I am starting to think that I should redo my theme from scratch so I can take advantage of the sidebar widgets and also get a design made by me. However, since that is a project I really don’t want to take on right now, I made some minor upgrades. First were the comments. I…
First of all, I love these two photos. The look on their faces is priceless. Here is the family on Halloween. Picasa has been doing well for us in the last year. The only drawback has been the lack of “collections”. Collections have recently been added to Flickr. The lack of this feature was the…
We are in the long tail at work. The product is getting close to releasable. The little details start kicking in and take an enormous amount of time and attention. I think the product will be well received, but like most products, the devil is in the details. The heat at work has definitely been…
I posted a review to what seemed to be an objective hosting review website. I got an email from the “editor” who talked to me about my experience. It was obvious that I was a real customer and my problems were well documented. It turns out that these hosting review sites are sponsored by the…
My uptime stats have improved greatly with Bluehost. Lunarpages clearly was having uptime issues, at least with the server I was on. The stats are even worse than they appear for Lunarpages. I switched about Sept 23, because it was so bad. Since then, there have only been 2 failed attempts by Siteuptime. What is…
Yesterday, our house guest, Jörn, showed me how to change the URLs on WordPress. The old links still work, but now the new links will show up better in other places, like Google Analytics. You can see how the links are useless to tell me what page that was. I basically have to click through.…
My experience with project estimates and scope can be summed up by the following chart. Of course the actual chart has way more uphill bumps and a much longer tail. But basically, the project starts, then you realize you didn’t scope it out entirely. Then some progress happens and you realize you totally forgot an…
Last night I was struggling with a problem that refused to budge. I was very confident in the beginning. Of course, Internet Explorer just refused to cooperate and Firefox was just fine. The problem kept going to a for while as a lost confidence. Right before I was about to quit, I sat very still…
I found this easy way to view generated source in IE. Type this in the browser: javascript:'<xmp>’ + window.document.body.outerHTML+ ‘</xmp>’ Why is Microsoft NOT building developer tools for IE? It’s making me sick. Firebug was made by one guy. Why can’t Microsoft make this seemingly simple thing? How about profiling? Memory leak detection? Come on.
I often see technology out there that is solid, but lacking a tiny bit of the details from a UX perspective. Or I would like to extend it a little bit more for a UX reason. When that happens, every once in a while, someone tells me I am “complaining” and says, “Why don’t you…
I actually am having trouble finding a decent Design Pattern for a Tree. A tree is a critical user interface element and is being used more and more on applications. Since, I can’t find one, I am going to quickly summarize the pattern I proscribe. Let’s start with the EXT JS Tree. This tree is…
I am working on a page with a small bit of JavaScript written by someone else. They are in the Pre-jQUery era. It’s all old and crusty code that is hard to read. I think I could have made the same stuff in jQuery using about 5 lines. jQuery just makes web page development so…
I have been getting a little bit on a roll with the book. I got one chapter approved and another chapter written in first draft form. I like the style of it. I hope the publisher can get me an illustrator. There are tons of pictures and my reliance on Microsoft Clip Art is pretty…
I don’t know exactly why, but I made an Amazon.com Wishlist. I was writing my book and got to a stopping point and wanted to see what Amazon.com did for some UI thing. And I just said, “Well, I am here. Why not? Note: The content of this site is always objective and free. I…