Mostly about my amusement

Tag: web (page 1 of 1)

Browsing the web like it’s 2002

I’ve re-acquainted myself with StumbleUpon and finding out it’s a much better time waster than Reddit. It’s like Reddit without the witty comments. I pressed the Stumble! button and went to the Stellarium web site.

Stellarium was a fantastic find. I installed it and was explaining to my kids that this is how the start are laid out in the sky right now. I had no idea this was freely available and here’s the best part: this is GPL’ed software too.

When you visit a website you can give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. Or you can ignore it. Mostly I press the Stumble! button and get sent to web sites that are in my chose categories. With your account you get to select those subjects that interest you, and can add or subtract later on.

It’s very addictive. I have narrowed down to astronomy and photography (not at the same time) and I get some really good websites. StumbleUpon has been around for many years and I’m glad that I’m using it now.

I’m not a web designer but I do like playing around

I’m playing with Typekit at the moment and having font fun. As I write this I am using Legendum by Roger van Dalen amd Droid Serif by Google Android. Today I received an e-mail from Typekit with my invitation (I applied a couple of weeks ago). I created my account, selected my fonts, and inserted two lines into my blog’s header.

The idea works like this: instead of just using the built in fonts specified in your style sheet, you can select and implement the font you want from Typekit’s offering.  This way, the fonts that are displayed match what you want versus what the browser thinks.  It works with all current versions of web browsers such as Firefox 3.5.x and Internet Explorer 8. It does not work with Internet Explorer 6, but who cares?

I signed up for the free trial so I’m limited to 2 fonts.  Once you select a font you can apply it to the CSS tags that you want.  I did not have to change my style.css in anyway, just get the CSS tags right. You can see the badge in the lower right hand corner and if you click it you’ll get to see what’s running font-wise on this page.

Very cool and I’ll keep poking at this.