Doing Things Wrong

Web Design

Well, it's that time of year again, time to renew the web hosting. And for those of you that don't know, that has become a lot more expensive than it used to be. Fifty dollars a year is now several hundred. Not to mention the price of domain names has gone up ten-fold.

And I just found out that the nice folks at PayPal disabled all my Support buttons, and I never got a notice (although that may be my fault.) In any case, it is all working again now, so if you would like to make a small donation to help defray these costs, it would be greatly appreciated.

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I coded up a pretty spiffy popup menu system for small displays like phones and tablets. If you're on a small device, you get it automatically. You can force it on a large display by making the window narrow.

Also, time for a rant. The people who came up with 'responsive web design' are a bunch of idiots. It doesn't work. It can't work, and there is a simple reason:

There is no way to detect the real-world physical size of the display. You cannot get the physical size of the screen your end-user has eyeballs on. Without that, everything else is pointless. Nor is there any reliable way to detect a touch screen, and nowadays even if you could it wouldn't mean much - everything is a touch screen now.

Perhaps someday browser software will have access to dpi, or maybe even the actual physical dimensions of the display. Together with screen pixels and a little math, that might finally give you a way to design a website so that, say, the font size doesn't shrink away to nothing on a phone. On the other hand, with virtual pixels, and 4k Retina displays, and lord-knows-what-is-to-come, I doubt "responsive web design" will ever work right.

The current paradigm of responsive web design is completely wrong. However, a bit of that wrongness can be used to get a desirable result, and that is what I have done here. Web gurus will howl, and Gargle analytics complains about it, but it works.

Gargle wasted no time in sending me this hate-mail. Funny for them to be telling the world how to code, Gargle has always had the worst web developers anywhere. They are just really, really BAD.


This is another factory guitar, vintage 1960s, made by Danelectro and sold exclusively through Sears. The 1448 was one of the cheapest electric guitars in the Sears catalog, but it came with something special - it's own amplifier built into the hardshell case. There is almost no wear on this guitar, I don't think it was played much.

Printed from luthierylabs.com