July 2010
1 post
Cross-browser issues
“Cross-browser issues” is an oxymoron because the adjective cross-browser commonly refers to code or markup which works in all browsers. Having it describe the word “issues” would mean that, in fact, the code doesn’t work and thus is no longer cross-browser.
–Timothy Christensen
June 2010
1 post
At Microsoft, open source means technology lock-in
Microsoft doesn’t really understand the open-source movement because they don’t empower the end-user. The open-source technology they produce requires certain platforms or licenses to function properly and the data that software generates isn’t portable. Ideally, open-source software could go on any system and function long after Microsoft has stopped providing support because developers are free...
May 2010
1 post
Technologies I'll be researching this week
OpenID
oAuth
Activity Strea.ms
Webfinger
Salmon
PuSH
PoCo
oStatus
April 2010
2 posts
Cpedia is a piece of crap →
… check out the results for my name. (Who is that girl and why is she the top result for ‘Timmy Christensen’?)
March 2010
8 posts
todo.txt
Lately I’ve been working on this project for a guy. It’s mostly just me working on it and I was using a todo.txt file to list things that needed to get done. One day I wanted to clean off my desktop a bit and I thought that this file could easily be trashed if I just put all my todo’s in a bug tracking system. It was easy to do and on top of that it gave me sorting and...
Google suggestions A to Z
This is an old blog post that I wrote a few months back. I didn’t think it was very good so I didn’t post it. But today I’m cleaning off my desktop and I felt bad just throwing it away.
-Timmy Christensen
I typed in one letter into the Google search box and grabbed the first suggestion and these were the results.
Some of the suggestions are pretty obvious but if they are based on user trends,...
Hosting Node Apps →
I really want to learn how to get rolling with Node. I think it will be fun and interesting to see where this develops.
I think Techdirt got it right on the issue of ad...
If you are running a media site, if you’re having trouble making money, it’s your fault. Don’t blame your readers. Don’t blame your community by telling them they’re “devastating” a site by blocking ads or failing to pay for a paywall. As the producers of that site, it’s your responsibility to do things to get that site paid for.
via Techdirt
How to alienate your friends and block off...
Aaron Swartz wrote a little blog post entitled HOWTO: Read More Books. Sounds great, right?
Wrong!
The basics of reading more books include such steps as “alienate everyone close to you”, “block your favorite blogs” (where he suggests that you unplug your TV and literally block your favorite websites at the router level) and “keep the temperature low”. Sounds fine if you’re a monk whose...
Remember when I wrote this post?
Remember when I wrote this post? (1 year ago)
Well … it came true!
Organization
A Muslim, a Christian, and a crazy guy walk into a room. The one thing you can know for sure is that at least two out of three of them organize their lives around things that aren’t real.
via Scott Adams Blog
I organize myself around my TV schedule. I should probably change that.
February 2010
11 posts
Law of Two Feet or “The Law of Mobility”
If at any time during our time together you find yourself in any situation where you are neither learning nor contributing, use your two feet. Go to some other place where you may learn and contribute.
via Wikipedia
Basically, you’re only as good to me as what I can contribute or get out of you. It’s a pretty businesslike perspective but I think it applies really well to websites we visit or...
Commet about comments
Comments can be beneficial, but usually aren’t. For the vast majority of comment-enabled blogs, the comments are a net loss for the author with very high rates of ad-hominem attacks, nastiness, nonsensical responses, and spam.
via 37signals
It’s kinda ironic since the quote itself comes from a comment.
One third of the traffic on this blog is to this... →
It’s crazy to see that a little SEO actually works. I wrote a post that would be useful to web developers, I put some keywords in the title and headers, and then I got a couple of links to it from other websites. That’s kind of a simplified version of things but it’s a repeatable process that has proven to generate (a little) traffic.
Why Your Employees Are Losing Motivation →
via Harvard Business School
If some day I ever become a manager I hope that I excel at these things.
What restaurant websites say to web developers
“Take a look at our menu! It’s a PDF of a screenshot of a scan of a Word document printed on a dishtowel.”
– Restaurant website
There are too many restaurants with websites for all of them to be good. It’s especially difficult with tiny marketing budgets and short timelines.
These guys really know how to do “experience... →
This headline should be “20 Percent Of TechCrunch... →
… instead of “20 Percent Of TechCrunch Readers Are Already Browsing With Chrome.” They say that as if it’s inevitable that everyone will eventually browse with Google Chrome.
This pisses me off a little
Kevin Lynch (emphasis added):
Adobe supports HTML and its evolution and we look forward to adding more capabilities to our software around HTML as it evolves. If HTML could reliably do everything Flash does that would certainly save us a lot of effort, but that does not appear to be coming to pass. Even in the case of video, where Flash is enabling over 75% of video on the Web today, the coming...
HAML Sucks for Content →
This actually taught more about HAML than the documentation.
Flash 10.1 optimized for Mac OS X
With Flash Player 10.1, we are optimizing video rendering further on the Mac and expect to reduce CPU usage by half…
Well! That’s exciting news. I’m looking forward to a better Hulu experience.
via John Nack on Adobe
Maybe I don’t hate Microsoft so much.
The company’s chief executive, Steve Ballmer, has continued to deliver huge profits. They totaled well over $100 billion in the past 10 years alone and help sustain the economies of Seattle, Washington State and the nation as a whole. Its founder, Bill Gates, is not only the most generous philanthropist in history, but has also inspired thousands of his employees to give generously themselves....
