Entries by Scott

Scott Vandehey is probably not a Cylon.

Overwhelmed

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

How to Hire a Front-End Web Developer

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]