I don’t care for infographics. Their original purpose of visually conveying otherwise complex information has been superseded by their current use as marketing drek with “quirky” illustrations, blocks of prose, and the occasional useful factoid. The love affair with inforgraphics is confounding to me as a web developer. They are…
I started this post way back in March after reading Brad Frosts’ bit on carousels. Then I let it sit unfinished. With the buzz around ShouldIUseACarousel.com this week, I figured I’d finish it up. The data is old, although I offer updated numbers at the bottom. The Process I looked…
Social media outlets are practically a dime a dozen. Excluding ones that are pretty stable right now (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), most of them will either fail or get bought. The problem is that your data, your content, typically dies when they do. As an individual you might not care too…
Yesterday Matt Cutts from Google tweeted that Google search results for users on smartphones may be adjusted based on the kinds of errors a web site produces (of course I was excited): Important: if your website has smartphone errors, we may change rankings for smartphone users: goo.gl/x8R4A #smx— Matt Cutts…
This post isn’t proposing any solutions (although I do toss out a hack). This post is a rant that I hope helps influence browser makers. Background Much of my web work isn’t for public facing web sites. Often it’s for enterprise-level software that is deployed via the web and used…
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…