The verbs founder and flounder are often confused. Founder comes from a Latin word meaning “bottom” (as in foundation) and originally referred to knocking enemies down; it is now also used to mean “to fail utterly, collapse.” Flounder means “to move clumsily, thrash about,” and hence “to proceed in confusion.” If John is foundering in Chemistry 1, he had better drop the course; if he is floundering, he may yet pull through.

I’ve been meaning to link to Paula Bernstein’s site for months. Her most recent article from the New York Observer is a fun read,”Committed Couple Seeks Fred and Ethel: Country House a Plus” (NYO). It’s a great little essay about the difficulty couples (especially with kids) have in finding other couples to hang out with.

This part had me laughing out loud, partly because anyone who’s been to a crowded playground with a toddler has seen this happen over and over:

“There was another couple we bonded with while pushing our children on the swings at the Union Square playground, but any hopes of forming a fabulous foursome were quashed when our daughter brained their son with a toy truck. (It’s amazing how quickly a little spilled blood can get in the way of a meaningful relationship.)”

There’s lots more on her site, The Hat Police is another spot-on slice of urban parenting.

click for larger image

Just awesome. Congratulations. (Photo: NASA)

The photo was taken from the Spirit rover on Mars looking back at it’s landing module. As someone who tries to build things that work without much assistance, this is incredible. It’s not a person’s foot, yet, but something people built is right now rolling around on Mars.

Below are a few styles I created to mimic those XML and RDF buttons found on a lot of sites. Since the icon is so simple, there’s not really any reason to use a GIF instead of CSS. The number of bytes transferred is basically the same, but you do save one server connection. (text-shadow only works in Safari so far as I know, it’s ignored everywhere else but nice if you have it.)


.xml_link, .rdf_link {
    font-family: verdana, sans-serif;
    font-weight: bold;
    font-size: 11px;
    text-decoration: none;
    padding: 0 5px 1px 5px;
    color: white;
    border: 1px solid #555;
}

.xml_link:hover {border-color: #ee5500 #000 #000 #ee5500;
    text-shadow: 2px 2px 0px #7d3302;
}
.rdf_link:hover {border-color: #0000cc #000 #000 #0000cc;
    text-shadow: 2px 2px 0px #00005d;
}


XML	RDF

Those pretty much matched the most common graphics I found, but I thought they were a big chunky, and I couldn’t convince the height to scrunch down to 14px while remaining an inline element. So changed the font-size to ‘9px’ and the padding to ‘0 3px;’ which creates these smaller stylings:

XML RDF

Of course, I don’t have a feed yet, but a lot of other people do.

These are free to use. (as if…)

Update:There are a bunch of these floating around online, here are some others:

• CSS Buttons
• XML button via CSS
• Advert Buttons using CSS
• Creating CSS Buttons

Ah well, I only wasted about 10 minutes re-inventing the wheel this time. I’ve done far worse than that.

The new FXScript Reference is open.