Blog

I just noticed that both Falling Awake and db link to me. Nice to know someone else out there finds me worth checking in on for one reason or another — much appreciated!

I’ve done a bit of reorganizing to the sidebar, in an effort to group things together a bit more logically, and move sections that are more likely to be used closer to the top (above the ‘fold’, ‘Above the fold’ is a carryover from newspaper publishing. In print terms, it just means that the most important items should be on the top half of the page, so that they are seen when the paper is folded and lying face up. It’s the same concept on the web, only the ‘fold’ in this case is considered to be the bottom border of the visible area when the page first loads at a standard resolution (usually 800px by 600px).so to speak).

I decided to start off with the more ‘interactive’ elements — ‘Music of the moment’ and the most recent comments. While ‘MotM’ isn’t really interactive, the voyeuristic aspect to it has some of the same feel (at least, that’s my justification for keeping it towards the top).

After that we have the search form and the archives list, as they’re both related to finding older information, or information elsewhere on the site. The search form is one of those things that’s commonly ‘supposed to be’ above the fold, anyway, so this helps. Also, I’ve taken the calendar display off of the archive list. I’d debated its usefullness before, but finally made up my mind to remove it after reading Jonathan’s reasons for removing the calendar on his site (which I stumbled onto thanks to Burningbird).

Next come all the various links to other places to go, the Amazon voluntary paybox (which would be just as useful if I put it on an entirely seperate page with some horridly dry, academic-sounding title not likely to interest anyone, named the file something else entirely [and misspelled it to boot], and then didn’t post any links to it anywhere — but that’s another matter alltogether), the syndication link (almost as useless as the Amazon box, except that I occasionally use it for testing purposes), and the linkback to MovableType.

And, that’s about it for now. Woohoo?

Last week I stumbled across Bloggy Opinions a blog review website. It seemed fairly entertaining, and the reviewers seemed to do a good even job of reviewing the sites they visited, so I went ahead and submitted ‘The Long Letter’ to them.

I got my review back today — and whaddaya know, not only was it good, it was really good! The review is posted on their site, but as there currently seems to be a slight HTML glitch that’s rendering my review invisible, I’m taking the liberty of copying it here.

DJWUDI — The Long Letter

Now here’s a blog I loved. It was excellent! It’s filled with multiple daily entries to keep you entertained, as well as a plethora of archived entries, features, and links that kept this reviewer busy for many hours. It generally amusing too, and though I’m sure a lot of work goes into the site, it appears effortless.

It’s the little things that make this site a gem in the drudge that can be the Internet. In the top right of your screen is an embedded applet that displays the mp3 that the author is currently listening too. It gets updated in real time and is the coolest thing I’ve even seen on a personal website! Unfortunately the version he uses is for the Macintosh operating system, so I won’t get to test it out on my blog. Another interesting feature is that he has implemented a help box on some of the more technical terms. Move your mouse over ‘Mbps’ and up pops a box displaying the full name ‘Megabytes per second’.

The layout is minimalistically beautiful. You’re not bombarded with a messy design; he takes a more newspaper, monochrome type layout. The text is the right size to read, and the font is easy on the eyes.

I can’t say enough about this blog. The author definitely deserves kudos. The only complaint I have is that he doesn’t seem to get that many readers, so the comment section is mostly empty.

Many thanks for such a glowing review!

Read more

Since I’m one of the many people out there who believe, to the very depths of my soul, that popups are evil, I’ve removed the popup window for posting comments. Now, clicking on the ‘comment’ link will take you to the page for the post itself, and scroll down to the comment form. Simple, but much easier.

I still haven’t got the TrackBack popup banished. That’ll be a project for another evening (tomorrow)? I’m ready to quit for the night tonight.

I’d done this once before, but as it got lost in my site crash, I took a few minutes to go through Dive Into Accessibility and make sure that my site was up to spec. I’m good to go, so here’s the official babble:

Note: This accessibility statement was written for my old site at djwudi.com. While the majority of it will still correspond to michaelhanscom.com, I’ve yet to go through and double-check everything. Please bear that in mind. Thanks!

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Accessibility statement

This is the official accessibility statement for www.michaelhanscom.com. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email me at djwudi@myrealbox.com.

