Book review: “Windows 7: the missing manual” by David Pogue

I regularly read David Pogue’s tech columns in the New York Times and even had a chance to exchange a few mails with him. However I had never read any book from the missing manual series that David created. It’s now a done thing with “Windows 7: the missing manual”.

What stroked me first was the casual tone of the writing. I’ve rarely seen a book about computers that is so easy to read. It actually feels like you’re having a conversation rather than concentrating on reading a technical book. What I liked a lot then were the very factual explanations. David clearly tells what is great about the system but he doesn’t hesitate to mention the things that could be better. In the end it feels he’s telling the truth and it makes the book even more interesting.

Simple website design using CSS 2.1

Today I’d like to address a very simple question: how to rapidly design a website?

The underlying topic we will actually cover concerns the basis of box positioning and floating using CSS 2.1. For those of you who hear a lot about CSS 3, all I can say is that it gives a lot of power to web designers with regards to a website UI and look & feel, but that the CSS 2 box model still rules. It’s important to understand it well.

Again first things first. We need to start with a bit of thinking to actually determine what our website will look like and how it’ll be organized. What I propose that we build together is quite simple: a header, a vertical navigation bar, a main section for the content and a footer at the bottom. In order to structure the website, we’ll use the div element as a generic container for our different sections. divs can be nested, thus once our basic website flow is drafted it’s easy to add as many other boxes as we want (i.e. widgets, content, …) inside our main containers.

How to toggle the light on your website?

Today I’d like to show you a way to switch the light off on your website.

What’s the point? Simple … Imagine you’d like to display photos, or a video, or if a box should pop up (for authentication purposes for instance), it’s better if your visitors focus on what you’re trying to draw their attention to. We will help them concentrate by darkening everything else in the background.

In order to do just that we will mainly use some CSS and a bit of javascript to toogle the light on/off.

Hello world!

Hi there.

I’ve been hesitating to create a blog on a variety of subjects for quite some time now but then here it is finally. I’ll primarily focus on some topics of interest to me among which:

• web design and development,
• photography.

I’d like this blog to be some kind of a cookbook and share recipes and thoughts with the community, so don’t hesitate to comment on the posts and add your own “home made sauce” to the meal .

Cheers.