Archives for Web Development
February 20, 2008
Looking for a word for the moment when an “expert” is belatedly revealed on a client’s staff with opinions about your job and how it’s done. There might need to be more than one word, because there are different kinds of “reveals”.
For example, when said “expert” expresses a very strong negative opinion about a decision that has been made and cannot be changed without significant delay or hardship, this can be seen as “marking one’s territory” and therefore called a peeveal.
Or, if you’ve been banging your head on a particular project requirement without coming to a solution, and the “expert” is revealed and supplies information leading to a solution that would have saved significant time and energy, it might be called a nerd ex machina.
Ideas?
May 31, 2007
Pixelmator is aiming to be a Photoshop competitor. Granted, it’s easy to make a really nice web site and never produce a product, but I love the idea of using this and Lineform and ditching Photoshop and Illustrator. Of course I won’t be able to for the same reason that I still have Microsoft Office on my laptop. Because other people haven’t changed yet.
March 27, 2007
In this NYT blurb about the upcoming Adobe CS3 suite, CEO Bruce Chizen states:
Our customer is not typically price sensitive. The cost of the tool isn’t what’s critical — it’s the productivity and what their output can be. They want to pay for value as long as we deliver innovative features that allow them to be more productive and creative.
As John Gruber over at Daring Fireball says, the translation of this is basically “We think we can charge whatever we want.”
Here’s an idea. Charge less for your products and the smaller companies and especially independent contractors won’t resort to bootlegging your software.
Photoshop is a standard. If I don’t have a copy of Photoshop, I can’t do my work, and I’m not even a designer, as such, anymore. I’m the guy that takes the Photoshop files and turns them into web pages. But I can’t do that without Photoshop, and Adobe products are easily the most expensive software I have to pay for, well beyond the price of everything else.
March 8, 2007
If you work with any Six Apart projects (Movable Type, TypePad, LiveJournal, Vox) and you haven’t looked around the Six Apart code repository, it might be worth your while.
This post is testing a plug-in that cross-posts from my Movable Type installation to my Vox blog.
Update: It posted correctly. However, someone on the SixApart ProNet list mentioned that it might not support updating (which wouldn’t surprise me). Testing this now.
Update 2: Nope. The update is not reflected on the Vox blog. Still, it’s pretty nice, and gives you the option of posting only the excerpt to Vox.
February 23, 2007
Hey, it’s time to start marking your calendar for the year’s conferences. Once again it’s been pointed out that the conferences’ speakers lists look like fraternity roll calls. Jason Kottke published some actual numbers. It’s enlightening. (Since Jason doesn’t usually open comments on his
site, head over to http://kottkekomments.com, where Ben Brown of Consumating set up a handy way to talk about Jason’s posts.)
Mike at Mule Design posted about it as well (disclosure: Mule is my current employer) , and Ryan Carson responded in the comments, apparently with an e-mail that he originally sent to Jason, which it turns out is nearly identical to an e-mail that he sent to Jen Bekman, who maintains an amazing list of women available for speaking.
Micki Krimmel picked it up, too, and in interesting point came up in the comments. Lane Becker (a founder at Adaptive Path, now with Ruby Red Labs Satisfaction) commented that the calling out the conference organizers is a place to start, but that we need to do more to balance the gender disparity in the technology realm in general. And I think he’s right, to a large degree. It’s easy for me to forget about that sometimes because I’m lucky enough to work with four incredibly talented, intelligent women at Mule.
This morning Eric Meyer, one of our industry’s best and brightest, and one of the organizers of An Event Apart, addressed some of these issues on his personal site, basically saying his primary concern as an organizer is finding the best speakers for his event’s topics, and a secondary concern is not repeating speakers from one event to the next, and that he’s not going to consider race, color, creed or gender when he’s looking at potential speakers. It’s good to see Eric be so open about it, and I understand his reasoning, but at the same time, it’s kind of disappointing.
Because the issue is most emphatically not “There aren’t enough women CSS gurus.” The issue is that the conferences and workshops in our industry are sorely lacking in women speakers.
Eric and Ryan both say that they support diverse speaker panels, but there aren’t enough women speakers out there that can sell tickets and fill chairs; the speakers whose names are well-known are all men.
