Web Dev
Concerning the development and maintenance of web sites. There’s a lot to that stuff, you know!
Avoid confusing button names in HTML forms
Web forms serve as the primary way users interact with web sites. A form allows us to provide information in response to its questions and take action on that information. Despite their importance, some web developers miss the basics. One such form darkened my day recently when I needed to change a password at work. The form's misleading buttons threw me (and I'm sure most other users) for a loop. Let's see how this form should have been designed for a better user experience.
Read More10 things every beginning web developer should know
For the second year, I spoke to a group of UW Informatics students about web programming. A friend and colleague of mine, Tony Chang, teaches Informatics 344 during summer quarter. He asked me to speak to his students last year… apparently I wasn’t too bad off as he asked me again this year. Rather than diving in deep into technical details as I did last year—the title was...
Read MoreBetter living through bookmarklets: instant image title attributes
If you read web comics like XKCD.com (or any of a number of other sites), you know about image tag's title attribute. It's where those snarky comments and additional captions are stored that appear when your mouse is hovering over the image. Fun as that content is, reading it using the browser's default behavior can be annoying. This bookmarklet extracts that content and displays it next to the image. At last--one of the world's greatest problems is solved!
Read MoreA web service test harness
One of the most tedious parts of developing web services is calling up a browser and entering in the URL and any required inputs. During a recent project at work my team was developing a set of web services. I contributed a test page that grew into a full-featured web-service test harness. In this post I explain its features and how it can be adapted to suit the needs of any web developer. I hope you find it helpful!
Read More“Honing the blade,” or self-improvement by the company you keep
As my daughter Emma gets older and begins to form her personality, I think about the concept of improving oneself by the company you keep. It's one of life's not-so-obvious facts: one of the best ways to improve yourself is to be surrounded by those who are better than you. Obviously, that's a simplification; taken at face value it can even sound a bit negative by implying you're not as good as everyone else. But perhaps a few personal and professional examples will clarify my point.
Read MoreUsing jQuery and ajax to input nodes into a neo4j REST server
Okay, let's get one thing straight: if you're reading this post you probably found it by Googling for terms like "jquery," "neo4j", and "ajax". I assume that because when I was dealing with this topic I searched for those same terms and couldn't find much that helped me. Neo4j's REST server documentation is great if you're using cURL to input and manage nodes. I'm not sure about you, but I don't write a lot of web-apps from a command line; I write them in javascript and jQuery! I wanted to set up AJAX calls in my web-app that would perform CRUD operations on nodes: CReate, Update, and Delete. After a lot of playing around with jQuery's $.ajax() method I succeeded and wanted to share the code to help others looking to do the same thing.
Read MoreNow Reading
Planned books:
None
Current books:
The Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey
Recent books:
- The Santaroga Barrier by Frank Herbert
- Stardust by Neil Gaiman
- Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks
- A Princess of Mars (Penguin Classics) by Edgar Rice Burroughs
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick