Tech Hive

Philippine Web Designers Organization is bringing back <form> function() & .class this year! It’s going to be on September 10 and 11, 2011 (yes, that’s 9/11) and will have 3-hour awesome workshops on HTML5 and CSS3, Javascript, Usability and Design by the country’s leading designers and front-end developers. There will also be talks on Business, Mobile Dev, Branding, and future trends. Speakers include Dan Matutina, Rico Sta. Cruz, Jason Torres, JP de Guzman, Allan Caeg, Drei Gonzales and John Leyson. Since the format totally changed, thanks to AIM for accommodating our last minute request BTW (they’re awesome!), the price will have to reflect said change as well. So this year, the payment scheme will be as follows: Early Bird (ends September 3): PhP 1,500 per day PhP 2,000 for 2 days Walk In: PhP 2,000 per day (no discount for 2-day signups) Note that to prevent long lines and annoyed … Continue reading →

I wasn’t really HTML5′s biggest fan. The fact that you can write it however you want made me very worried that it might result in poor coding again (unclosed tags, or mismatched closing tags). But after reading Introducing HTML5 and HTML5 for Web Designers, I realized that what it lacked in rigid coding conventions it made up with semantic elements like section, article, nav, aside, header and footer to name a few. If you’re planning on learning more about HTML5 then I suggest that you pick up these two books as it will help you immensely. Funny enough, while I’m reading these books, I suddenly realized how bad I did in coding this site up. I’m currently in the process of re-writing the entire thing while keeping in mind the mobile first philosophy. It’s a little challenging, but that’s how things get more fun, right? (I sure miss IE a … Continue reading →

The past year, I realized that I love traveling as much as I love airline seat sales, I follow a number of airlines like Cebu Pacific, PAL, Tiger Airways and Air Asia for all the seat sale goodness. On the 23rd of November, Air Philippines Express announced a seat sale, a one-way fare of 1,888 from Manila to Singapore. For something that usually costs 5,000 Philippine Pesos and up, that’s already a steal! So, as usual, I hurriedly tested how much this will cost me since my friend and I are planning a trip there anyway. I like the fact that you can a number of days so you can choose from them, unlike Cebu Pacific’s standard practice of making me click and wait to see other days. I didn’t know that there’s going to be a stop over but I thought that it’s fine, that’s what you get for … Continue reading →

Wufoo’s login form Semantics in forms are one of the things that needs to be talked about, in my opinion, since they are one of the most important parts of a web site. You create/edit user accounts, create/edit blog posts, submit a comment, gather information from your audience, and lots more through them. However, apart from fieldset, we don’t really have a semantic way of marking up a pair of form elements. There are different ways in marking up one’s form: div, p, ul or ol and dl. Because using dl, or definition list, to mark up a form is still unusual even though it’s not exactly a new idea, I will be talking and boring you, unfortunate people, about it here. Understanding the dl element dl is one of the most overlooked element in HTML since, I assume, people mostly associate it with just definition lists, aka glossary. But … Continue reading →

When I first read about CSS Animation, I thought that they shouldn’t be messing with the separation of logic and style. In my mind, it should be clear that logic (animation, rotation, even the alternating row styles) should be in javascript, all the styles should be in CSS, and the document structure in HTML. One time, while working on our internal project, I thought I’d try a little -webkit-transition-duration because I wanted the color of the links to gradually change to something else on hover. But when I hovered on our main navigation that was using a sprite image, the background scrolled from one background position to the next every time we hover on it because of the delay! It was really amusing. CSS3 Carousel I experimented a little bit with transition and descendant selectors, but apparently, p ~ p doesn’t work with :hover or :active or :focus very well … Continue reading →

Recently, I had to convert a PSD into a theme for a Volusion store. I don’t really mind doing something new because I know that you’ll always, always learn something from it. But volusion just made me appreciate WordPress, Drupal and MVC frameworks more. When I first looked at the code within Volusion’s LiveEditor, I thought “Well this is going to be simple and easy.” But I was so, so, so wrong. It was a nightmare so hard, I’m not used to making the design work for the CMS — I’m used to bending it with my jedi mind tricks (or well, try). Volusion only has one theme for everything. Ever since I started learning more and more about Drupal, I’ve started to appreciate this one-theme-for-all-page strategy where you update all of the options in the admin panel instead of in the theme itself. It wasn’t easy at first because … Continue reading →

I have always been a WordPress girl, but you have to admit that there are instances where you just have to use something that specializes in that area. I’ve recently overhauled Last Leaf and turned it into a lifestream. I have stopped blogging there since the start of the year and have always thought of turning it into just that but I haven’t because creating themes for another CMS seemed intimidating. At first, I thought of writing my own lifestream, it should have been my way of learning more about RoR but until now, all I have in my folder is the basic install (which I have forgotten how I was able to produce) so I turned to the next best thing: Sweetcron. It’s been months since I have looked at Sweetcron, I remember that I found it so unfriendly to customize to one’s needs before. Turns out, all I … Continue reading →