Ben Shoemate's Notebook

Jessica Hagy via indexed shared by 4 people

Danny Dover via SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog shared by 5 people

Posted by Danny Dover

Everyday a fiercely competitive battle takes place online over capturing the attention of millions of readers. As a result the blogosphere constantly changes shape and different players thrust forward as content kings for the day. Lately, I have been trying to find out what forces control this volatile scene. I have been looking for recurring themes and hoping to find useful correlations.

Last Friday, (August 15th, 2008) I took a snapshot of the Internet’s top blogs. This freeze frame identifies the blogs that have developed the skills necessary to compete. Unlike traditional top blog lists, I did not seek to place blogs in order of perceived importance. Instead, I combined public lists of top blogs ordered by the amount of inlinks (Technorati), amount of community subscriptions (Bloglines), ability to start and follow trends (BlogPulse) and the ability to thrive in foreign markets (Wikio). I then weighed each individual blog against its all encompassing internet performance using SEOmoz’s Trifecta Tool. The result is a list of blogs that have proven to be powerful in all aspects of Internet success.

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My hope is that by analyzing what all of these blogs have in common, I can learn how to become a better internet citizen and participant. Simultaneously I want to share my findings and gain additional insight by learning from all of your unique perspectives and experiences. I have already identified some common traits and trends below and I look forward to learning more from all of you.

Big Corporations Don't Dominate, Yet...

Of the 100 proven blogs in my sample, 66% were self owned. This leads me to believe that blogging is still dictated by ability rather than budget.



Branding That Works



Think the Market is Over Saturated? Think Again




Its as Much About Who One Writes for as it is About Who is Doing the Writing




It is my hope that others will be able to learn from my research. If I have learned only one thing about this industry, it is that online there is always more opportunity than one person could ever possibly need. By pooling resources and cooperating, I think we can beat the battle that takes place in the blogosphere and receive the mutual benefits that come with the victory.

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 If you are an experienced blogger, feel free to share your opinions and expertise in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me or send me a private message if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. Thanks!

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Jason Fitzpatrick via Lifehacker shared by 4 people

A small addition to your shower head can save you time, money, and water: a simple shut off valve can toggle the water flow off and on without undoing your carefully-calibrated mix of hot and cold on the faucet itself. When you want to save water (and money on your water bill), you can quick switch off the water while you soap up or leave conditioner in using a shower head shut off valve. Last summer we covered how the Navy Shower prevents waste water and decreases your water bill. A shut off valve can have the same effect, and it's dead simple to install. Here's how I did it in my shower.

First, here are the tools you need:

One shower shut off valve, one roll of Teflon pipe tape, and one pair of vice grip pliers. The total cost of this project was $5, the cost of the valve itself. A small roll of Teflon tape is about a $1 if you don't have any on hand. On the right, a better photo of what the valve itself looks like.

You may or may not need the vice grip pliers. I have needed them in the past when removing stubborn plumbing fixtures, though this time the fixture wasn't as stubborn as I anticipated. If you do use them, make sure to wrap a wash cloth or something similar around the fitting if you want to protect the finish of the fixture from the teeth of the pliers. Here is the fixture I modified:

All it took to remove the fixture was a firm grip, thanks in part to the Teflon tape I had wrapped the pipe thread in when I originally installed it. Here is where the vice grips come in handy if years of mineral accumulation and rust have locked up the connection.

Teflon tape isn't the sturdiest stuff in the world and removing the shower head shredded the tape that was on the pipe. I peeled it off with my finger nails pretty easily, but if your threading is gunkier a stiff wire brush might be in order. While you've got the shower head off, it's a perfect time to descale the fixture if you've got hard water.

We've trumpeted the uses of vinegar in the bathroom before showing you how to get the mildew smell out of towels with it, but in this case we're going to steal a trick from the kitchen: descaling a coffee machine with vinegar. Find a container large enough to hold the shower head (or just use the sink) and throw the fixture in. Pour vinegar in until the shower head is fully submerged and leave it while you work.

