As I wrote in The Importance of Testing, I feel like some problems with products could be resolved pretty easily with just a little testing. The steering wheel controls on the 2008 Nissan Altima are no different.So many late nights this week watching basketball and working on a freelance project. Lots of good things to read this week:
I love the first item: Web Standards = Validation. Just because your site is valid, that doesn’t mean it’s not crap.
Some simple techniques for achieving “a state of focused concentration”. I find it hard to stay focused some times; I need to try some of these.
As usual, A List Apart delivers two solid articles: Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry and Sign Up Forms Must Die. While I don’t really agree with the thought that all Sign Up Forms Must Die, I think Luke Wroblewski brings up a lot of interesting points.
So you’re telling me that I just have to tell my job that I will work better with beer and sushi? Yeah, I’m sure that would fly.
Can you imagine actually being able to use pixels for font size? I guess we can dream.
Six creative techniques for making your grid design extra special.
Ugh, just thinking about HTML emails makes me want to cry. At least this article discusses the non-design factors when preparing a campaign.
Wow, they call all of their clients every week? That’s pretty awesome.
This is a great article for two reasons:
During my senior year of college, I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do with my life, so I applied to some graduate programs. I knew one thing for sure: I wanted to make a difference. Thankfully, I was rejected from both graduate programs I applied to.
While I may not be making a difference in the Army or anything like that, I think that there are definitely ways to make a difference using web development.
At my company, we are broken up into 4 teams, each of which has a pro-bono client:
While there are times that we have to tell our pro-bono clients that we are simply too busy to fill their needs, we always try and get to them as quickly as possible.
A few weeks ago, some of the employees from Doorways came in to talk to us more about their organization. It was pretty powerful to hear what they had to say. To think that these people sacrifice so much time for the betterment of others is amazing to me.
I think it is extremely important for those of us who can to give back to those who are less fortunate. Whether it is donating time to a local non-profit to help them establish their web presence or just to provide some consulting time, it all will help.
Last year, I donated time to slice and integrate the Worldwide Breast Cancer site into WordPress, and I encourage everyone to try and find something to donate their time or services to.
Make a difference.
";s:10:"bodyBlocks";a:0:{}}i:2;a:6:{s:5:"title";s:24:"Weekly Link Round-Up #23";s:4:"slug";s:23:"weekly-link-round-up-23";s:2:"id";s:3:"230";s:10:"typeHandle";s:4:"blog";s:4:"body";s:1802:"Wow, crazy week at work. I felt like everything I had to do had a deadline of immediately. I’m so glad it’s the weekend, and I can watch some college basketball. So, here are a few interesting things from this week:
Some nice tips to create and maintain your person “brand”. I’ve been trying to do some of these things recently.
I would definitely do the same to save my MacBook Pro.
Can they release this version already? It looks like it has some great improvements. Great work by Happy Cog.
So you can add an extra parameter to the query string and get higher quality videos on YouTube? That’s awesome. How did they find that out?
Very good article discussing how to style links more effectively. When you think about it, links are the most important part of the web.
This time Cameron shows how to add in some simple AJAX functionality. I’m loving this series of articles.
Last fall, I bought a 2008 Nissan Altima. I absolutely love it, and I chose it over other cars like the Accord and Camry because of the way it drove. But, there is one thing that really bugs me: the steering wheel controls. More particularly, the volume and next/previous track controls.
As I wrote in The Importance of Testing, I feel like some problems with products could be resolved pretty easily with just a little testing. The steering wheel controls on the 2008 Nissan Altima are no different.
For some reason, Nissan decided to have the volume, which you turn up and down, be a horizontal control. So basically, if you want to turn the volume up, you hit the control to the right. If you want to turn the volume down, you hit it to the left.
Also strange, when you want to go to the next song, you hit the control up, and to go to the previous song, you hit the control down.
Is that just completely opposite or what? It reminds me of the Seinfeld episode: The Opposite
George: Hey, I just found twenty dollars! I tell you this, something is happening in my life. I did this opposite thing last night. Up was down, black was white, good was —
Jerry: Bad.
George: Day was —
Elaine: Night.
Every time I am about to adjust the volume level or change the song, it takes me that extra second to think about it. Maybe it’s because I’m not used to it yet, but if the volume were up and down, and the change track control were left and right, it would be what I expect and wouldn’t take that extra time to process.
So to relate it to the web, sometimes, it’s the small things that count. Think about conventions that exist in everyday life and see if they can be applied to the web as well. Don’t Make Me Think.
";s:10:"bodyBlocks";a:0:{}}i:4;a:6:{s:5:"title";s:24:"Weekly Link Round-Up #22";s:4:"slug";s:23:"weekly-link-round-up-22";s:2:"id";s:3:"232";s:10:"typeHandle";s:4:"blog";s:4:"body";s:2060:"Well, I didn’t get much sleep this week, because I spent the entire week staying up late playing with my new MacBook Pro. It’s amazing. Best purchase ever. When I wasn’t playing, this is what I found interesting this week:
Nice reference of all of the HTML elements, attributes, deprecated attributes, etc. Nothing new, but just good for reference.
I love this style, to an extent. I want to incorporate some small touches into the next redesign.
Wow, that is quite a process. I think I’ll let the experts create the fonts, and I will just enjoy the fruits of their labor.
Uh oh, Wordpress vs. Movable Type drama. I’ll tell you what: switching from Movable Type to Wordpress was the best decision ever. I think Wordpress has a much brighter future.
So after being in beta for a while, Hulu finally went public. I must say, I was really impressed. Plus, it gives me a chance to catch up on my new obsession: 30 Rock
This looks really promising. I know on a PC, Firefox is a memory hog, but I haven’t noticed it since I’ve been on my Mac.
