking unsightly on cell phones.



Or turn them into straight lines without first going through that thingy:

 

I like the background now better than the cloud image before. Also, I just noticed that you are using Flexible Box, which according to css-tricks.com is currently a W3C Last Call Working Draft. According to Mozilla, there are still compatibility issues with older browsers. It is nice, but what was your reason of employing this method (instead of using the more common display: inline, etc)? How do you deal with older browsers (as in strategy, not in details)? I do not have older browsers to play with, so this is only out of curiosity. Thanks.

 

Because I'm not planning on having more than six of them - so I'm not really gonna waste code on it. When/if I have/want more than six, I'll put the <input type="checkbox" and label in there to handle it -- but for now? Waste of time and effort.

Also not a fan of the hamburger icon, so when/if I do that I'll likely have text and an arrow saying "show menu" -- again, trying to avoid the "ambiguous ui" part of "false simplicity".

... and yes, I do have that methodology waiting in the wings for when I do need it.
http://www.cutcodedown.com/tutorial/mobileMenu

I'm using flex-box to create the 100% min-height layout -- and NOT my columns. Everything but the footer is set to stretch to the available space, so if the content is shorter than the browser window the footer stay at the bottom, but gets pushed off the screen if the content is taller than the window.

There are other techniques such as absolute positioning or negative margins after a min-height:100% container, but they require the footer to be a fixed height. Using flex-box in the vertical means the footer can be any size.

My fallback plan for flex not working is "Oh noes, the footer isn't at the bottom, notz thats!?!" -- I have the body background set to the same background color as the footer... old browsers the footer ends up at the bottom of the content instead of the bottom of the window.

So for example, on a content lean page on a modern browser where flex 'works':
http://www.cutcodedown.com/images/modern.jpg

But you go where CSS3 isn't available and there is no flex, rounded corners, box-shadows, etc...
http://www.cutcodedown.com/images/legacyIE_OhWell.jpg

The footer rides up -- I'm not going to waste time worrying about that. "oh well". I have the same attitude towards min/max-width (where IE6/earlier I still bother throwing a fixed width at them), box-shadow, text-shadow, border-radius; they're cutesy presentational stuff that isn't essential to what's REALLY important, the content. When I say "content first" I mean it, and that's entirely the reasoning behind "graceful degradation".

At the same time I DO use the negative margin + float method for making my columns, since that works all the way back to IE 5.5

Like anything else legacy support is a balancing act, one that you have to weigh the pro's and con's of the effort to "fully support" vs. the practicality of "Well, can they use the degraded version to get at the important bits?"

That's why the term "graceful degradation" exists. I'm not going to throw extra scripttardery or resort to things like pixel metric fonts and fixed height footers just for IE8/earlier to have the extra "gee ain't it neat" nonsense... at least, not unless someone is paying me extra for that. For my own projects, I embrace graceful degradation by way of progressive enhancement -- it's a good chunk of why HTML and CSS are separate in the first place and part of the reason HTML was even created.

Oh, and...

If you have at least SOME form of IE installed (10+ or edge) -- which you should have regardless of your OS (if on Linsux or OSuX just install Winblows inside a VM like VMWare or VirtualBox) -- open that up, hit F12 to bring up the developer console and look for the emulation tab. In that you can choose the "document mode" -- IE11 for example will emulate versions 10, 9, 8, 7 and 5. (no 6, kinda strange). Its not 100% perfect which is why I have XP and 98 VM's for further testing in the native environments. (just as I have a OSuX VM for testing safari and FF on those platforms as they don't always behave the same as their windows counterparts).

Testing tools are very important -- if for no other reason that when someone DOES have a complaint you can try to replicated it.

See "browsers and testing" on this page:
http://www.cutcodedown.com/article/tools_of_the_trade

Planning on some rewrites / updates to that particular article today. Hoping to finish off a second one that's sad here in Word for five days with me staring at it going "this isn't right".

 

You have a very beautiful website.