The following is an email exchange I had with a friend at another company about a year ago. We were talking about the best way to go about hiring a front-end developer, and I was sharing some tips from our hiring process. “Hi Scott, we are in need of a CSS expert/ninja. Our company has [...]
Archives for 2009
I Took The Survey, and So Should You
If you haven’t already, set aside ten minutes to fill out the annual “State of the Web” survey from A List Apart. This kind of data is important to gain an understanding of our community and profession, not just for ourselves, but the rest of the world. The data that you provide and we analyze [...]
Fast Post-Mortems
When it’s time for a post-mortem meeting, do people in your office groan and make excuses? Do your coworkers complain that they’re too busy with client work to attend? Do post-mortems feel like a chore with no payoff? I think everyone agrees that post-mortems are a great idea, in theory. When you finish a project, [...]
Five iPhone Tips
I recently got an iPhone, and like any good geek, immediately started banging my head against things I didn’t know how to do. If you’ve had an iPhone for awhile now, you probably already know these, but if you’re a newbie like me, these tips may help you out. Some of these tips will only [...]
How to Convert Your Old WordPress Database to UTF8
When I upgraded my WordPress installation recently, I ran into a chracter encoding problem. Long story short, it turns out that older WordPress installations like mine tend to have been created in latin1, but the data is actually being saved in UTF8. If you update your wp-config file to a newer version, it adds a [...]
Administrative Note
I’ve split this site into two, a personal one and a professional one. Spaceninja.com will remain my professional blog, with an emphasis on front-end web production. I’ve set up a new blog on ScottVandehey.com that I will be using for more personal posts about Zoe and non-web-development topics. Thanks for your patience.
The Big News: I’m Leaving Pop Art
Friday will be my last day at Pop Art. I’ve been working there nearly four years, and deciding to quit was not an easy decision. I won’t get into all the details, suffice to say that it’s time for me to move on, and I’m ready for some new challenges. Over the years at Pop [...]
Google Chrome Frame for Internet Explorer
Long story short, Google released a plugin for IE 6, 7 and 8 that will run Google Chrome (which uses webkit) inside a frame in the IE browser. Now IE6 can be standards-compliant, and all versions of IE get blazing fast javascript and HTML 5 support. Sounds great, but there are some problems, as lifehacker [...]
IE8 Compatibility Mode and IE7 are Not the Same Thing
Just so we’re clear, testing your website in an actual copy of IE7, and testing in IE8′s Compatibility Mode are not the same thing. Compatibility Mode does an acceptable job of imitating IE7, and for the average user who’s just trying to fix a site that looks broken under IE8, it’s good enough. However, there [...]
How to Avoid Paragraph Gaps when Using Superscript and Subscript
Frequently, when I see a webpage with superscript or subscript text, I see associated gaps in the paragraph. This is caused because the default way browsers render super and subscript text is to add enough vertical space in the paragraph to show them. The result is ugly, but as you can see in the following [...]
Talk Like Warren Ellis
A few weeks ago, I called my friend Miles and asked him to help me out with the programming on a project I dreamed up. Here’s how I put it to him: Scott: “I want you to help me with a project that will either get no attention at all, or a ton. [pause to [...]
Intelligent Defaults Save Time
Have you ever been a regular at a coffee shop? The barista knows you by name, and every morning when you come by, she’s already got your Triple Non-Fat Sugar-Free Vanilla Latte waiting for you. That’s an intelligent default. She doesn’t know for sure that’s what you want, or even that you’ll come in today, [...]
Key Takeaways from An Event Apart
I’ve attended An Event Apart four years running now. It is, hands-down, the finest web conference around, and if you work on the web at all, whether you’re a designer, developer, copywriter, or client-services, I cannot recommend it highly enough. Reviewing my notes from previous conferences, I noticed that there were some running themes. Each [...]
How to Convert from Community Server 2007 to WordPress
It’s safe to say that no one at Pop Art was ever really happy with Community Server. We selected it as a platform for a variety of reasons, some of which turned out to be based on faulty assumptions. Once we finally made the decision to switch to WordPress, the conversion was a huge pain, [...]
Six WordPress Tips from the Pop Art Blog Redesign
When we converted the Pop Art Blog to use WordPress, I learned some clever tricks that I would like to share with you. If you like what we’ve done around here, you might be interested in some of these techniques for your own site.
XHTML 2 is Dead
Wow, I didn’t see this coming. Zeldman reports that the W3C is not going to renew the XHTML 2 working group‘s charter this year. That effectively kills XHTML 2 in favor of devoting the resources to the HTML 5 working group. This makes sense in that HTML 5 is already gaining traction, and we’ve seen [...]
How to Get Your Most Recent Twitter Posts Using PHP with Caching
When we started redesigning the Pop Art blog, one of the chief requirements was to integrate everyone’s Twitter feeds into the site. In addition to the Pop Art Twitter feed in the sidebar, we wanted to add individual twitter feeds on the profile pages. The problem is that the javascript code that Twitter provides can [...]
Bugzilla’s Reset Password Page Sucks
Frequently, my coworkers will forget their Bugzilla passwords. They come to me, because I manage it, and I always send them to the reset password page. Inevitably, they come back a few minutes later and tell me that it didn’t work, and I just reset their passwords by hand. Well, I finally figured out the [...]
An Event Apart Seattle 2009
The night before An Event Apart, I was at a party with some college friends. When they found out I was in town for a conference, they wanted to know what it was about. I said it was a web conference, and they said “Aren’t those usually held on the web?” Eventually, I explained it [...]
First, Light a Fire
The best advice my father ever gave me was to start a fire. My family owns a cabin out in the middle of nowhere. For nine months a year, it sits empty, and during the summer, various branches of the family take turns vacationing there. It’s beautiful, but the first family in has the responsibility [...]
Heather Champ’s Rules for the Internet
Never send email in anger. Never let anyone take a photo of you naked. Only friend people who are truly friends. – Heather Champ’s Rules for the Internet
WordPress Automatic Theme Upgrade Deletes Custom Files
When I made Dojo, one of the main features of the theme is the ability to add a custom.css file in the same directory, and the theme will load it – that way you can use the theme as a starting point, and just change the colors and stuff to match what you want. That’s [...]
Dojo and WordPress 2.7
I’ve had a few inquiries about whether Dojo works under WordPress 2.7, and the answer is yes! You can drop it in, and it’ll work just fine. However, there are some new features to allow comment threading and paging which don’t work yet. It’s not broken, it just uses the old non-threaded, non-paged comment style. [...]
Why Aren’t You Using Fireworks to Compress Images?
I’m sure you’ve all heard the Fireworks vs. Photoshop debate. When I started at Pop Art, I was a Photoshop user. It was the application that we were taught in my graphic design program, and when I found out that the creative team used Fireworks, it took quite awhile for them to convince me that [...]