Holy crap, Apple designs 10 mock ups before narrowing it down!? Maybe that’s why their products are almost always awesome. That design process it pretty intense.
In a recent project at work, I had completed implementing a site, and the client was reviewing it. Their company decided that they wanted all external links to open in a new window. This is not a practice that I really like, and others agree:
Opening up new browser windows is like a vacuum cleaner sales person who starts a visit by emptying an ash tray on the customer's carpet. Don't pollute my screen with any more windows, thanks (particularly since current operating systems have miserable window management). If I want a new window, I will open it myself!
Jakob Nielsen: The Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 1999
Breaking the back button is never a good thing. But this article is not about that.
Back to the site I was implementing. I was really not interested in adding target="_blank" to every single external link, so I came up with a better solution…
The site was already using jQuery for other functions, so I figured that I should just use some of its powerfulness to make my life easier.
With a couple lines of code, I solved my problem:
$(document).ready(function(){
$("a[@href^='http']").attr('target','_blank');
});
Check out the demo to see the results.
If you know anything about attribute selectors, that should look familiar to you. Basically, it is saying, apply the attribute target="_blank" to all links that begin with http.
Really easy, really powerful, problem solved. Some may say it almost might be preferable to browse the site with JavaScript disabled so that the external links would just open in the same window. But that debate is for another time.
";s:10:"bodyBlocks";a:0:{}}i:6;a:6:{s:5:"title";s:24:"Weekly Link Round-Up #21";s:4:"slug";s:23:"weekly-link-round-up-21";s:2:"id";s:3:"234";s:10:"typeHandle";s:4:"blog";s:4:"body";s:3149:"It was a busy week at work this week, but a good busy. I was slicing a site, and implementing it into Wordpress. It’s going to be a good edition to my portfolio when it’s done. So, enough of the small talk, this is what I found interesting this week:
We awoke on Monday morning to very interesting news:
We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously.
Great article discussing the common mistakes in online portfolios and 12 Principles of Effective Portfolio Design.
The second article in the four-part series, “The Highly Extensible CSS Interface”. This one touches on some jQuery and attribute selectors.
Two great articles on design: On Creativity and Design is in the Details. I found both articles to be really interesting, especially since design is the area that I am trying to improve the most in.
That’s right everyone, IE8 Beta 1 is available for download. Roger gives a nice round-up of it’s improvements and it’s shortcomings (so far).
Chris Mills from Opera discusses the do’s and don’ts of coding for the mobile web. I still think that it’s not really going to explode until we see more interfaces like the iPhone, and until cell phone carriers reduce the price of their unlimited data plans. But still, some good tips for the time being.
My co-worker flagged this to me. Four day work weeks? Freedom to buy a book or software whenever? That sounds amazing.
Oh and in other news, my brand spanking new 15" MacBook Pro should be arriving Monday. The anticipation is killing me. I didn’t know they ship from China!
";s:10:"bodyBlocks";a:0:{}}i:7;a:6:{s:5:"title";s:48:"PNGs, the AlphaImageLoader Filter, and hasLayout";s:4:"slug";s:46:"pngs-the-alphaimageloader-filter-and-haslayout";s:2:"id";s:3:"235";s:10:"typeHandle";s:4:"blog";s:4:"body";s:2194:"I recently wrote an article discussing how to use PNGs effectively in all browsers (including IE6). For work, I had to slice a site that used a lot of PNGs, and I ran into something that I had never encountered before.
I was trying to use the Microsoft proprietary AlphaImageLoader Filter because they background images were PNGs that were going to scale to fit the background. The div that I was setting the PNG as the background to, did not have a height or width specified. Apparently, to use the AlphaImageLoader property, the element that you are using it on must have another Microsoft propriety property: hasLayout.
From the Microsoft Developer Network Site:
The object that the filter is applied to must have layout before the filter effect will display. You can give the object layout by setting the height or width property, setting the position property to absolute.
I am going to use the same working example I used in my Ultimate PNG Guide. But this time, I am going to add the following to the head of the page:
<style type="text/css">
div#container div.inner { width: auto; }
</style>
Obviously not how you would want to really add that style to the page, but I am just trying to prove that in IE6, to use a PNG with the AlphaImageLoader Filter applied, the element must have layout. So here is the new page, which should be broken in IE6.
So there you have it, remember to give elements layout if you are going to use the AlphaImageLoader Filter.
";s:10:"bodyBlocks";a:0:{}}i:8;a:6:{s:5:"title";s:24:"Weekly Link Round-Up #20";s:4:"slug";s:23:"weekly-link-round-up-20";s:2:"id";s:3:"236";s:10:"typeHandle";s:4:"blog";s:4:"body";s:1663:"Wow, I can’t believe I have written these weekly link round-up 20 times. The time sure has flown by.
Nice discussion of navigation trends, with lost of examples. I really like the first trend: Trend toward “speaking” block navigation. I may consider doing something like that in the next redesign.
Tutorial explaining the creative use of PNGs on the Silverback site.
The title speaks for itself. Some good stuff to remember.
Awesome tutorial about how to choose web typography: Contrast, Size, Hierarchy, and Space
I am a big advocate of jQuery. Nice collection of 10 simple tutorials.
Part I of the IV part series. Good start, I am interested to see the rest.
I’m glad that some of my spam comments appreciate the time that I put into my site:
You have an outstanding good and well structured site. I enjoyed browsing through it.T
Good site - you're a pretty good writer.u
Thanks bro! Real good work!i
Good site, thanks!
simple but quality, thanks!
I don’t even know how Akismet figures out that those are spam and not real comments.
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