Category: design
-
Books for the Budding Web Designer/Developer
This holiday season, pick up some books to aid the budding web designer/developer in your life. Even if it’s you.
-
Web Inspector Vs. Firebug
My fundamental problem with Web Inspector is … The CSS view does not resemble a stylesheet, and the HTML view does not resemble source code. Firebug does, and I find this makes development easier. But there’s a bit more to it. …
-
Must-Have WordPress Plugin: WP Super Cache
Yes, you should have WP Super Cache installed and working for your self-hosted WordPress site.
-
My Preferred Image Replacement Technique
There are many different kinds of image replacement techniques exhaustively detailed around the web. Many seem quite complex, and dated, and it seems that the most popular technique I see is the Farhner method, or text-indent: -9999px. However, there is a small problem with this technique: in Firefox it draws lines stretching across your screen…
-
Reminder: QuickTime Embeds
Okay, so you know how to make an optimized video for the Web with HandBrakeCLI, now let’s embed that bad boy into the webpage. … Oops. I always forget how to do QuickTime embeds. They are a rather involved affair so the name is quite ironic. Anyway, this post is mostly a reminder to myself,…
-
Coda Emulated in WebKit
I got tired of the boring look of a standard Apache web directory. So instead of browsing folders the default way, I built a small index.php file in the root, grabbed all folders dynamically, injected them as HTML5 and styled them with CSS3. Since I work with Coda all day, I chose to emulate their…
-
Jay’s WordPress Admin Plugin
I’ve created a WordPress plugin to fix an issue I have with the WordPress Dashboard: the HTML editor is not a monospaced font. I don’t like reading code in 13px Lucida Grande, so I wrote a plugin to add a stylesheet with 12px Monaco.
-
Defining Focus Styles for Web Accessibility
Most CSS hackers are familiar with Eric Meyer’s CSS Reset. Most are also familiar with Zeldman’s “LoVe? HA!” mnemonic to remember the pseudo-classes for anchors, :link, :visited, :hover, and :active. But what you might not be familiar with is the comment at the bottom of Meyer’s Reset block: “Remember to define focus styles!” Of course,…
-
Create Your Own WordPress Fail Whale
This page shows up when WordPress cannot connect to your MySQL database. The entire page, complete with head and body, is written into the code, so the good news is we can put whatever we want here.
-
Some Notes On iTunes LP
It’s clear that I’m pretty excited about iTunes LP. The “deluxe album” format from the iTunes Store is an attempt to revitalize music sales by providing an immersive digital experience complete with detailed art reminiscent of when people used to buy records. Feature-wise, an iTunes LP is a DRM-free album in high-quality 256kbps AAC format,…
-
Setting Up Your Mac For Local Development Using Coda, WordPress & MAMP
WordPress is not just for blogs. WordPress is a highly sophisticated content management system that you can use to develop and manage your client’s professional websites. Best of all, it’s entirely free. To get started it helps to experiment without the hassle of publishing files to the Internet. With a Mac, you already have the…
-
My Favorite WordPress Plugins
The abundance of “Top Ten” Lists of WordPress Plugins helps reinforce those plugins that are extremely necessary; like the All In One SEO plugin, or the Google XML Sitemaps plugin. However, my most essential plugins are never listed. So, while some of the following may not be as sexy as the Increase Your Traffic By…