Blog

  1. Switching to Colemak – Part 1 of (?)

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    For a rather significant portion of my life, I’ve spent most of my time on the computer. After I quit playing sports in high school I developed a rather violent MMO addiction, so between homework, RuneScape, and Counter-Strike (1.6, not Source, because I’m not a noob) I did a lot of sitting, mousing, and typing. Then in college I naturally gravitated to a lot of programming, plus paper writing, later supplemented with freelance web development on the side. All of this has left me with a fun little Repetitive Strain Injury in my right wrist, which I have finally come to terms with and am making an effort to get rid of.

    So I started thinking: what is the first thing I can change that will give me the most long term benefit? The answer to that was pretty clear to me, and if any of you have spent any length of time as a full time nerd you will probably agree. I do a LOT of TYPING. And because established standards are impossible to break, I’ve done all of this typing on a keyboard with the QWERTY layout. Chances are you have a QWERTY keyboard in front of you, so you can probably just look down to see it. However, here it is for reference:

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  2. Facebook iframe app development – even the smallest hiccup ruins a good yawn

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    Preface: This ended up being half rant, half analysis. Still, I’d love for you to read it and feel inspired to not make things more difficult than they need to be when creating a developer platform.

    Recently, I’ve been getting a lot of work making Facebook Pages for companies. More specifically, I’ve been developing tabs for the sidebar of their pages – essentially small websites inside of Facebook. Since February of 2011, Facebook recommends these pages to be built with standards compliant HTML, CSS, and Javascript, rather than the proprietary FBML (Facebook Markup Language, the cocky pricks) they’d been using before.

    My thoughts: “Great! I already know how to build things in HTML, CSS and Javascript.”

    Conceptually, this is a great idea. You build the page with technology you’re familiar with, host it wherever you’d like, and all Facebook does is embed your page in an iframe. Even in practice, the process is mostly smooth.

    Unfortunately, I felt the need to emphasize “mostly,” and that means it wasn’t totally smooth. I ran into a few issues that fall into two categories. 1) Facebook’s confusing navigation, and 2) Facebook’s strange development decisions.

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  3. Complex border-image use

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    There’s something magical about finally getting the opportunity to use a new technique you’ve been reading about for months. Since CSS3 has been all the rage for a while now, I’ve heard a lot about how powerful the border-image property can be but I’ve never really had an opportunity to put it to use.

    Then, along came this design:

    Immediately, my first thought was “how the hell am I going to make those tabbed boxes?” If the size was fixed it would be simple to add it as a background image, but they have to stretch horizontally AND vertically. So, I did what any good geek does in 2011; I tweeted about it.

    “Web devs,” I asked, “I need some help. What’s the best way to implement these tabbed boxes with CSS?” Instantly, a wild Jenn Schiffer appeared, linking me to her excellent blog post, explaining how to make a variable-sized wooden frame with border-image. The problem was, the frame she created in the blog post had an equal width on all sides, and it framed the content entirely. We hacked at it for an hour or so, and these are the steps that led us to my final, working, awesome code.

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  4. I Can’t Find Your RSS Link

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    Let me detail a situation that happens to me too frequently when browsing the web.

    On Twitter, someone links to an excellent blog post. I read the post and think that I would like to subscribe to this person’s blog. I glance around their site and see no RSS icon. I cmd-F and search for “RSS,” but nothing happens. I cmd-F again and search for “Subscribe” and find a tiny link hidden in the middle of a lot of other sidebar junk. I am relieved but frustrated.

    Especially for small blogs like mine (and a few on my “the bad, the good, and some special exceptions” list coming up later in this post), every subscriber is precious. They are the magical gnomes who will read and comment on your posts, even when no one links to them. Please don’t make it hard for the gnomes.

    Before I get into some examples, let me clarify a little bit what I am trying to demonstrate. Simply put: if you’re running a blog, it’s important for people to be able to subscribe to your blog. If you make it difficult for people to subscribe to your blog, you’re making it more difficult for your blog to be successful, and the difference is often a few simple design decisions.

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  5. Recursion – A Short Story

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    I’ve been working on this story for the past few months as an assignment for a fiction writing course I was taking. Now that it’s finished, I thought I might share it here. I’ve included the first 2.5 pages, and at the bottom you can download a PDF of the story in its entirety (12 pages total). Feel free to leave any comments or criticisms (I can take it!), I’m always open to more revising.

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  6. Why I Disabled Google Instant

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    I know I’m late weighing in on this issue, but I’ve been thinking about it for a while. Google Instant is a very cool idea and I really don’t want to dislike it, but its frustrated me enough times that I finally turned it off.

    Pros and cons, shall we?

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  7. Be Radical, Or Don’t

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    When a user arrives at a webpage, there a number of assumptions they immediately make. For example:

    User: “There’s a big logo at the top. That must be the name of this website.”

    Obviously this is subconscious; no user would go around the web repeating that to themselves. Try it. It gets old fast. The point is, we’ve grown extremely accustomed to certain design patterns. One of these is having the site/company/individual logo and branding at the top of the page. Another, even older, is having your navigation at the top or down the left side of the page. When a user sees a list of links in one of these two places, they automatically assume it will lead them to new and exciting places.

    Of course, all of this is common sense. As web designers and developers, we all know this information. That’s the point.

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Design By: Patrick Schneider