I really have come to enjoy and appreciate the service SiteUptime. They will ping a site and keep track of whether it displays in a browser. The first site is free with 15 minute checks. For 5 bucks a month you get 3 sites at 5 minute intervals plus other checks. That is an AWESOME…
On Ajaxian, they had this article about BlueprintCSS. It’s a CSS framework to make grids and other useful base components of a webpage. My main concern however is having equal-height columns. It doesn’t seem to have that, on first glance. My second concern is how detailed it is with great commenting. This is a good…
There are many ways of using a image sprite. Most ways use a background-image that can be moved using CSS. The problem is that this method creates alot of CSS defintitions that are hard to manage. The reason is that Firefox does not support the background-position-x CSS attribute. This really sucks because it means that…
There has been alot of talk lately about Rich Text Editors (RTE). There are alot of of them out there. FCKEditor, TinyMCE and xStandard are just a few. Recently Yahoo launched their own RTE. (Seems a little slow to me). EXT just announced they would have a RTE in their 2.0 release. (That 2.0 release…
Brad Neuberg’s brainstorming technique yesterday was called The Sacred Cow. You put on the white board all your assumptions about “sacred cows” of the browser. These aren’t hard and fast rules, but rather they are things that people assume. Of course, there are current innovative examples that break many of these. Someone tooks pictures, so…
I am reporting on a break-through idea. I have to describe it. It will change the world. Ar at least change the World Wide Web. It’s not “my” idea. It was a result of a brainstorming session. I’ll explain: It’s the last day of Ajax Experience. It started off with a keynote by Kevin Lynch…
Today is day 2 of AjaxExperience 2007. It is the first conference I have attended since Usability Week 2006. I have met lots of great people, like Bill Scott from Yahoo. He worked on their design patterns site, which I think is something every good designer should read. Also, Brian Cherne of HoverIntent fame. I love that…
What is this? It’s like a little cursor nose. [image lost – sorry] UPDATE: John Resig of Mozilla and jQuery fame has provided the answer. To Firefox this is a feature when you mix right-to-left or left-to-right text-directions. The little tick tells the user which direction the text should go. I can almost guarantee that…
Since switching to Lunarpages.com, I have been pretty happy. Speed is good. However, they just allowed something to happen which kind of annoyed me. I had installed the latest version of WordPress when I switched over and imported my blog. After a while, Lunarpages got the upgraded version of WordPress as well. So they kept…
There are alot of speed tests on the web that look at javascript libraries like jQuery. All of them have been getting faster and faster. I used a MooTools template, which was actually pretty easy to set up. I pointed it at my blog rather than the typical Shakespeare script. I also included the size…
Recently I was looking at Veoh. It seems to be a YouTube competitor. It has a nice UI and works pretty much the same way as YouTube. However, they allow you to download any of the videos, if you register. They also have a Veoh Player, but as far as I can see, the downloads…
Having trouble getting past a certain point in my presentation for AjaxExperience 2007. In the presentation, I have ranted and raved about the creative process and interaction design. I have nice illustrations and fancy transitions. All is well. Now, I want to transition to the part where there is jQuery. I want to show examples.…
jQuery 1.1.3 just got released. It’s 800% faster on average than 1.1.2 and still 20k. It also hase a few bells and whistles which will make my life easier. One thing I wish I had last month is a negative selector like $(“div[@id!=test]”). The exclamation point helps because I can say do something to anything…
I was just reading the CSS3 specifications. This got me down for two reasons. One, because I am a total geek for reading these. Two, because browsers are pretty far away from supporting these. Who knows when I will feel comfortable actually using some of these capabilities? When IE7 dies? 2010? Later? The stuff in…