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...