Once you have cleaned up the threading, wrap a few layers of Teflon tape on the threads. Don't overdo it; More than a few thin layers of the Teflon and the tape tends to just bunch up and tear itself free when you put the fixture on. It's important to wrap the Teflon tape firmly around the threading following the direction of the threading. This way when you screw the fixture back on to the threading, turning the fixture will help tighten the tape down into the threading instead of making a mess of it.

Once you've got the main pipe wrapped in Teflon tape you can screw the valve into place. It shouldn't be necessary to do more than tighten the fixture by hand. Extra force with tools will just make it more difficult to get off in the future. Wrap the male threading on the shut off valve the same way you did with the threading on the main pipe. Rinse off the shower head if it's soaking in vinegar and then screw it onto the shut off valve.

While you may not use your valve for the extreme water conservation that comes with a true Navy Shower, you'll be able to properly lather up and scrub in a small shower without resorting to contortionist tricks.

Mark Frauenfelder via Boing Boing shared by 6 people

The Times Online reports on the Dexter cattle breed, “the world’s most efficient, cutest and tastiest cows."

For between £200 and £2,000, people can buy a cow that stands no taller than a large German shepherd dog, gives 16 pints of milk a day that can be drunk unpasteurised, keeps the grass “mown” and will be a family pet for years before ending up in the freezer.

The Dexter, a mountain breed from Ireland, is perfect for cattle-keeping on a small scale, but other breeds are being artificially created to compete with it, including the Mini-Hereford and the Lowline Angus, which has been developed by the Australian government to stand no more than 39in high but produce 70% of the steak of a cow twice its size.

Just right for the garden: a mini-cow (via Arbroath)

(author unknown) via Boing Boing shared by 5 people

Shared by Nick
oooh, the logos, my eyes are burning!!!

ah, thank you olympics. i feel better now.

Marilyn sez, "Olympic logo police workers are tasked with vigilantly going around all facilities and putting masking tape over the logos for any product where the company is not an official sponsor.

7 To ensure that only the companies that pay millions of dollars to be official Olympic sponsors enjoy the benefits of exposure in Olympic venues, organizers have covered the trademarks of nonsponsors with thousands of little swatches of tape.

In media centers, dormitories and arena bathrooms, pieces of tape cover logos of fire extinguishers, light switches, thermostats, bedroom night tables, soap dispensers and urinals. The Taiden Industrial translation headsets in a large conference room have had their logos covered, as have the American Standard faucets in the bathrooms nearby, and the ThyssenKrupp escalators down the hall.

At the Athens games, people wearing logoed t-shirts were asked to remove them or turn them inside-out before entering the stadia. Nothing says "incorruptible international competition" like a bunch of bullshit rules about what your t-shirt is allowed to say and whether an elevator can display its manufacturer's mark. Ignore That Logo Under the Tape! (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Hutch Carpenter via I'm Not Actually a Geek shared by 7 people

Philipp Lenssen via Google Blogoscoped shared by 4 people

According to scientists:

