Skyrocket.be

Yep, there are already 300+ CSS Rebooters for the Spring 2006 Edition. The Belgian redesigners i spotted are Davy from Sintax, Stijn van Assche who still didn’t add his site(s) and Chris from Skyrocket Concepts who obviously is me

Since the site doens’t offer filtering based on country I’ve no doubt missed several Belgian contenders, make yourself heard i’d say. It never hurts to know who’s along for the trip and living in the same country.

Oh yea, Bart? I couldn’t find you on the list?

Since a few days I’ve been experiencing a very (and i can’t stress the very word enough) annoying problem. As webdesigner I have 4 webbrowsers installed and a few standalone versions of Internet Explorer. More recently I also added the IE 7 beta as a standalone exe to the list. From that moment on IE 6 started to behave strangely.

When I typed an URL in the address bar and hit enter, all of a sudden firefox launched and loaded the website I requested. Now normally I wouldn’t mind Firefox imposing itself over Internet Explorer but I want to test my websites in all browsers on my computer, not just a few of them. The odd think was that links clicked in a website didn’t act similar, they just launched normally in IE or in a new IE window.

After some latenight searching on Google I couldn’t come up with a solutions so I resorted to using my little server for testing websites in IE. Of course this wasn’t a long term solutions so last night I started searching for a solution again and guess what? IE 7 messed up!Because I didn’t install IE 7 in the normal way but hacked my way through it to run it alongside IE 6 some registry keys were entered wrong. This caused IE to launch all pages from the addressbar in Firefox. This seems to be an issue known to the IE dev team so they were kind enough to offer us the simple solution: delete a regkey.

They also stressed we should be installing the IE 7 beta the normal way. Yea right, if I’d be able to uninstall it as simply as it was installing it I would probably do so but I’m not going to install a beta product to replace a … erm … functional version. Certainly not since explorer acts as the backbone of the Windows GUI. Damn you Microsoft, do you really think I’m stupid.

Not installing IE 7 the proper way was own stupid fault, yes … but that won’t keep me from running IE 7 and IE 6 side by side. If the issue pops up again I know what to do!

It’s CSS reboot time again! I’m joining this edition of the redesign community or however you call it. You should too if you are interested in webdesign and webstandards. I’m even thinking of forming a little community among us dutch talking webdesigners to help eachother out and share ideas for our new designs. Anyone interested? You know how to comment.

At the time of writing there are only 73 days left … hurry up

The folks at Yahoo! have released a very nice javascript framework for building Ajax powered websites. It features various components ranging from drag & drop over treeviews to animation but also contains crossbrowser XmlHttpRequest functionality. And all released under the BSD OpenSource license. Go grab your copy and see for yourself if this framework has anything new to offer for you.

But it doesn’t end with just a free Ajax framework. They also introduced the Yahoo! Design Patterns Library, a resource for developers where Yahoo! professionals share their views and expertise on developing web 2.0 applications.

To top it all off the UI guys at Yahoo! started their own blog called YUIBlog. It’s already in my feedslist, what are you waiting for?

Yep, i’m back in the business. Notice the pun there, back in the business which means i’ve got a new job starting early march. Earlier this month I got an email from Jan at Inventis asking if I was interested in a job as webdeveloper and -designer. Hell yea, I thought so I replied with details to arrange a meeting. With my portfolio and my resume at hand I went to their offices and had a rather quick but nice talk about the job. Afterwards I felt quite positive and confident about the interview, a little too confident according to my girlfried but … after a few days they gave me the final and positive phonecall. I can start asap. But ofcourse I won’t ruin my current boss’ skiing holiday so i’ll stay on post at my current job till he returns and that’s when i’ll be joining the team at Inventis.

My role there? Take some of the work pressure of their shoulders ofcourse and introduce webstandards, accessibility, semantic coding and some SEO as a preffered way of working. I’m so thrilled to start working in a pretty big team since most of my experience comes from freelance work or in really small companies where I was the only codegeek. Can’t wait till february is over … luckily it’s a little shorter than other months :p

So goodbye to Boek & Soft, it has been a really nice experience working there. Working in a store specialised in software and computerbooks is like working in computernerds paradise but it’s my passion that has the upper hand. I’ll be a fulltime webdesigner again! Hooray!