The law of Futility of Avoidance
Given enough time, you will end up becoming responsible for supporting and maintaining the very system you’re the most desperate to avoid.
May 6, 2013 Monday at 11:22 am
Installing Internet Explorer on Mac
When you need to develop/design a solution for the majority of corporate users, you will need to test it on Internet Explorer. If you have a Mac, setting this up on your machine is easy. The original source for this information was OSXDaily. I cleaned it up and added additional information. Intended Audience If you’re unfamiliar with using the terminal, these instructions …
February 6, 2013 Wednesday at 1:14 pm
Don’t hate your users
If you want to enable your users to do something, such as create an account on your system, DO NOT MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLY HARD. Case in point: If algebra is too hard, just refresh and you’ll see something else. Woah, better refresh. You know what this does? It not only keeps out any bots, but turns a normal human into something …
January 28, 2013 Monday at 10:14 am
How to ask for help the wrong way
When submitting bug reports, it is a good idea to Realize that you’re asking for help from people who (usually) have day jobs, and Expend at least some amount of effort to show you’re not expecting someone else to do all the work. With that in mind, let me introduce to you the Best Bug Report Comment, Ever† First the bug …
January 23, 2013 Wednesday at 1:55 pm
Decoupling presentation from content
I recently ran across the anti-pattern of what I see as a common problem amongst designers and developers: coupled presentation and content. I’ve found that decoupling the presentation from the content makes things much easier to write, maintain and expand. Here’s a simple example: HTML <section> <div class=”margin-top-10″>Lorem Ipsum</div> </section> CSS .margin-top-10 { margin-top: 10px }; .margin-top-20 { margin-top: 20px }; (etc) …
January 4, 2013 Friday at 2:49 am
Iterations in Less
Part of the beauty of Less and other CSS ‘compilers’ is to enable the author to automate tedious functions that normally must be coded by hand. Suppose you needed several classes that specified padding/margins: .mRight50{margin-right:50px} .mLeft50{margin-left:50px} .pRight50{padding-right:50px} .pLeft50{padding-left:50px} .mRight25{margin-right:25px} .mLeft25{margin-left:25px} .pRight25{padding-right:25px} .pLeft25{padding-left:25px} No big deal, right? It wouldn’t take that long to type in; just cut and paste a bit. …
December 11, 2012 Tuesday at 10:54 pm
Flashback: Skip Intro for flash introductions
Remember when flash introduction pages were all the rage? They were ‘cool’ from the web designer‘s standpoint, but utterly annoying and off-putting to the visitor. Fortunately, most people figured out that people visited their site for the content, not the snappy graphics (unless it was a gallery site), and certainly not for the mandatory intro pages. Yet, some people still …
October 2, 2012 Tuesday at 7:51 pm
Regular Expressions Roundup
Writing some Regular Expressions? Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems. —Jamie Zawinski Well, not really. There are some cases where using a Regular Expression—RegEx— instead of a heap of convoluted if statements just makes sense from both a lazy and practical standpoint. When you’re knee-deep in writing your …
September 27, 2012 Thursday at 10:14 pm
Find Something You Like and Dissect It
I’m always on the lookout for a new technique or Better Mousetrap. I admit I don’t know all that much, so I’m happy to learn. I was playing around with Wikify @ appointment.net (a nifty tool that goes through a block of text and ‘wikifies’ it–that is, links all the words it can find to relavant Wikipedia articles) when I noticed …
September 20, 2012 Thursday at 2:48 pm
The Importance of Not “Designing” your own Security
Recently, at a client, I had the opportunity to review their security implementation on their website. I realized that it is very important to never try to design one’s own security, because of the Dunning Kruger effect. In a nutshell, folks who don’t know very much about security think they know “enough,” and folks who are very knowledgable (e.g., Bruce …
September 17, 2012 Monday at 2:29 pm
