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.
The TITLE element and jQuery’s text() function
In a day of zero fun, I ended up tasked with debugging a jQuery-based script that seemed to be perfectly fine, except of course, the part where it wasn’t working as expected in IE. After some tracing, it turns out the issue had everything to do with one line of code not returning a value:
$("title").text();. To translate, the author of the code had been trying to retrieve the text of the title element using jQuery’s text function. But, turns out that doesn’t work in IE. … Continue reading You Are Not a Web Developer
Yes, I'm talking to you, Dreamweaver user. You. Are. Not. A. Web. Developer. You're just the person that is screwing up the nice, pretty, semantic, standards-based Internet for the rest of us. The one that devalues our hard work with your naive undercutting. The one who makes our life hell when our project managers quote maintenance or design-tweaking projects not realizing that we can't just reuse your code and keep our dignity intact. You. I really hate you, you MM_preloader using, nested-tables employing you. … Continue reading
Why I Switched to WordPress
I’m pro-intensive-customization, anti-bloat, pro-knowing-what-your-code-does. For over a year, my site ran on a code-base authored at least 90% by me. Don’t get me wrong, I know when to say “hmm, that's not my strong point, let me use someone else’s code,” but I wanted to have total control over every aspect of my site’s backend. Then, last night I went live with WordPress. … Continue reading
Dictionary Lists: Child Elements and How to Use
One thing I see far more often than is excusable in code that I inherit is improperly used and structured dictionary lists. Certain elements in HTML are limited to having only a few specific children, and dictionary lists are no exception. Putting incorrect elements as direct children can cause display issues, parsing issues, compatibility issues and headaches for future development (whether it’s a new developer or your own updates). When developing, it should be a priority to use the correct—and only the correct—children in parent elements. Here’s how to properly use dictionary lists. … Continue reading
Creating Right Triangles in Adobe Illustrator
Here’s a quick way to draw a right triangle in Adobe Illustrator. It involves using just two tools: the rectangle tool and the pen tool. Don’t worry if you don’t have much experience with the pen tool—we’re using it very simply. The method: draw a rectangle or square and then use the pen to delete a corner, instantly creating a right triangle. … Continue reading
Online Retailers: Help Your Customers Find Your Products
One of my favorite (only because it has the best, low-price selection) sources of quality fabrics has horrible UX on their store site. Horrible to the point that I’m only able to do rudimentary filtering because I understand the GET variables they use to display their catalog. In fact, I wrote a post to help non-developer users figure out how to filter the catalog by changing the URL. The fact that I had to do either of those things really bothers me as a front-end developer; your users should never have to resort to manipulating the URL in order to filter or find products. … Continue reading
Losing Values When Cloning Forms
I’ve finally started development of a book recommendation widget for the musings and reviews on books I read section of my site. The general functionality is pretty simple: visitors have a few fields to complete with info about the book; upon submission, their recommendation is saved to a database; the new recommendation is shown to all and sundry in a “last recommendation” section; rinse & repeat. The whole no-JS needed, server-side scripting processing involved is simple, straight-forward and was quickly completed. Being a front-end developer, however, I want to make sure this can all be done in a smooth JS-enhanced way as well (for some nifty UX). That’s where I encountered yet another annoying JavaScript problem. … Continue reading
Trigger AJAX Error Event
When I was new to working with AJAX functions—especially in the realm of form submission—one hurdle I often encountered was how to handle processing errors in my back-end script and give meaningful feedback to my users. I didn’t understand how to designate a response as an error instead of successful processing. Early on, I sometimes employed a dirty hack of prepending any error with the string ERROR: and then adding in some quick checking to see if that substring existed in my response text. While that may get the job done, it’s not good form. It causes convoluted code usage, thumbs its nose at existing error handling functionality and makes future maintenance a headache. But there is a better way by simply utilizing your processing language’s inherent header and error handling functionality. … Continue reading
A Bad Webmaster is Bad Marketing
A month or two ago, a Twitter friend retweeted @berniebay saying Funny how the contemporary webmaster is really a marketing person… I retweeted that, adding At least, if they’re good ones. But—my poor grammar aside—my reply has been bugging me ever since, though I was unable to pinpoint why. I finally figured it out: I … Continue reading … Continue reading
CSS Shorthand: an Introduction
One of the things I see most often in beginners’ CSS is an utter lack of shorthand for style declarations. The cause may be that their existence is never mentioned in basic CSS tutorials, or that they’re never discussed in-depth enough for new developers to feel comfortable using them. Or, in some cases, simple ones are used without understanding exactly what is going on. I honestly don’t know why, but hopefully I can clear up some of their mystique so that these handy bits of code can be useful to all and sundry. … Continue reading
