AndrewBranch.com

(Notice: this post reads weird for a specific reason. I’m attempting to use 19 HTML elements that I have either never used, or used rarely.)

This was fun. In fact, I have been quoted saying of it:

The HTML element quiz at justsayhi.com is probably one of the greatest HTML element quiz’s on the whole entire world wide web. In fact, I would recommend it to anyone who does HTML markup and for educators who teach it.

At first I wasn’t sure how to use it¹. But realizing that all I had to do was type the element’s title (without the carrots like so: “table“) only took 2 of my precious seconds.

Thought I would do better than I did, I was told my score was like 100% 50%. I blanked on some obvious ones like “center” and “dl”. But there were a few that I either have never used or didn’t even know about. Like one that extends abbr. text. After sorting through them and eliminating the those elements marked as “deprecated” by W3C, I made a list of every item I either needed to familiarize myself with, or needed to use for the first time. So, in this post I am using all 19 of them in very creative ways.

<abbr>

Used to mark something as abbreviated.

<acronym>

Used to mark something as an acronym.

<address>

Indicates the author’s address (probably a good reason I never use this one )

<blockquote>

Used to indicate block quotes.

<cite>

Indicates a citation.

<code>

Marks text as code.

<del>

An item marked as “deleted”.

<dfn>

Indicates a word that is a definition (like in textbooks when a term is used the first time).

<dt>

The term in a definition list.

<dl>

The definition of the term in a definition list.

<dd>

List of definitions (used with dd, and dt).

<ins>

Text marked as inserted.

<kbd>

Text marked as keyboard insertion by the user.

<samp>

Text marked as output.

<sup>

Superscript.

<tt>

Indicates teletype text (like DOS prompts).

P.S. The address I have in the postcard background graphic of my other blog is a fake. But for those who can’t read it, here it is:

¹: Yes, I was talking about the quiz with this very unclear pronoun.

For those of you who may not know, I maintain a site dedicated to indie music which has been in operation for three years (pretty long considering the shelf-life of most blogs!). However, much to my chagrin, due to an errant mouse click or two, I somehow managed to delete the whole site in one singular moment of terror. At that moment I knew it was either the end of my much-neglected site, or the opportunity for a rebirth. Deciding upon the latter I have spent much of the last few days salvaging what posts I had on a database and redesigning the site. This all might turn out to be a great thing for the site, since the biggest reason for me not posting new content was the difficulty I had with my custom CMS system I had built in days of yore when I was just learning PHP. Now I’m using WordPress and life is better.

So, without further ado, I give you LoveYourSong.com 1.9 (not 2.0, that’s for you John). I can’t take all the credit for this most awesome design. iStockphoto helped a bit.

I’ve been a little behind on my rss reading so I’ve been trying to catch up this week. This morning I read this one at Simplebits on unique or outstanding 404 pages. It was fun looking at all the creative/useful ways people found to customize their 404 pages, but it was about when I got to this one that I thought, why make 404 pages with lots of helpful search info? I mean, most sites do nothing but show 404’s when the URL doesn’t resolve. So that means most users are pretty used to seeing them. At least for me, when I see a custom 404 page with “helpful” info it takes me a few seconds to realize that this isn’t a content page that I searched for. If it looked at least something like a typical un-custom 404 page then I know exactly what to do. But that one or two seconds of “wait just a minute, this is a 404 page!” is far too costly for my liking. So as for me and my site, all you get is this, or if you’re really lucky, this.