• New data could help Canada stake claim to a highly disputed area of the Arctic seabed
• People can see the future
• An octopus has only six arms
• Ugly Betty will never come out on top
• Dogs pick up yawning from their owners
• Neanderthals and modern humans shared an ancient ancestor who lived about 660,000 years ago
• Elderly people should take probiotic supplements
• Only about 20 percent of the energy stored in a car’s gas tank is available to propel the vehicle
• The North Pole may be completely ice-free later this summer as global warming melts Arctic ice
• Only 4% of the total energy density in the universe can be accounted for
• Chlorine is one of the most toxic natural elements
• The gingerols in Aframomum are related to the properties in ginger that prevent nausea
• The very first organisms to dare engage in sex were more like Adam and Steve than Adam and Eve
• The Sun is pretty big; the Moon, however, is not so big
• Men are not going extinct
• Comets are balls of ice and rock made of debris left over from the formation of the outer planets some 4.6 billion years ago
• A human brain is capable of processing an enormous amount of information
• The mosquito alone spreads more disease and causes more health problems for more people than any other single entity
• Humans may have occupied Oregon’s diverse landscapes for more than 15,000 years
• Electromagnetic field hypersensitivity currently affects about 3% of the population
• Holbox has the highest concentration of whale sharks in the world
• Mosses once grew and insects crawled in what are now barren valleys in Antarctica
• A total solar eclipse will occur on August 1, 2008 and it can be witnessed from the entire territory of Vietnam
• Meandering streams occur when a flowing river or stream cannot dig its channel any deeper as if it flows over
• As the beam containing the song propagates across the universe, the signal could theoretically be picked up by anyone or anything with the right equipment
• Kangaroo farts are fighting global warming, thanks to a special bacteria in their stomachs
• 4,500,000,000 years ago our little planet was born
• The latest findings indicate that Earth is warming faster than at any time in the last 10,000 years
• The husks of the cocoa beans that chocolate is made from contains an antibacterial agent that fights plaque
• A positive outlook is not enough
• At least 52 new species of animals and plants have been identified this past year on the island of Borneo
• Conservationists should become palm oil farmers themselves
• The world’s chocolate supplies are under serious threat
• The Mars Phoenix lander uncovers ice
• California at the time had the dirtiest air in the nation, and today, 90 percent of Californians still breathe unhealthful air
• Wild flowers could provide environmentally friendly biofuel
• A daily dose of yummy dark chocolate may help patients suffering from the chronic fatigue syndrome
• Hidden talents can be stimulated using magnetism
• Water cooling beats air-cooled systems
• Birds have the right equipment for emotion

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google Poll: According to Scientists... | Comments]

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It's no secret I'm a fan of Web T-shirt shops. This time last year I rounded up 20 different online shops that specialize in selling the cotton wonders, but few of those were as interesting as Cameesa.

Like many online T-shirt operations, everything on Cameesa is designed by freelancers who submit their stuff with the hopes of making a buck and getting some recognition. These designs (once approved by human editors) go into a pool where shoppers can pick out a shirt they want; the only catch is that they've got to invest in it so Cameesa can scrap together enough money to get it printed.

Designs have 31 days to get funded, and any investors who fund a failing design get their money back. If a design is completely funded, the 20 benefactors get the first run of the shirt and a small cut of future sales. The designer gets $500 and a free print of his or her shirt. From then on, anyone who comes by Cameesa can freely purchase that shirt like they would any other shop--seeding the dividends to the initial investors.

The shop currently has three shirts that have gotten over the funding hump. Meanwhile, the upcoming pool is filled with a handful of really good-looking designs that can be sorted by date or what needs the most funding. Because of the slim selection I'll still likely stick to places like Neighborhoodies which pumps out 200 new designs every month, and Shirt.Woot.com which has a new shirt every day for $10 shipped. Neither of those have nearly as cool of a business opportunity for the buyers, though.

Does Google know judo? Maybe. Google Street View has pulled a sutemi--a judo throw in which you launch yourself at the ground, risking disadvantage, to topple your opponent--on the entire Floating Kingdom. Even though Japan knew that the controversial Google Street View was coming to Japan, the tech savvy country was caught off-guard by Google's willingness to involve itself in yet another privacy imbroglio.

The pattern is familiar. Cars mounted with the Google Street View cameras scoot through a neighborhood, taking 360-degree shots of all they surveil. When the feature finally goes live, amused Netizens find images of people in compromising positions, while others decry the end of innocence--uh, privacy.

