2008 December | Brenelz Web Design Solutions

Archive for December, 2008

Google PageRank Updated Dec. 30

Wednesday, December 31st, 2008

December 30th saw Google make its PageRank update. This has some web developers excited going into new year’s and others a bit down as their PageRank may have dropped. To confirm this, Matt Cutts (Head of webspam team at Google) tweets the following:

“Yes, Google updated our toolbar PageRank values today. Consider this the confirmation.”

PageRank probably doesn’t get the hype it used to as all we can see is the “Toolbar PageRank” which is a very limited version of our actual “Secret PageRank”. People used to think PageRank was the only determining factor in SERP placement, but nowadays we know that the algorithm is way more complex than this.

I didn’t see a huge leap in any of my sites, but was happy to see most of them gain 1 or 2 spots.

What are your thoughts on PageRank? Are you happy with your new values?

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sIFR: Not Compatible with CS4?

Tuesday, December 30th, 2008

Today I needed to use a non typical web font for a site I was working on. I chose to use sIFR and download it from http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr/

I then proceeded to open up the sifr.fla, only to find out that CS4 choked on it with an error “unexpected file format”. At first I didn’t know what to do, but I googled the problem and found out a nifty solution from Novemberborn.

All you need to do is download a newer version that contains an updated file called “sifr-cs3-and-up.fla”. You should now be able to use this file to create your fonts.

Download the updated sIFR here

If you are against using flash for non-standard text, you can check out Facelift Image Replacement AKA FLIR.

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Dealing with CSS Font-Sizes

Monday, December 29th, 2008

Dealing with font sizes is a part of designing that can’t be overlooked. There has always been the holy war between using pixels or ems. When I started I used pixels as it allowed the greatest precision over my sizes.

I then learned through university that some browsers did not allow pixels to be resized. This is a great accessibility problem for those with eye sight problems. Then we come to today where most browsers allow resizing of text regardless of what unit of measurement is used. So where does that leave us today? I still use ems, but that is not to say it is the standard as many graphic designers prefer pixels.

If you are one that gets confused with what exactly an “em” means, and that is what is stopping you; I have a solution that will help you. By default 1em = 16px. This makes it difficult to translate some measurements to pixels. For example, 11px = 0.688em.

To make things much easier on yourself, use the following to make 1em = 10px.

body { font-size: 62.5%; }

Now you can more easily convert 11px to ems

p { font-size: 1.1em; }

All you have to do is shift the decimal one place to the left for you math nerds

If this is still a little too complex for you; you can always find a cheat sheet that will help you out. This one I have found allows you to convert pixels to em and vice versa. http://pxtoem.com/

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Economy Recession Won't Stop Boxing Day!

Friday, December 26th, 2008

Today us Canadians took part in a national holiday called Boxing Day. To those of my readers that are in the states, this is the equivalent of Black Friday. It is a day where there are some great deals to be had, and many people treasure its experience more than the actual purchases.

There are stories of getting up at 2:00 AM and waiting in line. Maybe even cooking up some wings, or parking your vehicle in line to keep warm. Read up on this story from a buddy of mine, Boxing Day 2009 – The Tailgate Party
. It is times like this that I sometimes wonder where the “recession” of our economy is. Certainly here in Manitoba people were quite happily spending their money.

As for myself, I did manage to score some 20% off deals which could range from stuff for my office, as well as personal toys that will wear out after a month or two.

If you have any boxing day stories, please comment below.

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