Basketball season is upon us and so I thought about redoing a web page I had done last year. Olaguez.net’s NBA page was redone in Transitional XHTML, using a basic 3 DIV design. I originally started out with trying to do XHTML Strict 1.0, but I was not able to do the layout I wanted, and so I finally settled on Transitional. No tables are used for layout, in fact the only table you see is the only table! I will eventually get around to adding a Print Stylesheet for those who just want to print out the page, but for now I am going to let it be and see if I can catch some NBA action before the actual season starts on November 1st.

I added a quick Whois Lookup tool to WebKeyDesign today. Although every domain registerar has one, I find them to be all rather slow or hard to find at times. The whois tool uses Sam Whois, which is a nice whois script I found.

To prevent abuse the script requires a code to be entered and all results are cached once a lookup for a specific domain is done.

The WebKeyDesign Forum is now running Invision PowerBoard 2.1 and the Mac OS X inspired theme is done. It almost feels like an eternity that I have been waiting for Invision’s 2.1 release, but now it is finally here and with all the bugs and all, it still feels fast and a little slick. However, there are some things that bother but I’ll have to comment on those some other time. More importantly IPB 2.1 now has static css stylesheets which help increase download speeds and makes for a more modern closer to XHTML standards based forum.

For the Mac OS X theme, this is a theme I made for my original forum on Olaguez.net, which was ported over to work with 2.1. I will eventually start designing a WebKeyDesign theme, but for now the Mac OS X theme looks nice and is functional.

Easy XHTML is a simple form that builds a standard XHTML template with all the meta tag lines that you always need to have in any html file, (but for some reason always tend to forget about). I’m sure not very many WordPress users have a great need for such a thing, but every now and then you run into a situation where you just need to code a single page outside of your blog, and that’s when it comes in handy.

Easy XHTML builds either strict or transitional templates and I put in the four indexing options just for completeness. Although the form is not very fancy, because it will generate all tags regardless of whether you inputted any data or not, it is still faster than trying to write a template by hand or should I say memory.

Overview

The first two options, are pretty simple. The title is what the browser window displays, and the domain url is used to generate the code needed for a favicon.

For the stylesheet, either put in the full url or if the stylesheet is at the root of your directory, then just type in the stylesheet name.

Author and Copyright are pretty self explanatory, just type in what you want for these meta tags.

Description and Keywords are important meta tags if you want to be displayed well on Google and Yahoo. You usually want to have the same words in both the keywords and description. The description should be short and to the point, 25 to 30 words (or about 160 to 180 characters). For the keywords, you can separate phrases or words with commas. Keywords should be limited to 15 to 20 words.

There are four indexing options, just choose the one you want, with the most obvious choice being to index all.

Lastly are the doc types for the template. Transitional is the most popular.

Notes
I have double-checked the output of the form for errors and it does validate. You should note that the template created is for English language and specifies the more common ISO-8859-1 encoding.

If you find this useful, let me know. You can find Easy XHTML under the Tools section on the sidebar.

I finally got around to widening the theme design for WebKeyDesign. It is now 768 pixels wide for the main content and sidebar. If you have never read the short description in the Site Map, you might not know that the WordPress theme is actually John Wrana’s Relaxation Theme.

Relaxation is based on the Kubrick Theme, but is somewhat less complicated and easier to load. I’ve changed some of the CSS, so it is not an exact implementation of Relaxation, and now that it is 54 pixels wider it presents a lot more text horizontally.

A theme that is also progressing nicely is Blix, which has more of a frost white look.

Speaking of theme design… check out A List Apart’s new look.