In Japan earlier this week, the real-world Google Street View effect saw images of two high-school lovebirds playing dentist, a photo shoot in a park, a person collapsed or asleep in a street, the wife of a CEO of a major Internet services company, and the expected shots of couples entering love hotels, which is basically a motel with hourly rates and vibrating beds. The irony of this is that the Japanese are often obsessive about their privacy and ''saving face'' can often be taken literally, where people will cross their arms in a big X in front of their bodies or faces when you threaten an unwanted photograph. When I was living there, I even had a shop owner come out and demand that I not take a photo of the exterior of his trendy shoe store. That's quite a different attitude from what we experience in the U.S., and ironic given the popularity of photography there.

On message boards, the debate has mirrored that of other countries, from the expected, ''new technology is ruining our way of life,'' to a bear-hugged embrace of finally being able to see what the place you're supposed to be going to looks like. That's no small accomplishment in Tokyo's notorious neighborhoods, where warrens of streets zig, zag, and loop back upon themselves seemingly without logic.

Still, Japanese IT professional Osamu Higuchi was so horrified by Street View that he wrote an open letter to Google explaining how it has acted out of disregard for local standards and could encourage more crime. He called the effects of Street View ''evil.'' Heavy stuff.

Despite being a country with one of the lowest per-capita crime rates anywhere in the world, Japan's media is obsessed with reporting on any change that could lead to an increase. As such, Higuchi's letter isn't surprising. His concerns that laundry left out to dry and car parking spaces revealed in Japan's densely packed and often-empty-during-office-hours residential neighborhoods could lead to higher theft rates are not without some merit, at least in theory.

While it's not as crazy a theory as the Hadron Collider destroying the planet, I've yet to see any reports of increased crime anywhere being linked to Google Street View. Also, as JapanProbe and others have noted, Google has been quick to remove offending images and has been using face-blurring algorithms to try to add a modicum of privacy protection.

Vitaly Friedman & Sven Lennartz via Smashing Magazine shared by 9 people

By R. Christie

Tables got to be one of the most difficult objects to style in the Web, thanks to the cryptic markup, amount of detail we have to look over to, and lack of browser compatibility. A lot of time could be wasted on a single table although it’s just a simple one. This is where this article comes in handy. It will show you ten most easily implemented CSS table designs so you can style your tables in a zap!

First things first

We start with a valid xhtml 1.0 strict markup. Here is an example of a valid table markup:

<!-- Table markup-->

<table id="...">

	<!-- Table header -->

		<thead>
			<tr>
				<th scope="col" id="...">...</th>
				...
			</tr>
		</thead>

	<!-- Table footer -->

		<tfoot>
	        <tr>
	              <td>...</td>
	        </tr>
		</tfoot>

	<!-- Table body -->

		<tbody>
			<tr>
				<td>...</td>
				...
			</tr>
			...
		</tbody>

</table>

You can read more about xhtml table markup in HTML Dog’s Table Section. I have tested the tables below in Mozilla Firefox 3, IE 6 and 7, Opera 9.x and Safari. Also note that I apply a light blue color scheme to all of these tables to give the article a consistent look. You can modify the color scheme to match your site — the source package is provided in the end of the article.

Before we start, let’s review the general rule of thumb for styling of tables:

1. Tables love space. Set the width of tables carefully, according to the content. If you don’t know the perfect width, simply set the width of the table to 100%. Tables look nicer when they have “overwidth”, and when it comes to tables too much width is definitely better than too little width.
2. Cells need some distance. Sure, each table cell relates to each other. But it doesn’t mean that we have to pull them too close, right? Define some space between the cells, crammed up table cells are so much harder to read.
3. Treat tables the way you treat content. Tables are read similarly to the way we read text — except it’s harder and it takes more time to read a table. So be careful with the amount of contrast you are giving to your table. Use soft colors — it’s easier for the eyes. Don’t treat your table like it’s a graphical decoration. Make sure that the style you apply to it makes the content more readable, not the other way around.

Now that we are all set up let’s get going, shall we?

1. Horizontal Minimalist

Horizontal tables are tables that are read rather horizontally than vertically. Each entity is represented by a row. You can style these types of tables with minimalist style. Simply set enough padding to the cells (td and th) and put a 2 pixel border underneath the header.

