I just received my copy of Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholm this morning. What a great book! OK, I didn’t read the whole thing, but at least, the first two chapters “Flexible Text” and “Scalable Navigation” were quite helpful. and I’m so eager to read chapter #8, titled “Fluid Layouts” — in case you didn’t notice, the site’s design is now liquid.

Dan’s concept of “bulletproof” is very interesting. It combines accessible, flexible, yet visually appealing web design methods.

That was not a book review. You might read one about this book here in two weeks or less.

I’m asking myself why can’t I appreciate my website’s design for more than two months. I created the “Cherry” theme two months ago, which I used to replace the “Summer” theme which was made around two months before it.

Why? Why do I still love SimpleBits‘ design each time I come there? Is is the fact that I work on my site everyday, and by seeing the design each time, I’m getting more used to it… and I come to hate it? Dunno.

I would like to create a design that would be time-proof.

Is it normal to hate a design, when you see it 20 times a day? I guess it is.

No, not a new design again! Just an experiment, of white background and nice green. Because white backgrounds are cool. And red+green is too.

You can still use the old style if you’re using Firefox or a browser that supports alternate stylesheets.

Well, Applemint. You should not see this style for more than one day, unless if some people ask for it. But you sure won’t.

So I just arrived from the Vans Warped Tour 2005 in Quebec City. It rocked.

I first saw Senses Fail and Avenged Sevenfold. Good. Then, The Offspring. Great. And hot. After, bands like The Transplants, Hawthorne Heights (to which I give my rookie band of the year award) and Fall Out Boy.

And finally, Dropkick Murphys. Seriously, if you don’t know that band, you’ve gotta listen to it.

Punk isn’t dead.

Update: Forgot to mention that I shook hands with Dexter Holland.

Oh my gosh, my design has been stolen.

Hey Greg, you suck. But thanks for keeping the original copyright link. *Sigh*.

Updated: I’m no longer providing the link to the website, since its author made public apologizes. However, I kept a screenshot of the stolen design.

The previous headings were plain, yet common. They were displayed with the same color as the body text and a bigger font size. But when I was looking at a page (ie. the about page) if it was a “whole” thing, I realized it wasn’t the way I like reading structured text.

Yes, a bigger font size is necessary, but if the heading isn’t highlighted, we couldn’t actually notice it. So, a colour change was appropriate. But — oops –, my background color is quite “dark” and the palette used in this design is kind of “red-gray-black”. The main text is white, so the heading had to be “redish” ( –is it a real word?).

But red over dark gray isn’t nice. In fact, it was worse than their previous style. So, with a little darker background color changing, it looks great. The headings are now more noticeable, thus, the text becomes more structured. Well, it’s the same structure, but that structure is more noticeable with highlighted headings.

P.S. - If you don’t see any changes on the pages, reload the stylesheet by pressing CTRL+R.

I’m now stopping relying on WordPress to connect to another tables in its database.

The thing is, I want to display my latest project from anticubed on the work page of this very site.

I just don’t want WordPress to do the job for me. I want to connect to the database, select the table, do a query (which is not a hard thing to do with SQL), and display the results.

Plus, we are going to use MySQL in the 3rd semester this year at school. I’d better know it; otherwise Marc-Antoine will look smarter than me… ;-)

Fifty days of work in a row. I’ve done it. And it doesn’t seem like it will stop. Since May 28, I’m working between 6 and 10 hours a day at the local grocery. No day-off! I can now say that I have quite a lot of experience in customers relations/service and grocery managing in general. I know that will help me in the future. And yes, lots of money, I know.

How much days/hours in a row have you ever done?

Since I now have the minimum age to be the owner of a credit card, I’m now seeking Amazon.ca to look for some great books and dvds to buy.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Yeah, it sounds quite young-ish, but Harry Potter books are excellent. I’ve read the first four books in french, and the fifth one in english. It made me realize one thing: A translation is not the half good as the original version. The sixth seems to be very, very good. Oh my god, it will be released in two days!

DOM Scripting

Jeremy Keith’s upcoming book, DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model will explain why Javascript is not as bad as we think. With the rising of CSS, Javascript has been less and less used than before because we were taught of seperating content from presentation. Now there’s a third element, the behavior. With the recent rising of Ajax, Javascript tends to be more used by web developpers.

Bulletproof Web Design

And finally, Dan Cederholm’s second book to be released on July 29, 2005, describing some of the worst situations when designing using XHTML and CSS. Can’t be a bad book: Dan’s writing it.

Oh, and I was using the excellent WP-Amazon plugin for the first time, to include Amazon content in this post.

I started it on July the 8th 2003. I’m not going to write the story of this weblog, again. If you want to read it it’s mostly there.

Oh and by the way, why couldn’t I take this occasion to thank all the visitors who are reading and commenting on my thoughts since Day 1, such as Patrick, Joël, Jeton and Pepijn. Thank you also to everyone who’s reading my blog ;)