iPhone Programming Tutorials

December 26th, 2008  |  Published in Blog

Did you get that iPhone you wanted for Christmas? iCodeBlog has some great introductory iPhone programming tutorials.

Shiny CSS Buttons

December 25th, 2008  |  Published in Blog, Web Design

It seems like all of my clients love big shiny buttons. On 24 Ways they have a great tutorial Shiny Happy Buttons that shows you how to easily create some nice looking buttons with a minimal amount of html and css.

Module Pattern for Javascript

December 24th, 2008  |  Published in Blog, Web Design

The Module Patter in JavaScript is a powerful tool that uses the idea of closures and automatically evaluated functions. After using this technique for a while now it’s hard for me to imagine writing JavaScript in any other way.

The repetition of rewriting long namespaces while calling methods or accessing properties was the one thing that bugged me about using this pattern. To alleviate this annoyance I did some googling and found Again with the Module Pattern. This article will give you an idea about how useful the Module Pattern can be.

Two other good Module Pattern articles, both named A JavaScript Module Pattern, can be found at yuiblog.com and ajaxian.com.

Plan for Content Strategy

December 23rd, 2008  |  Published in Blog, Web Design

A List Apart has a great article about content strategy.

The basic idea from this article is to setup a plan for your content that will deliver good content that your web-site’s viewers need and want while also fulfilling business requirements.

The most important part of content strategy is to make sure that a plan for content exists in the first place. Once you have a plan make sure that the plan has a champion or someone that will make sure that everyone else in your organization sticks to the plan. When deadlines start to approach it is easy to publish content that is sub par or that does not fit into your strategy so having a champion for content strategy will help to keep everyone inline.

Snow in Seattle

December 19th, 2008  |  Published in Blog  |  3 Comments

Santa has dropped a little bit a snow in Seattle, a pretty cool early Christmas present.

puppy-in-snow

Useful Wordpress SQL Hacks

December 19th, 2008  |  Published in Blog

The 8 Useful WordPress SQL Hacks article on Smashing Magazine has some useful tips for making some repetitive tasks in Wordpress go a little quicker.

2007’s 24 Ways

December 27th, 2007  |  Published in Blog, Web Design

24 ways is back for 2007 with new tips, tricks, and tutorials.

Here are my favorite articles from the new 24 ways

Transparent PNGs in Internet Explorer 6
Dealing with support for transparent PNGs in IE 6
Get To Grips with Slippy Maps
Creating interactive, draggable maps using the Mapstraction library
Capturing Caps Lock
Detecting Caps Lock in a web app
10 Ways To Get Design Approval
10 tips for getting approval of a design
Unobtrusively Mapping Microformats with jQuery
Using jQuery to extract data from Microformats
CSS for Accessibility
CSS techniques that help make your site accessible to as many users as possible
Christmas Is In The AIR
Introduction to Adobe AIR and using standard web technologies to build a desktop application

A Preview of HTML 5

December 7th, 2007  |  Published in Blog, Web Design

A List Apart’s article “A Preview of HTML 5” gives an overview of the current status of HTML5. One of the cool things about HTML5 is that it would introduce new elements that would provide semantic alternatives to using the div element for page layout.

HTML 5 introduces a whole set of new elements that make it much easier to structure pages. Most HTML 4 pages include a variety of common structures, such as headers, footers and columns and today, it is fairly common to mark them up using div elements, giving each a descriptive id or class.

The use of div elements is largely because current versions of HTML 4 lack the necessary semantics for describing these parts more specifically. HTML 5 addresses this issue by introducing new elements for representing each of these different sections.

Definr.com

December 1st, 2007  |  Published in Blog, Links

Definr.com is a pretty cool dictionary site. It’s tagline is “incredibly fast dictionary” and it is fast. Definr.com is only one page but it does everything a dictionary should do and does it well in that page.

M/S Explorer Crashes in Antarctica

November 26th, 2007  |  Published in Blog, Links

From a BBC News Article “Stricken Antarctic ship evacuated“.

The M/S Explorer is now lying on its side close to the South Shetland Islands, in the Antarctic Ocean.