Month: September 2007

  • The Holy Mail

    Updated Once Latest Greatest (8/27/08) I have been working on an email template to use for a future design tool. Emails, if you don’t know, are not as easy to design as web pages. They are viewed in a wider variety of clients. Some of these clients are downright evil. I feel like I have…

  • New Host: Bluehost

    I finally lost my patience with LunarPages.  The downtime was just getting out of control.  I put down $95 and got a Bluehost subscription (12 months).  Lunarpages made me wait 10-30 minutes for their technical support and then refused to do anything about it.  The intermittent failures were just unbearable.  I am going to switch…

  • The UX of Right Angles

    http://mike.teczno.com/img/right-triangles/RightTriangles.swf Grab the fingers with your mouse and walk the image across the page. No real world usefulness, but it’s sure fun.

  • WordPress 2.3

    WordPress 2.3 is out. I downloaded it and upgraded. Bam! I was going to wait for the fantastico upgrade, but decided to just push the envelope. The upgrade process is so smooth and pain free. I really have to hand it to those guys, this is a great product. I admit I haven’t used all…

  • Here’s to the Crazy Ones

    Ethan’s teacher, Mr. Fidner has this posted on the classroom wall. He also has pictures of inspirational people like John Lennon and Ghandi. I like Mr. Fidner. I consider myself a crazy one. Here’s to the crazy ones.The misfits.The rebels.The troublemakers.The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.They’re not fond…

  • Manage Categories in WordPress

    Another great find!  Check out this plugin for WordPress to manage categories with Ajax.  I have a few hundred uncategorized posts from before I knew to manage them.  I have always been hesitant to deal with them.  Now, with this plugin, it’s finally fast enough to deal with!  Hooray! I am having a good technology…

  • Finally, a UTF-8 WordPress Converter!

    Just what I wanted for the holidays!  As previously blogged, I had been having trouble with the latest versions of WordPress because they switched from Latin to UTF-8 character set.  I found a fix, which basically said, “Leave it as Latin”.  But finally, I found a 1-step UTF-8 Converter Plugin.  GENIUS!! It didn’t just work…

  • Opera JS Troubleshooting

    I recently received a comment that said my sprites were breaking in Opera and Safari 2. I don’t have a mac, so I can’t test Safari 2, only 3. Safari 3 works fine. I checked my Google Analytics to see how many people used Opera and it turns out to be around 3%. So I…

  • PHP Learnings

    I recently have been working on a new API Browser for jQuery. It’s been a pet project in the back of my mind for some time. I thought I could create a better mousetrap, if only I could get over the programming hump. So finally, last week, I took a few tentative steps forward. First,…

  • Rob Reich, SuperCapitalism

    I was listening to NPR this morning to an interview with Robert Reich. Apparently, Rob Reich uses blogspot for his blog. He was very interesting on the interview. He was talking about how the world has changed in the last 30 years. I didn’t get to the end of the interview, so I think I…

  • The UX of Required Fields

    I was recently asked: I was wondering if you could tell me if there is a “proper” or generally acceptable way to denote required fields on a form. Label* Field *Label Field Label *Field I don’t think the Form Police will arrest you if you do #2 or #3. However, they will arrest you for…

  • jQuery UI and the UX of Demos

    jQuery has announced a new user interface components package called jQuery UI. It is a pretty impressive set of widgets and components to make a rich user interface. It also consolidates alot of various plugins for a consistent development effort. I think it’s an awesome start and will continue to get better. Looking at the…

  • The UX of Podcast Players

    I have been frustrated with maintaining the podcast player on Marketo.com. See example on this page. (Click Podcast on the left). The UX was good, in that it zoomed up gracefully and played. However, the pain was on the backend. I had to encode each mp3 as a SWF file for it to work. I…

  • jQuery spring cleaning

    jQuery just recently released their 1.2 version.  This spurred me to get some of my mini-projects done and clean up my cookbook area.  I also FINALLY figured out how to Gzip my JavaScript files.  There might be an easier way, but here is how I did it. Rename the JavaScript files from .js to .php. …