Authors

August 31, 2009: Simple Short URLs with ExpressionEngine

If you use Twitter, you’ve no doubt seen short URLs. Posting most web page URLs would use up almost all of the 140 characters allowed by Twitter. Services like http://bit.ly and http://tr.im shorten any URL to just a few characters, leaving plenty of room for your comments. But history has shown these third party services may not be reliable. That’s why it might be best to roll your own…and ExpressionEngine can make it easy.

July 31, 2009: Names and IDs

In XHTML 1 strict and HTML 5, the name attribute on many elements has been replaced with the id attribute. But name hasn’t been replaced entirely. Form elements still use both name and id, and both serve very different functions.

May 26, 2009: Skip Photoshop…Mock Up Tables in HTML and CSS

Photoshop is a great tool for mocking up websites. Layers, shapes, and filters help make the design process quick and easy. However, designing data tables can be a chore. Setting the spacing and alignment of the text, borders, and rows isn’t necessarily hard, but is definitely tedious. A simple change of cell padding could require resizing and moving dozens of objects and layers, one at a time.

My advice for mocking up data tables in Photoshop? Don’t bother. There are plenty of other tools that design tables with less effort. And since a mockup’s final destination is a website, why not start with HTML?

April 06, 2009: Little-Known Tech: Data URIs

An image doesn’t always have to be an image. Images on websites are usually .png, .jpg, or .gif files located on a server that are referenced in code. Data URIs allow you to skip referencing an image file and embed the image directly in the HTML or CSS. Here are the basics:

March 06, 2009: The Skittles Super-Mashup: Taste the Social Rainbow

Mars, Inc., is taking a brilliant new approach for their Skittles brand’s public website. By creating a mashup of popular social web applications, they have essentially relinquished control of their public website to the people.

February 04, 2009: How to Make Your Site Look Good Naked

There are a lot of web browsers out there that have limited CSS support, including most mobile browsers and older desktop browsers (like Netscape 4). Also, shutting off stylesheets is popular with those who are miserly with their bandwidth. So chances are there are plenty of people that have seen your site without styles. How can you keep your site sexy when the styles are stripped away?

November 04, 2008: Tables Are Only Mostly Dead

I was recently browsing through a web development forum when a particular posting caught my eye. A member was asking what is the best way to mark-up and design a calendar in HTML without using a table. He got plenty of answers, with a lot of advice on complex code structure and CSS floating techniques, some with a few existing examples. He also got few responses telling him to just do it in a table; but he remained convinced it should be table-less.

September 24, 2008: Learning to Love <b> and <i>

Since the great Web Standards revival, we web developers have sworn off presentational mark-up. Strict HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1 have exorcised presentational tags, such as <font> and <center>, completely out of the spec. Now, we bold with <strong> and italicize with <em>. There doesn’t seem to be a need for <b> or <i> anymore. So why are they still part of the spec?

August 30, 2008: How Do You Browse? Take My Poll!

Computer screen technology has seen big improvements in the last few years. Old, bulky tube-based monitors, once the only type of monitor available, are nearly extinct. Flat panels have become big, cheap, and ubiquitous. Average screen resolutions are larger than they've ever been before. According to OneStat, as of April 2007, only 8% of online computers were set to an 800x600 screen resolution or lower.

Larger screens allow you to fit more on the screen at once. You can put documents side by side, open more palettes, or view more photos at once. They give you a lot more room to stretch out.

There's a feature in Windows that was added before there were high-resolution screens: the 'maximize' button. It's the button at the top right corner of every window that stretches the window to completely fill the screen, allowing the use of only one window at a time. The maximized mode (or single-window mode) is still popular, even on the big 24 to 30 inch screens.

My follow-up post will touch on the implications maximized windows on big screens have for web developers. Before that, I'd like to conduct a little (non) scientific poll. The information from this poll is valuable because it comes from all of you: a wide range of real people reading articles on the web.



(By the way, did you know a few months ago a feature was added to Google Docs that allows you to create forms that can be emailed or embedded on a web page? The data from the form is put into a Google Spreadsheet. I decided to use this poll to demonstrate how useful this feature can be. To learn more, follow the link just below the form.)

July 24, 2008: The Endangered Mouse

In a recent article from BBC News, an analyst from the tech firm Gartner predicted the death of the computer mouse within the next five years. He bases his prediction on current advances in interaction with electronics, such as the motion-sensitive Nintendo Wii and touch-screen iPhone. Reference is also made to technology from Panasonic which senses hand movement and facial features. But can these technologies really take the place of a mouse?

April 12, 2008: When Web Sites Are Stolen

Imagine surfing the web and finding a site that looks and behaves exactly like yours…the one you spent a lot of time and a lot of money designing and building. Your web site has been stolen! How did this happen and what can you do?

October 28, 2007: ‘Downloadable Fonts’ on the Web Gains Support

A few weeks ago David Hyatt, a member of the WebKit Open Source Project, announced the WebKit rendering engine now has the ability to download fonts to be used in web sites. This means web sites will be able to use any fonts a web developer chooses, not just the select few cross-platform fonts available now.