PlainsCapital Relaunch

My most recent freelance work was as lead developer for PlainsCapital’s relaunch of its site and subsidiary sites (PlainsCapital Bank, PlainsCapital Insurance, and others). Formerly PNBFinancial, the company decided to redesign its sites as part of its company-wide rebranding.

The sites launched last week and its standards-compliant layout includes valid XHTML 1.1 and CSS (just CSS for layout). I’ve also added a section to my portfolio which explains several of the CSS techniques used throughout the site.

CSS Based Rollovers

JavaScript rollovers have been around almost as long as JavaScript itself (and they’re still useful, in many ways). However, I’ve recently discovered some CSS-based rollovers with a built-in preloader (via Zeldman.com).

The idea is that the documentation is in the source code, and that the reader figures things out from there. Really, the technique is not too hard to understand, once you see what he’s doing. Basically, each <img> is surrounded with an <a href=“…”> (just like normal). However, each link’s background-image is set to the desired rollover state.

Of course, with the image completely covering the background, the rollover state isn’t seen. But, the author then specified visibility:hidden for the hover-state of the images. So: the user rolls over an image, the image becomes hidden, and the background (the rollover state) is seen.

And, because the rollover-images aren’t hidden elements (but merely covered up), they’re loaded with the rest of the page — and so there’s no lag when they’re swapped-in (or, rather, unveiled). An elegant approach, I think.

Mozilla — Now with Spellchecker!

Thanks to bug 56301 being fixed recently, the latest builds of Mozilla now include the spellchecker built right in (it used to be that you’d have to install the spellchecker separately). I’m really pleased about this since it’s not only one less step that I have to go through each day (yeah, I upgrade Mozilla every day), but it also means that the spellchecker’s reliability is now tied to the core Mozilla development (I’ll explain).

When the spellchecker existed as a separate plugin, it had no association with the Mozilla team. So, if the spellchecker stopped working, you’d just be stuck without a spellchecker until the spellchecker guys got around to fixing it (which could sometimes last for months on end). Now that’s it’s integrated with Mozilla, if the spellchecker breaks, the core Mozilla team will work towards fixing it. And, even better, the spellchecker won’t check quoted text anymore either.

Brainbench HTML 4.0 Master

On the advice of a recruiter, I took the certification exam for HTML at Brainbench (Brainbench is an online tech-testing company). The test was 40 multiple-choice questions (three minutes allowed per question) and it took me about an hour.

The test was $50 but I passed! They don’t reveal the actual score and instead give an aggregate score out of 5.0. They rate 2.75 or higher as passing while 4.0 or higher is passing at the Mastrer Level. I scored 4.53, which I’m very pleased with.

However, I’m not sure about how to integrate this into my resume. I could add it to the Educaion section, I could add it as a bullet to the Profession Profile section, or I could add a separate Certifications section. Any suggestions there? And, if the latter (adding a Certifications section), where would you add that in relation to the other sections?