Seositecheckup.com is useful. That’s all I had to say.

Fresh out of its sandbox environment is the new website for Party en Beauté, a new Granby-based event decoration rental service. It’s my first public work as a web developer (unless you count Trly.gd) and I’d appreciate some input.

If you have a JPEG image from your graphic designer that refuses to display in Internet Explorer even after triple-checking the CSS and the markup, check if it’s formatted in CMYK instead of RGB. It’s a stupid little mistake, but it might take quite some time and a lot of cuss words before you figure out what’s wrong.

With Photoshop, select Image>Mode>RGB to fix this problem.

If that isn’t the problem, consider revisiting the code and make sure the image format used is supported by all browsers.

I just bought the domain deviceroms.com. This will soon become host to a Windows Mobile ROM catalog where cooks can post their hacked firmware. All the crunchy details can be found right here.

After a few years of playing with various kinds of code, I started to take a serious look into web development. It took me less than a few minutes to realize I absolutely had to know CSS to get going in the webdev world. Three months later I still don’t have a clue of whatever the fuck this language is up to. Let me get this straight: CSS is bad, very, very bad.

I wanted to do something pretty simple today: align a textbox in a square. That kind of stuff would be simple with any programming language, but with CSS, it’s a whole another thing. For some reason, the one language that holds the graphical web together performs awfully at laying out your shit. Don’t get me wrong, I know it can be done with a few hours of intensive research and trial-and-error, but it doesn’t simply work, and the web is ALL about laying things out.

CSS does not do simple things simply. A ridiculously simple design like mine (a textbox in a rounded rectangle centered in a page), 2 hours after I started trying, still isn’t working. I know I’m not an experienced coder, but shouldn’t centering stuff vertically be easy as pie? I don’t have to hack the shit out of my shoes to kick things with them, so why should I have to spend an hour on Google to center a fucking textbox?

What is wrong, I’d say, is that CSS is still playing with webpages expecting that websites are mostly text-based. In a world of shapes, colors and images, how can something akin to a document editor handle graphical user interfaces? Shouldn’t we already have something closer to coordinate-based layout as of 2009? It looks – at least to me – that it would be simple to create a website with Java/C++/Basic than with HTML and CSS. Making an executable that looks and acts the same as a webpage would take – what – a quarter of the time?

Looking for an easy way to generate a favicon for my blog, I stumbled upon this wonderful tool. It couldn’t be simpler or work better. Click for DeGraeve’s favicon generator.

Mad props to its creator.