Employee	Salary	Bonus	Supervisor
Stephen C. Cox	$300	$50	Bob
Josephin Tan	$150	-	Annie
Joyce Ming	$200	$35	Andy
James A. Pentel	$175	$25	Annie

Because horizontal tables are supposed to be scanned horizontally, clearing the border of the table increases the efficiency of the table. The lack of border, however, makes this table design hard to read if it has too many rows. To counter it we simply add 1 pixel border underneath all td elements:

Employee	Salary	Bonus	Supervisor
Stephen C. Cox	$300	$50	Bob
Josephin Tan	$150	-	Annie
Joyce Ming	$200	$35	Andy
James A. Pentel	$175	$25	Annie

The tr:hover rules are very useful to aid people reading a minimally designed tables. When the mouse cursor hovers over a cell, the rest of the cells in the same row highlights immediately, making it easier to track things if your tables have multiple columns.

Important!

Carefully finetune the typography and the padding between the cells

Pros

Very easy to style, good for simple tables

Cons

tr:hover rules don’t work in IE 6, table can be confusing if it has too many columns

Play with

Color scheme, typography, tr:hover effects

2. Vertical Minimalist

Although rarely used, a vertically read table is useful in categorizing or comparing descriptions of objects, with each entity represented by a column. We can style it in minimalist style by creating white space separators between columns.

Comedy	Adventure	Action	Children
Scary Movie	Indiana Jones	The Punisher	Wall-E
Epic Movie	Star Wars	Bad Boys	Madagascar
Spartan	LOTR	Die Hard	Finding Nemo
Dr. Dolittle	The Mummy	300	A Bug’s Life

Add large size border-left and border-right with the same color as background. You can use transparent borders if you want, but IE 6 screws it all up. Since this is a vertically read table, adding tr:hover does not help, instead hindering the effort to read it. There is perhaps a Javascript way to highlight the whole column when a mouseover event occurs, but that is beyond the scope of this article.

Important!

Carefully fine tune the typography and the padding between the cells, do not add tr:hover effect

Pros

Easy to style, good for simple tables

Cons

Cannot be used if background is not a solid block of color, suitable only for some tables

Play With

Color scheme and typography

3. Box

The most dependable of all style, the box style works for all kinds of tables. Pick a good color scheme and then distribute background-color to all the cells. Don’t forget to accentuate the differences of each cell by giving border as a separator. An example of box style table is as such:

Employee	Salary	Bonus	Supervisor
Stephen C. Cox	$300	$50	Bob
Josephin Tan	$150	-	Annie
Joyce Ming	$200	$35	Andy
James A. Pentel	$175	$25	Annie

Comedy	Adventure	Action	Children
Scary Movie	Indiana Jones	The Punisher	Wall-E
Epic Movie	Star Wars	Bad Boys	Madagascar
Spartan	LOTR	Die Hard	Finding Nemo
Dr. Dolittle	The Mummy	300	A Bug’s Life

This style is probably the most used style in the internet. The tricky part is actually trying to find the color scheme that matches with your site. If your site is heavy on graphics, it will be pretty hard to use this style.

Important!

Choose a color scheme that matches with your site

Pros

Easy to style, flexible for large or small tables

Cons

Choosing the perfect color scheme could be tricky

Play with

Colors and borders, use dashed or dotted to achieve cute effects, typography, icons

4. Horizontal Zebra

Zebra style tables are pretty attractive and usable. The different background color can serve as a visual cue for people when scanning the table. To style a table as zebra, simply put a class="odd" every odd ordered tr tags and define a style for it.

	...

		<tr class="odd">
		   <td>...</td>
		   ...
		</tr>

		<tr>
		   <td>...</td>
		   ...
		</tr>

	...

Employee	Salary	Bonus	Supervisor
Stephen C. Cox	$300	$50	Bob
Josephin Tan	$150	-	Annie
Joyce Ming	$200	$35	Andy
James A. Pentel	$175	$25	Annie

Important!

