Skyrocket.be

As promised in a previous blog post here, Horizontally aligned elements in forms, i’ve tried to work out a way to reproduce the registration form at http://www.squarespace.com/join/ in a semantically correct way with fieldsets, legends, labels and some CSS styling. This is what i’ve come up with : http://www.skyrocket.be/lab/semantic_horizontal_form.html

I’ve rewritten the XHTML in a semantic way and positioned the form elements next to eachother except for the last fieldset which spans the full width of the form below the 3 top fieldsets. It’s been tested in FF1.x, IE6 and Opera8. (looks a little quirky in IE5.x but still usable) I’ve added a conditional comment to fix a padding error in IE but without this the form would still be legible and fully usable, it’s just a small cosmetic adjustment.

I’ve already received some emails from Kevin at el73.be who’s been working on another method which depends less on em widths. Wonder how he’s been coming along on this. Kevin?

Update: Some minor bugs fixed with field labels. Thanks Dan and Michael.

Update 2: Fixed questionable semantics by adding and hiding correct legend text, thanks Adam and Joe.
Added error messages as requested by A. Casalena

Veerle Pieters, one of Belgium most talented and respected webdesigners and author of the popular blog at http://veerle.duoh.com is lined up for 2 big events this year (with probably more coming up). She’ll be attending SXSWi in Austin Texas and later this year in London’s @Media 2006 as a speaker in the “Good Design vs. Great Design” session . I haven’t met Veerle in person yet but to me she always seemed like a very intriguing personality and a very professional designer with buckloads of talent. I frequent her blog daily.

Unfortrunately this year @Media 2006 is a little out of my league. The entry price is £395 + VAT per delegate which makes about 600-700 euro’s (accomodation like hotel, breakfast, flight, … excluded) which is alot of money for a simple freelancer like me. Maybe i’ll have the opportunity to meet her and other designers alike at other events in the near future. I’m sure going to keep an eye out for interesting events and try to attend some of them this year. As a matter of fact i’ll even put it in my “must do” list for 2006!

Jason Parker at Download.com recently posted a list of his favourite Firefox extensions. While i do agree that there are alot of nice extensions he listed I do have some questions with some of his picks. Most of them are personal taste really but i wonder what Forecastfox and Foxytunes are doing there. They really don’t add any value to my browser experience, especially since most of the forecasts they give overhere are wrong (and i live about 2km from a weather station, Kleine Brogel, Belgium). Foxytunes is probably nice for people who actually live in their browser, i’d rather use the hotkeys on my keyboard to control my music than another toolbar in Firefox.

Amongst my favourite extension are Webdeveloper Toolbar (Hey, i’m a webdesigner remember), Tabbrowser Preferences, DownloadThemAll, Customize Google, IETab and Sage. I have a bunch of other extensions installed but those are the ones i put to use most frequently.

Netvibes.com has been the default homepage in Firefox overhere for a long time. It’s one of the most feature-rich, easy to use and stable web2.0 customizable homepages available at the moment. And they even got better! Some of the nice features they added the last week:

• Todolist with colored items
• POP/imap email integration
• Yahoo! Mail integration
• Color Coding RSS feeds
• Gmail module upgrade

Netvibes is sure one of the best things that hit my browser lately. It’s absolutely wonderfull to have this amount of information (3 different emailaccounts, all my Rssfeeds, 4 Flickr modules and a Todo list) onscreen the moment you fire up your browser.

2005 is no more and it’s been a good year. When looking back nothing very special happened, everything went smooth, no big disappointments this year luckily in contrast too 2004 when i crashed 2 cars and my employer went bankrupt.

Last year 2005 in summary:

• I started this blog
• I finally started as a freelancer and named my business Skyrocket Concepts
• Still living happily together with my girlfriend
• Went on an absolutely fantastic vacation to Turkey, Aegean Dream Resort, Turgutreis
• Bought a car, Ford Fusion+

What 2006 is going to bring is a little unclear, there are several things i want to do for sure, others might happen or might not. Time will tell.

• Buy a Mac
• Get my Zend PHP certification
• Learn Ruby on Rails and expand my knowledge of Ajax and other technologies
• Build a CMS for my clients
• Go on vacation, back to Turkey in Aegean Dream Resort, Turgutreis
• (optional) Find a new job as webdesigner/developer
• (optional) Start looking for a house to buy