About 3till7.net

3till7.net was purchased through Dreamhost.com on December 31, 2003 by my dad. The name came to me one evening at 6:57 PM when I checked the time; “three till seven” just sounded cool. If you’re interested in being hosted here, contact me and we’ll talk.

I make 3till7 with WordPress, Coda, Vim, Photoshop, and GIMP. I test it in Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Opera. While I’m not so worried about having valid code, I am concerned with having accessible, 508-compliant pages.

Ideas About Web Design

Code validation is nice, but I’m of the camp that accessibility is more important. I want my visitors to be able to read everything on my site in any browser they choose, at any font size they’ve set, and without images, stylesheets, or Javascript. I much prefer having colors that contrast sufficiently, relative font sizes that allow even stubborn Internet Explorer to resize them, and proper alt attributes on images to having code that’s valid XHTML 1.0 Strict. This is not to say that having valid code means you can’t also have good colors and fonts, but rather that I’m more concerned with having one over the other.

I also value content over layout. Believing wholeheartedly the adage ‘form follows function’, having a pretty layout is nice, but the real meat of the site (i.e. the content) is what I’m interested in. If my visitors find something useful or entertaining here, then that’s the most important part to me.

Recognition

Plugins Used

Akismet
“Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web serivce to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use this service. You can review the spam it catches under “Manage” and it automatically deletes old spam after 15 days.”
Amazon Showcase
“A sidebar widget for showcasing items from Amazon. Simply enter the ASIN/ISBN numbers of any products and optionally enter an Associate ID for earning commissions.”
Batch Categories
“Easily manage the mass categorisation of posts that match various criteria.”
BDP RSS Aggregator
“New and Improved RSS Aggregator - collate RSS feeds and summarise to a page - updates regularly without the need for cron.”
Custom Posts Per Page
“Change the number of posts per page displayed for different page types.”
Facebook Comments
“Copies comments from your imported Facebook Notes back into your blog entries.”
Flickr Photo Gallery
“This plugin will retrieve your Flickr photos and allow you to easily add your photos to your posts.”
Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu
“Replaces admin menus with a CSS dropdown menu bar. Saves lots of clicks and page loads! For WordPress 2.5+”
Recent Comments List
“This plugin will add a list of the most frequent comments posted to your blog. They are gathered in descending order (newest at the top), but then group them together by post title, so that comments from the same post are listed together. The list items will be links to the comments, and will contain the name of the commenter.”
Recommended Tags
“Creates a list of recommended and existing tags (JavaScript must be enabled). There are currently four different settings you can adjust in the file.”
Related Posts
“Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches.”
runPHP
“Allows you to put PHP code into a post and have it eval()’d.”
Site Statistics
“Show your site statistics. Posts, comments, categories, last post, last commentator and last modified.”
SyntHihol
“Syntax highlighting using Geshi. Sythihal is small, simple, and doesn’t require Enscript installed on the server.”
Theme Switcher
“Allow your readers to switch themes.”
Twitter Tools
“Bring your Twitter tweets into your blog.”
Wordpress Automatic Upgrade
“Wordpress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions.”
WordPress Database Backup
“On-demand backup of your WordPress database.”
WP-ContactForm
“WP Contact Form is a drop in form for users to contact you. It can be implemented on a page or a post.”
WP Audioscrobbler
“A way to list your most recently played tracks from your audioscrobbler/last.fm account.”
WP Category Posts
“List the posts in a specific category.”
WP Unformatted
“With this enabled, you can add a custom field of ’sponge’ set to ‘1′ to a post to disable the auto formatting and a custom field of ’sandpaper’ set to ‘1′ to a post to disable the auto smart-quote conversion.”