About dW
dW is a weblog programmed, designed, and written by me to catalogue my thoughts about the Web, design, or whatever comes to my mind.
dW is hosted on a VPS with the fine folks at Geek Storage. All posts are published with a custom log system programmed by myself using PHP, SQLite, and Apache. All of the logging systems out there I have tried have been slow and overly complicated for what I needed one for, so I spent the time to program one myself. My weblog system is not open source and never will be. In fact it might be a perpetual work-in-progress.
I would like to thank John Gruber for his excellent Markdown concept. I do not use his code, but I do use a custom script written in PHP by myself as the ported PHP classes are less than optimized for PHP 5. Markdown is such a natural and great way to author for the Web. The proper typography isn’t made using Gruber’s SmartyPants but a custom script of my own design more similar to WordPress’s texturize. The logo and the website’s headers use Delicious, a FREE font designed by Jos Buivenga.
About Dustin Wilson
I am a graphic artist/illustrator living in West Monroe, Louisiana. I am employed at Opera Software as a user interface designer, working predominantly on the desktop browser’s visual appearance and behavior. I graduated from Louisiana Tech University with a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Graphic Design in May of 2005. I only spent four years in college as I knew from a young age I wanted to major in graphic design; that’s what I did. I am a Photoshop and Illustrator expert, having spent most of my life using the programs. A certified geek, I’ve taught myself HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, AppleScript, and bits and pieces of other programming languages as I have found the need to learn them. I am of the belief that Web standards are important; standards have made the Web a better place these past several years.
In my free time I have in the past illustrated the manga Dark Phantasy. I also have designed, have illustrated, and have written for the My Opera Nintendo weblog, N+.
On a daily basis I can be seen using a series of programs on a Mac Pro Quad 3 Ghz:
I am an Opera fanatic so to speak. It is the program out of that list I use more than any other, and I’m truly blessed to be working for a company in which I love. It is overlooked, especially on the Macintosh. I hope I can teach and show people some of the things it can do throughout this weblog’s lifespan.
Web Standards
The website is an experiment with CSS and markup, using HTML5 and CSS3. It should, however, degrade gracefully in Web standards aware Web browsers. I cannot guarantee perfect rendering in every browser, so I’ve established a graded browser approach to support similar to what Yahoo! uses for YUI so that I could make it extremely clear what I support and don’t support. There are some notable differences between my grades and the ones Yahoo! uses.
- A-grade
- A-grade browsers are what I extensively test. They are browsers which are perfectly capable of viewing the website. Differences between rendering in the A-grade category should be quite minute. Problems which occur when using these browsers are of high priority.
- C-grade
- C-grade browsers are browsers which are known to not fully support this website’s technologies, and appropriate measures have been taken to ensure each browser is provided with an experience that’s appropriate based upon its capabilities without resorting to user agent sniffing. Rendering will not be consistent between these browsers, but every page of the website will be accessible.
- X-grade
- X-grade browsers are browsers which are not tested and are assumed to be capable. No support is provided for them. They are not prevented from viewing content, and they are provided with the same code A-grade browsers are.
| A-grade | C-grade | |
|---|---|---|
| Opera 11 | ✓ | |
| Safari 5 | ✓ | |
| Chrome 11 | ✓ | |
| Firefox 4 | ✓ | |
| Internet Explorer 9 | ✓ | |
| Internet Explorer 8 | ✓ | |
| Internet Explorer 7 | ✓ | |
| Opera Mini 6 | ✓ | |
| Mobile Safari 5 | ✓ |
Any browser not listed in this list is an X-grade browser; that includes any browsers which are newer and older versions of the browsers which are listed above.
Media Types
Initially I served my alternate stylesheets using an idea by Dave Shea, but with the wider support of media queries in modern browsers and workarounds’ not requiring server-side code I was able to abandon all that and simplify things in the process. I first chose to feed separate stylesheets based upon an HTML media attribute. Today, in an attempt to reduce HTTP requests there’s only one stylesheet, serving the following media types:
- Screen
- Handheld
- TV
- Projection
In addition to media types styles are applied to the screen media type based upon screen width and view mode. If the device’s screen is small it will have styles apply which optimize the layout for the device’s screen width. Since Opera 11 authors are able to use the view-mode media feature to apply special styles to create a dynamic thumbnail for their website in Speed Dial. Every page of this weblog is optimized for this unique feature.
Contact Information
You may contact me at [hidden unless JavaScript and DOM is supported] if you have any questions about this website.