Then, Eric and Ryan here’s a chance to step up and make a difference. Use your names and high-profile sites to promote those women. Ask them to contribute. Help them build their names.
The web business skews heavily toward males, but it is not a boy’s club. Our ranks are filled with women, and they contribute insights and perspective that the boys don’t have. Let’s figure out how to get that perspective in front of more people.
In the meantime point some fingers and keep asking why there aren’t women speakers at the conferences you’re attending.
February 5, 2006
Dustin Diaz’s getElementsByClass Javascript function is a swell piece of work. Not only will it find all the elements of a given class on a page, but you can tell it to look only in a certain node (it defaults to document) and only for certain tags (it defaults to *). Be sure to also take a look at Top 10 custom JavaScript functions of all time.
February 3, 2006
Yesterday I busted on IE’s interface, but I do believe that the IE team has their hearts in the right place, at least with regards to how we as web developers will use it. They are aiming for much tighter conformance to the W3C standards for CSS, and most notably fixing the fabled Box Model problem.
A couple of days ago, they published a nice, concise document about what we can expect from the new version in terms of rendering, and they specifically talk about what well-known hacks will not affect IE7. Which is great.
What remains to be seen is where IE7 misses the standard. (And I’m not saying that Microsoft is the only one that misses the standard. CSS development is and will remain a juggling act.)
February 2, 2006
In Stop Stop Stop Hurting the Internet John Rentzsch says “My God, they’ve made metal look good.” (A reference to the unloved Brushed Metal theme that Apple used for a while, and is now most prominent on Safari as other Mac apps move on.)
On top of the looks of the thing, they’re dropping buttons (“Stop Loading” and “Reload”) and moving things around from the places where all browsers have always had them. Safari’s take on the “Stop”/”Reload” buttons is especially nice, where they’re combined. (“Reload” turns into “Stop” while a page is loading making it more of a “Loading Control” button.) What kind of thinking is that?
And wtf is going on with squeezing the tab bar between two other tool bars? Do these people not use tabs? I have no less than five tabs open at any given time, and it’s usually closer to ten.
They have such a chance to grab some cred here, and they’re getting close to squandering it before they’re out of beta. I know it must be hard to be under the microscope like this and who knows what sort of orders they’ve got from higher ups at Microsoft, but man. This just doesn’t look very good.
For reference, here’s the official MS blog post that Rentzsch is talking about. There’s interesting feedback there, too, bearing in mind that most, if not all, users of a beta web browser are going to be self-selected and that IE and Microsoft are so polarizing.
January 19, 2006
The thieves folks at Sitesurfer Publishing seem to want to do a good job, but really, if you're going to steal a design from someone and sell it to a client as your own work, you should at least have the common decency to change it a little bit and the common sense to re-brand it, like any right-thinking rustler would. The stylesheets in use at Colorado Land Rush are still clearly labeled:
/*
-----------------------------------------------
adaptive path master screen file
version: 2003.02.20
----------------------------------------------- */
Ooooops. And you would think that would go double for people doing work for lawyers.
UPDATE: So the people at coloradolandrush.com seem understand that they were hoodwinked, and have taken down the offending site. Here's a screenshot for those interested. Addtionally, it appears that not only does Sitesurfer do work for lawyers, they do work for intellectual property lawyers. Nice.
November 14, 2005
In the olden days, we were happy with hit counters. We could tell how many people had loaded a given page by looking at the cool graphic numbers down at the bottom. Then as we learned more about how to use our hosting accounts, we became familiar with analog and learned to decipher its many pie charts, and eventually other contenders came along. Of course there were always the commercial products that were used by the e-commerce sites, but I’m talking about the personal publisher of 2005.
In the last few months, there have been two notable ripples in the stats pond: Shaun Inman relased mint and Jeff Veen announced that he’d been working on a product called Measure Map for Adaptive Path. Both promise well-designed and well-analyzed reports of your site’s performance; a more human approach to understanding who’s using your site and how.
Then today came the announcement that Google has launched Google Analytics and made it available to anyone for up to 5 million page views per month. Buy an AdSense account for $5 and you get unlimited page views, presumably even if you don’t put ads on your site.
Is this just a few smart people recognizing an untapped market or the start of something more interesting? And can we expect something similar from Yahoo! some time soon?
