Tag Archives: web-design

Style guides make code collaboration easier.

March 29th, 2010

In this week’s Monday By Noon article Jonathan Christopher covers establishing style guides in code to make collaboration between multiple developers easier.

Although it may seem like an anal attempt at control style guides can go along way in making a lot things easier in the project workflow. Reading through and fixing bugs in someone else’s code, less conflicts will occur when merging branches and the speed at which new features can be added are all fringe benefits.

As Jon said: “It helps with everything from readability to quality control and especially helps a team become that much more cohesive.” So, do it.

Premium Tumblr themes

March 24th, 2010

Tumblr has announced that there are now premium themes available for Tumblr. Premium meaning that they cost money and are generally much more refined then the over 350 free themes already available for Tumblr.

Two things: First, I love that Tumblr is doing things to monetize their platform for both themselves and their design-savvy community. Any service that you love should, at some point, begin to monetize. If they don’t, they won’t survive. These types of moves by Tumblr are moves that will ensure their longevity as a service. Second, I think some of the free themes could easily be pulled into the Premium themes category and the designers of which could make a few dollars on them (since this model wasn’t available when they originally designed their free Tumblr themes). I wonder if Tumblr reached out to some of them?

Videos from The Future of Web Design in New York City, Fall 2007

May 28th, 2008

Late last year I was privileged enough to find the time to attend The Future of Web Design in New York City.  Some of my friends were presenting, the Carsonified team always puts together great events, and the event was relatively in my own backyard so the decision to attend was easy.

After the conference Ryan Carson, founder of Carsonified, told the attendees they’d make the video available online for free to all attendees because of some of the presentations issues they had.  Turns out the weather was beautiful in New York City and, because of the sunlight shining through the Javits Center, it was hard to see the presentations on screen.  I asked Ryan if we could share it through Viddler in a private way to attendees and he said “Absolutely.”

Long story short, for the first time ever this video is now available to the public whether or not you attended the conference.  And don’t think because these presentations were done in November of 2007 that they aren’t just as valuable today as they were then.  I just watched them all again, as every one did a great job.

Some of the presenters from The Future of Web Design were Joshua Davis, Ryan Signer of 37signals, Jeffery Zeldman, Andy Clarke, Josh Williams, Brian Fling, Jonanthan Snook, Elliot Jay Stocks, Lea Alcantara, Ryan Sims and D. Keith Robinson, Jina Bolton, Cindy Li, and Matthew Patterson.

So here you go, one place to watch all of the video, download the slides, and download the audio from these presentations.  This just saved you $150USD!  Also, watch the Future of Web Design’s Viddler account, as I think there will be much more to see there in the future.

Source: The Future of Web Design, New York 2007 videos.

Dan Phiffer’s Web site

May 7th, 2008

I am not even sure how I came across this site.  A few days ago I found myself browsing Dan Phiffer’s Web site and I have to say, it is probably one of the more innovative sites I’ve seen in a while.

There are some drawbacks, however: After visiting the site numerous times you kinda forget what you’ve seen and what you haven’t.  Subscribing to his feed is actually the feed to his blog powered by Tumblr.  And, some of the links from the front page have no way of getting back without clicking the back button on the browser or hacking up the URL.

But what this site lacks is made up for by the fun of actually playing with it.  Very cool.  Pushing the envelope. Kudos.

Source: Dan Phiffer (phiffer.org).

The CSS Selector proposal explained for CSS noobs

May 6th, 2008

I am not well versed in CSS.  I can get around.  I can make a site look pretty good in Safari and horrible in Internet Explorer (look at this site in IE for a great example).  But I’m a hacker at best.  I fiddle with CSS until something looks right, I don’t follow conventions or standards, I don’t know what a box-model hack actually does, and I can’t even begin to tell you how to write browser specific CSS styles.

If you are a like me then Shaun Inman’s proposal for CSS Selectors will probably leave you with a furled brow.

Rather then being left standing in the dark I tried to wrap my head around what Shaun was trying to accomplish with his proposal.  I didn’t get.  But I wanted to.  So I setup a quick example page that illustrated my question.  I then hopped, skipped, and jumped over the Shaun’s Web site, and asked what I was missing.  Shaun, kindly and succinctly, replied.