Access keys

Most browsers support jumping to specific links by typing keys defined on the web site. On Windows, you can press ALT + an access key; on Macintosh, you can press Control + an access key.

All pages on this site define the following access keys:

• Access key 1 – Home page
• Access key 4 – Search
• Access key 9 – Feedback
• Access key 0 – Accessibility statement

Standards compliance

1. All pages on this site are at least Bobby and WCAG A approved, AA and AAA when possible. This is always a judgement call; many accessibility features can be measured, but many can not.

2. All pages on this site are Section 508 approved, complying with all of the U.S. Federal Government Section 508 Guidelines. Again, a judgement call.

3. All pages on this site validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional. This is not a judgement call; a program can determine with 100% accuracy whether a page is valid XHTML. For example, check this page for XHTML validity.

4. All pages on this site use structured semantic markup. H1 tags are used for the header, H2 tags are used for main titles, H3 tags for subtitles, etc. For example, on this page, JAWS users can skip to the next section within the accessibility statement by pressing ALT+INSERT+4.

Navigation aids

1. All pages have rel=previous, next, up, and home links to aid navigation in text-only browsers. Netscape 6 and Mozilla users can also take advantage of this feature by selecting the View menu, Show/Hide, Site Navigation Bar, Show Only As Needed (or Show Always).

2. The home page and all archive pages include a search box (access key 4). Advanced search options are available at the advanced search page.

Links

1. Many links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target (such as the headline of an article).

2. Links are written to make sense out of context.

Images

1. All content images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes.

Visual design

1. This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout.

2. This site uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified “text size” option in visual browsers.

3. If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.

Accessibility references

1. W3 accessibility guidelines, which explains the reasons behind each guideline.

2. W3 accessibility techniques, which explains how to implement each guideline.

3. W3 accessibility checklist, a busy developer’s guide to accessibility.

4. U.S. Federal Government Section 508 accessibility guidelines.

5. Dive Into Accessibility, a comprehensive guide to implementing these guidelines in websites, with a focus on the most popular blogging software.

Accessibility software

1. JAWS, a screen reader for Windows. A time-limited, downloadable demo is available.

2. Home Page Reader, a screen reader for Windows. A downloadable demo is available.

3. Lynx, a free text-only web browser for blind users with refreshable Braille displays.

4. Links, a free text-only web browser for visual users with low bandwidth.

5. Opera, a visual browser with many accessibility-related features, including text zooming, user stylesheets, image toggle. A free downloadable version is available. Compatible with Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and several other operating systems.

Accessibility services

1. Bobby, a free service to analyze web pages for compliance to accessibility guidelines. A full-featured commercial version is also available.

2. HTML Validator, a free service for checking that web pages conform to published HTML standards.

3. Web Page Backward Compatibility Viewer, a tool for viewing your web pages without a variety of modern browser features.

4. Lynx Viewer, a free service for viewing what your web pages would look like in Lynx.

Related resources

1. WebAIM, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving accessibility to online learning materials.

2. Designing More Usable Web Sites, a large list of additional resources.

Recommended reading

1. Joe Clark: Building Accessible Websites. Comprehensive but not overwhelming.

2. Jim Thatcher and others: Constructing Accessible Web Sites. Less comprehensive than Joe’s book, but goes into greater depth in the topics it covers. Gives screenshots of how various screen readers and alternative browsers interpret various tags and markup. Also has an amazing chapter on the current state of legal accessibility requirements.

Thanks to Dive Into Accessibility for the template for this Accessibility statment.

I know that the majority of my posts lately have been site-oriented, and are probably insanely boring, but…well…from time to time, I fall into full-on-‘geek mode’. Just bear with me, I’m sure things will be back to the normal boring drivel (rather than the current technical boring drivel) soon enough.

The site search function has been re-enabled. I’m currently using the Fluid Dynamics Search Engine, which has the dual benefits of being very easy to set up and configure (I’ve even got it matching the look and feel of the rest of my site, something I hadn’t bothered to do before), and is extremely powerful. Since I’m still in the process of re-entering all my old posts after the recent crash, it’s only got so much to draw on, but by the time I finish putting two and a half years worth of babble back online, it could be quite useful for finding specific posts.