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Friday 15 December 2006

Liste au père noël.

Cher papa noël du W3C, je veux ça implémenté dans tous les navigateurs pour noielle. Tu sais, j'ai été très sage. Merci !

Wednesday 13 December 2006

Choosing a default color palette for OOo charts

Choosing a color palette for OOo is quite a tough challenge, 12 shades of gray is a lot, 7/8 is the limit of what you can distinguish "easily". So I tried a pragmatic approach, with shades of gray from 25% to 90%, a first row of 6 colors sticking to 10 multiples, and a second one with multiples of 5. Then setting saturation to 100% (assuming vibrant colors are the best to draw charts), there's only the hue left to play with. So aesthetically speaking, it's, hum, perfectible. Slight gradient to darker colors somehow improve the results.

Anyway, IMO, the best way to make colors stand-out on any background are outlines (I like thick rounded outlines, but it gives a cartoonesque look which might be inappropriate). Inverse video is also very efficient, but not always nice to the eyes. Yet another solution is to associate two colors, one for the fill and another one for the outline so your chances of confusion are lowered (2 hints instead of 1). Or to associate motifs to colors (stripes, bubbles, stars), but this does not work for lines.

Anyway, here's a first try

Wednesday 6 December 2006

Visualiser tous les liens rel=nofollow

En tant que webmestre, il peut être intéressant de voir d'un seul coup d'oeil si un back link a l'attribut rel="nofollow". Firefox, ses sélecteurs CSS avancés et son fichier userContent.css rendent celà très facile.

lire la suite

Thursday 6 July 2006

Set your feed on fire

Friday 23 June 2006

Technorati claim

Thursday 1 June 2006

Palette switching script for Illustrator

Already had to convert vectors made in CMYK ignorant programs, like, say, inkscape and wanted to print them with a predefined and fixed palette ? Illustrator scripting capabilities saves you hours of repetitive work.

lire la suite

Thursday 11 May 2006

How is an adsense made ? How can I affect their display ?

Let's observe the beast. The usefull tools are Firefox; equiped with the webdev toolbar. Adding addsenses in a page is inserting a call to the http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js script. This script is obfuscted, so normal humans have difficulites to understand its behaviour. What we can see is the result of this script, executed upon the loading of the page. Select the Adsense without clicking it, right click->view selected source. You should see something like that:

<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "pub-8315147201128023";
...
google_color_url = "54724A";
google_color_text = "2F2005";
//--></script>

This javascript snipet prepositions variables used by the show_ads.js script

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"></script>

This is the call to the script acting onload. You actually pasted these few lines in your HTML code, so it is normal to see those here.

<iframe name="google_ads_frame" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ads?client=ca-pub-8315147201128023&amp;dt=1147..." marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" vspace="0" hspace="0" allowtransparency="true" frameborder="0" height="125" scrolling="no" width="125"></iframe>

This iframe was inserted by the javascript and sources a page on the googlesyndication.com server. The long list of parameters are used by the server to display a targeted add.

The content of an iframe does not uses the CSS from the source page. But it isaccessible via the DOM: details are on QuirksMode

The first way we can try to modify the way its displayed is playing with the iframe itself, provided you do not have other iframes on your page; e.g. to have a fixed add in the top right left add the following statements in your CSS file:

iframe { position:fixed; top:0; right:0; }

If you have several adds on the same page, they'll pile up, and that's bad.

Friday 5 May 2006

Adsenses ? Why ?

I just added adsenses to this blog. Not that I am willing to make money from it, with 6K visits a month, I highly doubt I will hit the 100$ required to receive the first check.

The reason is twofold:

  • In my professional life, I am an anouncer, using Adwords to reach visitors searching about DO-178B and IEC 61508 code generators. I just wanted to know how the other side of the system was working. My first impression is: wow, how easy it is !
  • I want ot experiment of what it is possible to do with Adsenses and CSS, and maybe a bit of javascript.

As a user, I am a bit disapointed, having always thought Ads are bad, I find myself clicking on adds, not for earning money (I'm sure google has the means to remove my clicks), but because the adds actually interest me. Their algorythm to find targetted Ads seems pretty good, so lets play a bit and see the results.

NB: should I ever receive a check from google, the first one will be for regne.net which hosts me freely.

Thursday 4 May 2006

Cyrillic enters the DéjaVu Fonts

Wednesday 25 January 2006

From inkscape to illustrator

What should you avoid in inkscape to have neat illustrator imports of the svg:

  • Text using transparency. Use path->Object To Path on such text if really needed.
  • Gradients using transparency. If it is applied ont top of an uniform surface, its easy to flatten, compute the right colors with the pick color tool.
  • Images in inkscape are translated in two objects in illustrator: the image itself, which appears scaled down, and an invisble rectangle with the correct size. Resize the image to fit the invisible rectangle.

I am sure i'll find more and will udate this list to track possible solutions ...