Front-end Dev
Most days, I spend hours upon hours doing front-end Web development for a local company. Occasionally I’ll also pick up some freelance work as well. Regardless of the type of work I’m doing, I constantly learn new things, better ways to solve old problems, and novel ideas to implement. And I bug hunt. I don’t particularly like that bit though. Here’re stories of the above.
Google Mini KeyMatch and Related Query Imports
Filed under “you mean the documentation doesn’t exist somewhere?”, was my issue trying to import KeyMatches and Related Queries to a Google Mini we have set up for a client. Google’s documentation on them is very straight forward: select the file, press import— but it lacked instructions about how to set up the import file. … Continue reading … Continue reading
Creating Quarter-Circles in Adobe Illustrator
Here’s a quick way to draw a quarter-circle in Adobe Illustrator. It involves using just one tool: the arc tool. These instructions will work in Adobe Illustrator from CS–CS5. How to create a quarter-circle (or quarter-ellipse) in Illustrator Select the arc tool. (Click and hold the straight-line–segment tool to bring up the sub-menu of additional … Continue reading … Continue reading How to Schedule Planned Maintenance Using RewriteEngine
… or how I set my sites up to go black tomorrow in protest of SOPA and PIPA. You might not see this prior to that blackout, but it has useful applications for other things—essentially any time you want to do a redirect that has a specific schedule. If you are running your sites on … Continue reading … Continue reading
When to Use Events vs. Pageviews for Google Analytics
How to set up a schema for tracking certain things on a website is a polarizing topic. I’ve seen numerous schema that rely solely on pageviews to track everything—outbound link clicks, downloads, modal dialogs, etc—and the creator is dogmatic about the approach. But, semantically speaking, one of those three actions is a legitimate pageview; two … Continue reading … Continue reading How to Check If Google Analytics Click Tracking is Triggered
When I add new Event or PageView tracking code that is bound to click events, I want to be sure that the tracking code is fired without waiting for a site visitor to trigger it (or in some cases before the code is even on a live page). Because my own traffic is filtered out … Continue reading … Continue reading New Project Launch
I launched a new Web project a couple of months ago, but am just now getting a chance to post about it. The project is the Student Loan Facts Page, a site and blog about student loans. The importance of it to this Front-end dev blog, however, is that I want to let you know … Continue reading … Continue reading
IE Change Event Delay
I recently developed a sign-up form for a client that includes on-page price total calculation using JavaScript (jQuery). The premise is simple: the user provides information and specify options, then clicks a radio button to choose a specific price plan. The initial total price calculation is triggered by the change() event for the radio button elements. But, the client was concerned (and with user testing, it turned out rightly so) because in IE, the price calculation didn't happen until the user clicked somewhere else on the page. In cases where they first clicked one option, then a different one, the price would seemingly lag behind because of IE’s delayed change event firing. It was confusing to the user, but worse—confusing for me to “fix” IE’s implementation. … Continue reading A List Apart: The Survey 2010
For the past couple of years, A List Apart has run a survey for those of us who create the Web. They collect stats about location, type of work, etc. It's quick to take, and the information is helpful. Go take it or view the findings from last year. … Continue reading Elegant Code Patterns—Set and Return a Variable in One Line
I’ve been working on a Project that Never Ends™ for well… months now. Many months. The project has moved in to phase I’ve-lost-count, and the current milestone work is speed improvement. The project is a wonderful example of what goes wrong when you don’t have a detailed plan to start with, and has evolved into a terrible mess of convoluted code. The first step in any speed improvement is to reduce as much duplication as possible. One way of doing that is by caching calculations. And you can do that with a very small amount of code, using an elegant code pattern of setting and returning a variable in a single call. … Continue reading Elegant Code Patterns—Drop the Else When Code is Repeated
I'm working on launching a new project that has been eating up a lot of my time. Partially because any new project has a habit of eating up a lot of time, but also because I'm really focusing on using this project as a solid base for a few others, meaning I want my code to be elegant, my ideas well-executed, and my implementation in a way that means I won't want to scrap it and start over in the future as I do far too often. Part of that employing elegant code patterns. One of my most often used patterns involves dropping the else statement when I have code repeated in different logic clauses. … Continue reading 