Do not put too much contrast on the zebra colors, you can blind your viewer

Pros

The zebra pattern can help people scan the table

Cons

Adding class="odd" manually can be very tedious for large tables, many content management system does not provide even odd features on a table loop, picking the color scheme may be tricky

Play With

Contrasting color, borders, typography, icons

5. Vertical Zebra Style

Vertical zebra is easier to style than the horizontal one, as we can make use of colgroup and col elements to distribute column classes. The code becomes something like this:

<table>

		<!-- Colgroup -->
	   <colgroup>
	      <col class="vzebra-odd">
	      <col class="vzebra-even">
	      <col class="vzebra-odd">
	      <col class="vzebra-even">
	   </colgroup>

		<!-- Table header -->
	   <thead>
	      <tr>
	         < scope="col" id="vzebra-comedy">Employee</th>
	         ...
	      </tr>
	   </thead>

	   ...
</table>

The colgroup element actually applies a style or class to the table, columnwise. Instead of tediously giving class to the first td or th element, we can use a more convenient colgroup. For more information about colgroup visit this source.

Comedy	Adventure	Action	Children
Scary Movie	Indiana Jones	The Punisher	Wall-E
Epic Movie	Star Wars	Bad Boys	Madagascar
Spartan	LOTR	Die Hard	Finding Nemo
Dr. Dolittle	The Mummy	300	A Bug’s Life

Although perhaps more suitable for vertically read table, this zebra style can also be used for any kind of table.

Important!

Do not put too much contrast on the zebra colors, you can blind your viewer

Pros

Suitable for all types of tables

Cons

Choosing the color scheme could be tricky, need to add colgroup elements

Play With

Contrasting color, borders, colgroup and col, icons and typography

6. One Column Emphasis

In some tables, a column may have higher hierarchy than the rest. If that’s the case, you can use colgroup and col to make that particular column stands out. In the example below, the first column serve as the starting point to read, so it is emphasized, just like we emphasize the first letter of the paragraph as drop caps:

Company	Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4
Microsoft	20.3	30.5	23.5	40.3
Google	50.2	40.63	45.23	39.3
Apple	25.4	30.2	33.3	36.7
IBM	20.4	15.6	22.3	29.3

You can also use one column emphasis technique to point out something important, say the column containing totals of an accounting table, or in a comparison table - for computer specification perhaps, the winning entity (column).

Important!

Be careful, don’t overdo the emphasis or the column will jump out, distracting the effort to read the rest of the columns.

Pros

Very effective when used in certain kind of tables

Cons

The necessary tr:hover effect does not work in IE, suitable for certain types of tables only

Play with

Color scheme, typography, icons and tr:hover effects

7. Newspaper

To achieve newspaper effect, apply border to table element and play with the cells inside. A quick, minimalist newspaper style can look like this:

Company	Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4
Microsoft	20.3	30.5	23.5	40.3
Google	50.2	40.63	45.23	39.3
Apple	25.4	30.2	33.3	36.7
IBM	20.4	15.6	22.3	29.3

Simply play with color scheme, borders, padding, backgrounds, and tr:hover effects of the cells (td and th). Other alternatives is presented below:

Company	Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4
The above data were fictional and made up, please do not sue me
Microsoft	20.3	30.5	23.5	40.3
Google	50.2	40.63	45.23	39.3
Apple	25.4	30.2	33.3	36.7
IBM	20.4	15.6	22.3	29.3

Favorite	Great	Nice	Bad
Passion of the Christ	Bourne Ultimatum	Shoot ‘Em Up	Ali
The Big Fish	The Mummy	Apocalypto	Monster
Shawshank Redemption	Cold Mountain	Indiana Jones	Dead or Alive
Greatest Story Ever Told	I Am Legend	Star Wars	Saw 3

Important!

Be careful with border-collapse, do not lose the signature border around the table!

