Web Dev
Concerning the development and maintenance of web sites. There’s a lot to that stuff, you know!
Disneyland mobile website wins a Webby Award!
Everyone loves Disneyland, right? Well turns out the judges at the 2012 Webby Awards do, too! The mobile version of the site, which I was one of three developers on, was recently recognized as an "Official Honoree" in the Travel category. In this post I talk about what the project's scope was, what we wanted to accomplish, and how we did it (successfully, I might add!)
Read MoreCSS issue: first selector ignored with @charset
Most developers have a story of some browser oddity that defied their every attempt to resolve, costing hours of wasted productivity. This is one such story, and I share it here to—I hope—save someone similar wasted time. But lets cut to the chase: if you've got an @charset declaration in your external CSS file, it might be messing up the first style defined in that file.
Read MoreAvoid 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 MoreNow Reading
Planned books:
None
Current books:
The Player of Games (Culture) by Iain M. Banks
Recent books:
- The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
- The Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey
- House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds
- The Santaroga Barrier by Frank Herbert
- Stardust by Neil Gaiman