Finding that one of the best ways to solve problems with your website – layout, functionality, maintenance, what have you – is to plunder the blogrolls of people much smarter than you. Specifically, people smarter when it comes to websites. Even if the site of some web cognescenti has no post that directly addresses your concern, there’s a serendipitous chance that somebody on his or her linklist has the answer.
The latest such example: I’ve long admired the treatment of entry title headers on Ethan Marcotte’s Unstoppable Robot Ninja. He uses the sIFR technique – that’s Scalable Inman Flash Replacement to you – to replace boring ol’ HTML text with Flash-based equivalents, and so exploit fonts that would be otherwise unavailable for web typography. Want, said your humble correspondent. The problem is that your humble correspondent is lazy, and sIFR is hard work. Even web design experts can have a tough time adapting it to their use.
One day last week found me prowling the blogroll of Greg Storey’s Airbag Industries. These are all smart folks, I thought. One of them surely had an answer to this image-for-text problem. And an answer I did find at Cameron Moll’s Authentic Boredom, in a post titled ‘Exploring Cufón, a sIFR alternative for font embedding.’ Cufón is a technique created by Simo Kinnunen that provides the replacement of text with images without Flash – and without the complexities of sIFR.
Long story truncated, I applied Cufón with success. All that time spent longing after such an effect on my site, and the very first time I went looking for it: Yahtzee!
As luck would have it, I found that day a solution to a problem I didn’t even know I had, and once again by way of the Airbag blogroll. Clicking over to Hicks Design, run by Jon and Leigh Hicks, gave me the opportunity to admire the stationary colored header atop their blog. Ooh, I said. Also: Ahh. And: Want.
Not for decoration alone, though; it came to me that fixing the navigation strip atop my own site would be useful for visitors, saving them miles of upward scrolling just to get back to the ‘Home’ link. So, after some hard staring and a couple of hasty tweaks – including applying a z-index:1; to the nav strip so that it didn’t end up behind my fancy image entry headlines – I shouted “Victory is mine!” much like that round-headed kid on Family Guy. Fortunately, there weren’t many people around.
It occurs to me that I could employ this education-by-blogroll technique to other topics, and perhaps finally get that bachelor’s degree, or its equivalent. Cheaper than college, at any rate.