Pros

Gives a royal, authorative aura to a table easily

Cons

Unsuitable for large tables (it loses it’s charm on large tables)

Play With

Typography, color scheme, background, border, padding, and tr:hover effects

8. Rounded Corner

Rounded corners are slick and modern, and it’s easy to apply it to a table, although you need to fire up your photoshop for this. Create images for all four corners of your table. Theoretically, we can make use of the nesting tr and td elements to place the left and right corners of the table without adding additional markup. Unfortunately, IE 6 goes berserk and the table was ugly, so the most stable way to do this is to put ID or class to all four corner cells of the table. You can see the example below:

Company	Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4
The above data were fictional and made up, please do not sue me				Â
Microsoft	20.3	30.5	23.5	40.3
Google	50.2	40.63	45.23	39.3
Apple	25.4	30.2	33.3	36.7
IBM	20.4	15.6	22.3	29.3

Pros

Great if you want untraditional table, probably the only viable option you have if your website uses rounded corners heavily

Cons

Takes longer time to style, needs images

Play With

Color scheme, corner variations, typography, tr:hover effects, icons

9. Table Background

If you want a quick and unique way to style your table, simply pick an attractive image or photo related to the subject of your table and set it to be the background-image of the table. You can add 50% grey PNG as background-image of the cells to improve readability, and that means a css hack to make it work in IE 6:

* html table tbody td
{

		  /* IE CSS Filter Hack goes here*/

}

The table would look like this:

Employee	Division	Suggestions
IE 6 users won’t see the transparent background if the hack is not applied
Stephen C. Cox	Marketing	Make discount offers
Josephin Tan	Advertising	Give bonuses
Joyce Ming	Marketing	New designs
James A. Pentel	Marketing	Better Packaging

Important!

Make sure the image is relevant to the table’s contents

Pros

Very easy to style, delivers unique look, if used correctly the image can serve as a symbol that gives outstanding impression on the viewer

Cons

Needs hack to get the background work in IE 6, needs images

Play With

Background images, transparent PNGs, typography, colors, icons

10. Cell Background

You can apply background-image to the cells and achieve a consistent look. Say you have at least half an hour to spare - and you want something that’s not too bland. Start your Photoshop and make 1 pixel width gradients, and set them as background-image of all cells. You’ll end up with a gradient style table:

Employee	Division	Suggestions	Rating
Give background color to the table cells to achieve seamless transition
Stephen C. Cox	Marketing	Make discount offers	3/10
Josephin Tan	Advertising	Give bonuses	5/10
Joyce Ming	Marketing	New designs	8/10
James A. Pentel	Marketing	Better Packaging	8/10

Similarly, pick a pattern and set it as background-image and you’ll end up with a pattern style table:

Employee	Salary	Bonus	Supervisor
Stephen C. Cox	$300	$50	Bob
Josephin Tan	$150	-	Annie
Joyce Ming	$200	$35	Andy
James A. Pentel	$175	$25	Annie

Nation	Capital	Language	Unique
Japan	Tokyo	Japanese	Karate
South Korea	Seoul	Korean	Ginseng
China	Beijing	Mandarin	Kung-Fu
Indonesia	Jakarta	Indonesian	Batik

Important!

Make sure the text stands out of the background

Pros

Easy to style, not too bland

Cons

Uses images, patterns and gradients might distract reading

Play With

Color scheme, patterns, typography, borders, backgrounds, gradients, icons

Final Words

I know I barely scratched the surface when I did this article, so grab the source and play around. Feel free to post your favourite table designs, especially if it’s something I miss out. Over to you.

About the author

R.Christie is studying information systems at college. He viciously juggles activities from college, web design, programming, church, to sport activities. You can say hello to him via e-mail.

Editor’s note

This post is one of the finalists of our guest author contest. Over three weeks selected top-10-lists and discussion articles will be published. To rate the articles we’ll analyze their popularity, users activity, quality of backlinks, traffic and further data.

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