For those of you who have more free time on your hands, The Intelligent Collector magazine just published a great checklist of five ways to improve your collection:
Long-time readers of the Mercheum Blog may recall that Intelligent Collector interviewed me back in 2017.
Sorry for not posting last weekend. I am very fortunate, in that I am still employed, and my employer gave me the equipment I need to work from home. The trick is, now that I am spending forty hours a week sitting in my chair, staring at my monitor, I really don’t want to spend my free time doing more of the same, even if it is for my projects not work. It took me about a week to get used to working from home, hopefully I will find a work/life balance that allows me to enjoy working on the Harvey Mercheum website again.
Continue reading →Earlier this month, I read this post about accessibility testing:
Beyond automatic accessibility testing: 6 things I check on every website I build
Step five makes the point of not conveying information with color alone, and goes on to cite hyperlinks as an example. Hyperlinks should be underlined to easily differentiate them from normal text. I realized that the Harvey Mercheum website was just using color to indicate a hyperlink, and decided to implement underlines. After some experimentation, I decided to only do this for the “content area” of the pages, in other words not the menus, sidebars or footer.
Once I decided upon the underlines and was already working with the website’s Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), I wanted a clearer way to indicate whether the hyperlink was internal or external. I mentioned early last year about how I checked to make sure all internal links open in the same tab, and external links open in a new tab. I read this post on wpmudev:
How to Style External Links in WordPress Like Wikipedia
Then, rather than worry about licensing an icon, I found this way to create one on the fly as a Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG):
I love learning new (to me) technologies such as CSS, and I am always looking for ways to improve the Harvey Mercheum website. What do you think of these changes? Leave a comment below, or use the Contact the Curator form to let me know!Featured image credit: Andreariverac [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
I had written back in February about how I had had problems with the new WordPress block editor, Gutenberg, and about how I overcame these problems by changing all my content to “Custom HTML” blocks, with “More” blocks as required. I have now gone back through the 425 posts that make up the Mercheum Blog and made better use of some of the other block types available by default.
Continue reading →It was exactly a year ago that I commented on the Roboto font’s popularity, and now I am pleased to see that Roboto made it to Vistaprint’s Top 12 Easy to Read Fonts. I knew it was a Google font, but did not know it was created for Android (specifically 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich”) or used in the Chrome web browser.
I use Vistaprint for business cards, both personal and for the Harvey Mercheum, and have been very pleased with their quality. Some day I need to have these cards redone with “https” instead of “http”…
Anyone who has read anything I have written knows that I have a strong sense of personal nostalgia. Looking back at my childhood, to when I first started collecting comic books and my father reading them along with me, that was a good time in my life. I usually feel a touch of sadness while looking back, and sometimes I worry that this sadness is bad for me. Well, I need not worry, according to this post from the Spring/Summer 2019 edition of The Intelligent Collector magazine:
Long-time readers of the Mercheum Blog will recall that I was interviewed in the Fall 2017 issue of that great magazine.
Back in January, I found the hobbyDB website. I just read this very interesting post on their blog:
When Collectible Websites die – does the Data die too?
Readers of the Mercheum Blog know that I am very concerned with the preservation of the content I have created. I do not feel that hobbyDB is a perfect fit for all the Harveyana that the Harvey Mercheum embodies, especially the various bits of corporate ephemera that I have promised to share with you. I am, however, very pleased to learn about the efforts that hobbyDB is making, and I still need to investigate how I can contribute.
I just read a great post on the Intelligent Collector website:
What All Collectors Absolutely, Positively Must Know
While some of the people interviewed were concerned with the value or authenticity of items purchased, I liked the quotes that emphasized buying what you care about. Shortly after I started the Harvey Mercheum website, I started buying every new Harvey-related item I could find. I quickly ran out of money, and did not even put a dent in the list of items I had found. I now buy items I feel are unique or otherwise important parts of the history of Harvey Comics. In short, I try to buy items that I care about.
Long-time readers of the Mercheum Blog may recall me doing an interview that was published in the Fall 2017 issue of Intelligent Collector magazine.
WordPress hosting company WP Engine publishes a very interesting online magazine called Torque. Back in January, they wrote an article about whether you can create a website for free:
Can You Create a Functional (and Effective) Website Without Spending a Dollar?
I reached the same conclusions they did. I spend money on web hosting with SiteGround, and on domain name registration with Namecheap, but use the free Weaver Xtreme theme, free plugins, free CDN services from Cloudflare and free SSL from Let’s Encrypt. This seems to be a reasonable balance to me.
I just read a good post on the Namecheap blog about “5 Things to Never Include in a Domain Name“. I know back when I first started working on the Harvey Mercheum website, I had a very hard time deciding what to use for a domain name.
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