Archive for the ‘Web Development’ Category

What exactly is up with the silly and meaningless use of “Rockstar” and “Ninja” that is proliferating around the web? “Rockstar Developer”, “Rockstar Designer”, “CSS Ninja” etc. I know it’s a joke, but it’s also moronic.

Tell people what you do, and why you’re good — don’t pretend to be a musical genius or a silent assassin. You’re not. There was a time, pretty recently in fact, when we were all keen to “keep it real.” What the hell happened?

(Of course, if you actually are a rockstar or a ninja, then stop moonlighting as a web professional, you’re taking work from the rest of us!)

Myows is a service for helping creatives to protect the copyright on their original works. It launches soon and I was lucky enough to get an interview with the founder, Max Guedy, about this valuable new service.

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Title: Sexy Web Design: Creating Interfaces That Work
Author: Elliot Jay Stocks
ISBN: 0980455235

Note: This is an edited version of a review I previously posted on Amazon.

I rarely buy technical books these days since so much knowledge is available for free on the web, but I was excited to get hold of this tome by Elliot Jay Stocks since he’s an excellent designer and I hoped to tap into what it is that sets him apart from the rest of us.

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Current discussions around the “Support IE6?” debate have elicited strong opinions on both sides. I’m not going to repeat my position, since I’ve documented that elsewhere, but I thought it would be worth taking a step back to get a sense of the bigger picture.

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IE6update is a script you can add to your web site that will detect if the user is running IE6 and recommend that they upgrade.

The intent is clear: get people off IE6 (a flawed and outdated browser) and onto a more modern browser. Their web experience will improve and the lives of developers will be made easier.

I understand the intent, but the shameful way it’s been executed is so wrong it almost beggars belief.

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UPDATE 14th Jan 2010: While the IE6 usage stats mentioned in this article have dropped, my views about IE6 support remain the same.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), a web browser released in August 2001, is currently touted as the bane of the Web due to inadequate functionality and poor security.

Many web developers now think support for IE6 should be dropped, citing its lack of features and security problems as good reasons for upgrading. In this article I’ll discuss why I think this is wrong, and why you should continue to support IE6.

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It’s been long overdue, but I finally moved my web host from Memset to EZPZ Hosting.

Back in September I wrote about the Memset Miniserver not being good enough for my site, and it’s only finally now that I had the time to make the switch elsewhere.

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Waking up to Gmail this morning gave me a nice surprise — they’ve finally implemented two long over-due features: assigning labels and archiving in one function, and assigning multiple labels to posts.

The original ‘Labels’ drop down was a bit clunky:

• You could only assign one label to a message at a time. To do more than one, required you to keep going back to the drop down and selecting the next one
• You couldn’t assign a label and archive it at the same time

The new labels features have now been split into two buttons: Move To and Labels.

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I recently switched hosts from MediaTemple in the USA, to Memset in the UK. Initially happy with their low-end Virtual Miniserver, I’m beginning to think it’s just not up to the job.

I host two sites here, both powered by Wordpress. One has virtually no audience, but the other — this very site, Frisk Design — has reasonable activity. Since my redesign, I’ve had a fair bit of exposure and two rather large traffic spikes crashed the web server and required a reboot.

I’m not happy.

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Accordions, colour attention grabbers, fading popups, expanding lists, overly complex slideshows. What do all these have in common?

They are largely redundant.

Since everybody discovered the pretty animation effects that JavaScript libraries can produce, they have ended up in practically everything. We’ve become very accustomed to them, yet very few people seem to be questioning their use. And some of the use is worth questioning.

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