The non-CSS guru explanation of the CSS Selector proposal

I can’t be sure that any of you reading this are in the same boat as I was.  In fact, I’m sitting here thinking at all of you are smarter than I am when it comes to these things, and that you’re not even reading this right now.  But if you are, and you’d like to understand this debate a little further, here is as simple an explanation as I can give.

A style can not be attributed to a parent element when a specific child element is present.

I don’t even know if I worded that correctly.  I’m pretty sure I didn’t.  So here is the long-winded version.  In Shaun’s first example he shows that an image, that is wrapped with a link, would have the same style as a normal link.  The problem is that, currently, CSS can not determine the differences between a normal link and a link that has an image within it.  It just isn’t “smart” enough.  That is, without the help of something that runs after the DOM has loaded fully like the awe-inspiring John Resig’s jQuery plugin.

Here is a quick explanation of what John Resig’s JavaScript is doing.  Once the page loads, jQuery parses through the entire HTML document, determines which links “has images” (see documentation here) and then you may run specific JavaScript functions on those links specifically.  You could, for example, add classes to those links dynamically with jQuery, rather than mucking up your code with classes inline.

Shaun’s proposal is to help make CSS, and browsers, “smart” enough to determine when styles should be attributed to links and when not to be attributed to links that contain images.  This was only his first example, Shaun gives others.

I really hope I did an okay job explaining this for those of you that, like me, didn’t understand it before pounding my head against my desk.

Addendum

Shaun has hit me back with a succinct definition that correctly uses the lingo.

“CSS allows you to style elements based on their parent/ancestor elements but it does not allow you to style a parent element based on the presence of a descendant element.”

You can look backwards, but you can’t look forwards.  Thanks Shaun!

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee

February 9th, 2007

9rules, former employer of yours truly and quite possibly the fastest growing brand in blogging, has recently redesigned their site; which was codenamed Ali during development.

Brining Social Back - 9rules

I am not a huge boxing fan (since I don’t watch boxing all that much I wouldn’t want to call myself a fan for fear of being ridiculed) but I am a fan of Muhammad Ali, and his boxing style and career. When I read Paul’s entry about the redesign, and when he referred to it as Ali, I got a little bit frightened. Would the new site hold a candle to my thoughts on Ali?

Being that I am familiar with the system that runs 9rules (which I’m sure, from what I’m seeing now, has been improved 10-fold since my tenure) I know that an enormous amount of hard work went into creating this iteration of the site. Style, layout, and panache aside – the underpinnings of the new 9rules.com is a monumental upgrade from the previous code-base which was a mashup of the incredibly crappy code I wrote while I was there and Mike Rundle trying to patch said crap. I’d be willing to wager that only a small percentage, or almost none-at-all, of the code that I wrote is still in use at 9rules (which is a blessing for them, trust me).

In other words: the 9rules team did as Ali taught: “I run on the road, long before I dance under the lights.” They were willing to go back to the “drawing board” to rebuild their architecture simply to make it more manageable, faster, and more stable. And really this is something the general public, or any of their members for that matter, wouldn’t have noticed – but this is exactly what they should have done. And from what I’ve seen so far they’ve accomplished what they set out to do.

So, does it hold a candle to my thoughts on Ali? Actually – it blew the candle right out. I’m really impressed by this accomplishment.

Take a look around the new 9rules. I think you will like what you see. Register for an account so that you can take advantage of notes (which got a huge shot of nitro in this release) and my.9rules (which is brand-new) – which are teeming with life right now. Oh and don’t forget to play around with topics, which is a feature that 9rules has wanted to do for quite awhile and I think they pulled it off really well. I’ve been messing around in the apple topic all morning.

Kudos Paul, Mike, and Tyme. You guys are class acts and 9rules Ali is really great. I recommend everyone buying these guys a drink, or a milk for Mike, at SXSW.

To leave you with another quote from Ali, that I feel applies to the 9rules team: “Champions aren’t made in gyms. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them-a desire, a dream, a vision. They have to have last-minute stamina, they have to be a little faster, they have to have the skill and the will. But the will must be stronger than the skill. “

[tags]9rules, paul scrivens, mike rundle, tyme white, redesign, muhammad ali, blogging, community, social network, web design, thoughts[/tags]
[slug]9rules-Ali[/slug]