December 2009
1 post
Human Scale →
I like the last paragraph where he applies “Human Scale” to website design.
November 2009
1 post
Ampersands (&'s) in URLs
Another common error occurs when including a URL which contains an ampersand (“&”):
<a href="foo.cgi?chapter=1§ion=2©=3&lang=en">...</a>
This example generates an error for “unknown entity section” because the “&” is assumed to begin an entity reference. Browsers often recover safely from this kind of error, but real...
October 2009
4 posts
Bloggers can’t write
Most blogs aren’t very good. Bloggers can’t write.
The writing isn’t the only thing that makes blogs bad; the lack of consistency isn’t helping either.
And I am a victim of this too. Blogs are kinda of a chore when you know that no body is going to read them. Maybe if there were more appreciation for the work put into blogs then the writers would care enough to put more time into them. Or...
The advice hasn’t changed
1999 – Build it and they will come. (a.k.a. field of dreams syndrome)
2004 – Build it for users, not search engines, and they will come.
2009 – Build it for users, optimize it for search engines, create content for link bait, promote it through social media, reoptimize it for conversions and they will come and convert.
The advice hasn’t changed. There are just a few more pieces.
via SEOmoz
September 2009
4 posts
“How about kicking the shit out of the old guys?”
– via 37signals
The State of the Web Design Profession
This is a beautiful post about the state of the industry and Noah Stokes really hits the nail on the head:
Let’s face it, we are a low hanging fruit. Anyone can design a site. And everyone’s neighbor’s step-cousin’s twin can code it. You don’t need to be certified, you don’t need to be licensed by the state, or submitted to the cruelty known as the Bar Exam. Nope, you just need a computer,...
“To every girl I’ve ever met: I won’t fix your computer or troubleshoot spyware,...”
August 2009
14 posts
If Seinfeld is a show about nothing then Reddit is a website about itself.
When you make a mistake, write a test
I wouldn’t call it a fiasco but a site I made today went out and there was one large bug that I entirely overlooked. There was an invisible <div> absolutely positioned over the main navigation of the site.
As a result I did something that a boss once told me to do when I messed up royally. That is, make a test so that I never do it again.
This is some really poignant advice for me now...
“I like bite-sized realizations but they can be a bit Jack Handy.”
– … in reference to every Twitter post ever.
The next great Twitter app . . .
The next great Twitter app will detect when you have a new follower and if they only have one tweet and zero followers it will block them automatically.
Does someone want to make that for me? I’d use it even if it were a paid service.
Easily highlight text when you click a
I used this in a project that I just finished and I thought that I’d share.
$('#badge-code').focus(function(){
$(this).select();
});
If the <textarea> element on your page is #badge-code then, using jQuery, the text in that textarea will be highlight when they click on the box.
This is great if you have a lot of code for your badge but not a lot of page real estate.
...
“Anyway, SEO it’s not an exact science, it’s actually more art and guessing. You...”
– via Theme Forest
Dear David Rojas,
You should measure your traffic and rankings before and after implementing one of these SEO tactics. Then do it again on a different website and tells us what happened with the technique that you weren’t certain about. I think you’ll find that what worked once...
Above the fold isn’t as relevant anymore
“Above the fold,” isn’t as relevant to web design as it used to be. Today, screen sizes can be all over the board and even if they were uniform, browser windows can be resized to any dimensions. Additionally, all of the majors browsers (including, most importantly the iPhone version of Safari) support zooming instead of text resize. So, all those variables together make it near impossible to...
One of the biggest problems I see on the web
The first guy (or girl) to come up with a system that prevents or fixes linkrot without killing the simplicity of writing an anchor tag and without obfuscating the link target will fix one of the biggest problems I see on the web.
–Timmy Christensen
No! That’s not “viral”
This morning I was watching the local news to catch the weather before I head off for work and I saw a spot about how (local?) couples are making weddings more memorable. Of course they go directly to funny dances and of course they show a clip from the JK Wedding Entrance Dance. After the news piece, one of the reporters comments how that video “went viral.”
And that brings me to my point...
Rectangle Tool makes better lines
In Adobe Photoshop when you’re designing a site and you need to draw a 1px solid line, I recommend using the rectangle tool (U) rather than the line tool. The reason is that the line tool will leave a blurry edge at the beginning and end of your line even when it’s drawn at 100% zoom. When using the rectangle tool, you’ll have to pay attention to the height of the line but you will get a...
Head instead of close button in Google Chrome →
Just doing it
I don’t know where I’ve heard this recently but I know that the only way to get better is by doing. I can read enough articles about SEO to fill a book but the only way I’m going to get my page (timmychristensen.com) to rank for any search term worth-a-damn is by opening up TextMate and optimizing.
That said, I want to get better at writing. Specifically writing for the web. I feel that if I’m...
July 2009
2 posts
ProTip: Tricks Are Just Tricks
I had lunch with some friends last week. The discussion topics varied, and at some point someone mentioned the word, tricks, and it got me thinking. I don’t know how long the trend of “X ways to do something really cool in CSS/XHTML/JS” has been going on, but there seems to be no end in sight.
Here is the thing. While it’s fun to learn the latest way to vertically center a div on a page...