When I say “global,” I don’t necessarily mean the whole world, but really any aggregate pile of numbers for browsers that aren’t culled from your own site or project. With IE6 finally fading (which many developers will claim is a result of their IE6-blocking sites), the ire of developers has…
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (1815—1852), considered by many to be the first computer programmer (of any gender). Portrait by Alfred Edward Chalon. Lately you’ve probably heard plenty about education in the US and the renewed push for STEM (science, technology, engineering, math). As STEM education gets attention, it…
Web developers have been looking to call everything the new Internet Explorer for a while now. With Opera’s recent move to WebKit as its rendering engine (replacing Presto), even more developers are suggesting that WebKit is becoming the new IE. I think they are right, but for the wrong reasons.…
I have no illusions that accessibility on the web can be tricky. It’s primarily tricky because of the way developers choose to implement it. Web Axe nicely sums it up: Most people don’t realize that the web IS accessible. The problem is that designers and developers break it.— Web Axe…
Facebook has announced its new Graph Search feature which allows logged in users to search for information across their friend profiles. Facebook even made it a point to set up a page about privacy in the graph search to try to head off concerns from users. In this case, Facebook…
Here’s the TL;DR: Google Maps sniffs a browser’s user agent string. If it finds Internet Explorer on Windows Phone, then it kicks it over to the m.google.com mobile home page. So let’s be clear. It’s 2013 and one of the biggest companies on the internet is using a sniffer to…
Every year I think people will start to get the hang of social media. After all, it’s really not much different from what we’ve done as a society forever, just more rapid-fire. Every year I am proven wrong. Perhaps we need to consider better behavior on social media as a…
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…
This image gleefully stolen from The Page That No One Will Ever See. Now it may be a seen page. Yesterday an eye-catching headline popped up in my Twitter feed: 6 Reasons Facebook and Twitter Are More Important Than a Website (which is a different message than the author’s “infographic”…
This past weekend I had the pleasure of participating in Buffalo’s first WordCamp for WordPress users. Before my presentation I made it a point to sit in on the other sessions that were in the same track as mine. When discussing SEO, all the sessions I saw mentioned only Google.…
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…