More and more lately I’ve been feeling overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of great stuff on the internet. I sit down at my computer, intending to spend a half-hour in my feed reader, and the next thing I know, it’s three hours later, and I’ve managed to clear out my unread list. But the trick [...]
Archives for 2010
Web Developer Job Descriptions by ZeFrank
ZeFrank recently posted these brilliant job descriptions, and I’m reposting them here because I don’t want to lose them if he takes down the “help-wanted” page. Full or Part Time Front End Developer/Interaction Designer (4+ years experience): Ideally you should know what the following acronyms stand for and be able to use any one of [...]
Best Practice: Use @font-face for Custom Fonts
I just wrote the following for our marketing team to understand how to sell font solutions to our clients. If you have any feedback, I would love to hear it in the comments section! When a client’s design calls for a custom font in the headlines, there are a variety of solutions we can recommend, [...]
Best Practice: Use native form elements whenever possible
I just wrote the following for our marketing team to understand why we recommend not styling forms. If you have any feedback, I would love to hear it in the comments section! Our recommendation is that only minimal styling be applied to form elements. When possible, using the native form elements is the most accessible [...]
How to Change the Content-Type Meta Tag in Drupal
I’m working on an HTML5 theme for Drupal 7 right now, and I needed to change the meta content-type tag. By default it looks like this: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />, and I needed the updated HTML5 version: <meta charset="utf-8" />. Normally, you can replace these things in one of the theme template files, but [...]
Big news for web fonts and video today
WebM Video The codec wars around the HTML5 video element might be settled sooner than you think: Basically, Google just open-sourced VP8, a video codec. VP8 is being combined with the Vorbis audio codec to create a new video format called WebM. This wouldn’t be news at all except that a ton of groups have already [...]
How to use jQuery to open external links in a new window
A common request from clients is to open all external links on their website in a new browser window. (Leave aside for now whether this is a good idea or not, and just assume that you need to do it.) It’s easy enough to add target="_blank" to a link, but there are two problems. First, [...]
How to use jQuery to target CSS at older browsers
On a recent project where I had to support Firefox 3.6, 3.0 and 2.0, I had to find a way to target a specific version of the browser due to differences in the rendering engine. It turns out the easiest way to do this is by using jQuery to detect the browser and add a [...]
jQuery Slide-Down Language Selector
A site I worked on recently had an international link, and when the user clicked on it, the whole page was supposed to slide down and reveal a language picker. I found some jQuery to slide the page down, but it relied on the language picker being the first div on the page. For SEO [...]
jQuery Popup Footnotes
A recent site I worked on had footnote references throughout the body copy, and a corresponding list of footnotes at the bottom of the page. That’s easy enough to mark up, but the client also wanted the footnote to display it a little tooltip-style popup when you moused over the footnote reference. I didn’t want [...]
Followers vs Friends
It’s always bothered me that most social networking sites only have one level of friendship. You are either someone’s friend, or you are not. In the real world, we have multiple levels: spouses, partners, family, friends, coworkers, acquaintances, etc. Since there’s no depth to our friend lists on these sites, it appears that we are [...]
The Importance of Terminology
There are certain terms used in the web industry that most people think of as “industry-standard,” but are actually used in slightly different ways at different companies. For instance, I’ve run into several definitions for “alpha,” “beta,” “wireframe,” and “comp” at different shops I’ve worked at. Learning how a new company uses these terms isn’t [...]
In Praise of Specialists
There is a split in the web industry that you might not be aware of. No, I’m not talking about Mac vs. PC. I’m talking about companies hiring generalists or specialists. When I say specialist, I mean an employee whose focus is on one particular skillset, eg, flash, copywriting or front-end development. They may have [...]
New Year, New Job!
In October, after four years at Pop Art, I decided it was time to move on. While I will always miss the incredible people I worked with, and the passion everyone brought to the job, the company had changed and it wasn’t the right place for me anymore. While negotiating my exit, I interviewed for [...]