Now that the (Western, my favorite) holiday season is upon us, the tradition of advent calendars whose chocolate is replaced with web-related tips and articles is back. This year’s crop is missing some from last year, but there’s still good stuff to be found. If you know of any others,…
We should be familiar with anti-patterns in user interface design — counter-intuitive or ineffective user interface techniques. Dark patterns are user interface design patterns that intentionally try to steer users into taking actions that are in the best interest of the site owner, not the user. Sadly, users encounter these…
Past Thanksgivings Three years ago I wrote a post describing how I used social media during my 2008 Thanksgiving dinner (mostly to keep my guests pacified in my tiny house while I considered cooking a turkey with a pencil torch). To my family it was novel to watch people across…
Typography on the web has come a long way from the days of a handful of web-safe fonts, six sizes, and little other control. With the ability to embed custom typefaces in web pages and exert a great deal of control via CSS, it was a matter of time before…
Today Twitter announced that it has added header images to profiles, similar to what Facebook and Google+ have done. In addition, Twitter has updated its apps for iOS and Android devices to use those header images. Twitter explains why it has added this feature: Starting today you can make your…
As I started down the path of my first HTML5 web page I spent a good deal of time trying to understand the sectioning elements of HTML5 — nav, article, aside, and section — as well as the major structural elements such as header and footer. Trying to find the…
Update: September 7, 2012 I misunderstood how browser load external JavaScript files when that load itself comes from embedded script. Ben Ward explained it to me and referenced this handy article, Thinking Async. The gist of the article is that using JavaScript to write in a call to a JavaScript…
This post was written in 2012, when Internet Explorer was still a browser in common use, Edge did not exist (in either form), and WHCM was not yet on standards track. If you are supporting IE or looking for historical support, then this article is for you. Otherwise I recommend…
I have been working on a slow and plodding redesign of my personal site and am playing around with some navigation ideas. I wanted to create a JavaScript-free and image-free radial menu, an idea I toyed with a couple years ago and abandoned due to the lack of CSS support…
It’s not hard to stumble across diatribes against IE6 (and 7 and 8) users across forums peopled by web developers. As a web developer there is no denying that my desire to play with the new and shiny is hampered by my need to support users on older browsers and…
This past Saturday marked the third Mashable-sponsored Social Media Day here in Buffalo. While the last two years have been unofficial (much like the day itself), this year the City of Buffalo declared June 30, 2012 as Social Media Day (the year on the proclamation makes me think this is…
If you’ve used the Twitter web interface much you might have noticed that sometimes a tweet that links to a popular site includes previews of the pictures, or perhaps video, or even maps. For example, when I check into a venue on Foursquare and allow that to be auto-tweeted, the…