I have admittedly not taken the time to attend An Event Apart any of the times it’s been held, but I do tend to follow the #aea hashtag on Twitter so I can glean at least a little wisdom from the discomfort of my own desk as I wade through…
It’s been a few weeks since Twitter moved to its own link shortening service for tweets. Originally the shortener only kicked in for tweets over 18 characters, but Twitter recently moved to have it affect all URLs in tweets. Twitter’s argument was that this allows Twitter to reduce the number…
When the guy who coined the term “Responsive Web Design,” has written a book about it, and is well regarded throughout the industry is asked to name his 20 favorite responsive sites, you should expect top-notch examples of sites that use CSS to respond to nearly any medium. Except that…
This article was originally posted on evolt.org, an online resource for web developers, maintained by web developers. I have granted evolt.org the right to use this article on its web site, and it is the only entity with the right to reproduce it. As web browsing technology continues to change…
WebAIM is a non-profit organization within the Center for Persons with Disabilities at Utah State University. It has a reputation (perhaps only in my head?) or providing resources both to the disabled and to organizations enlightened enough to want to support the disabled (or selfish enough to recognize they will…
The patent trolling continues, which should really be no surprise. Consider that Nortel put its portfolio of 6,000 patents on the auction block, with Google starting bidding at $900 million dollars only to be beat out by a consortium of Apple, Microsoft, Research in Motion, EMC, Ericsson and Sony for…
Color is the newest social media application on the block, launched just after SxSW and relying on proximity-based media sharing instead of a friend model. Founded by names from other successful ventures along with $41 million in funding, Color seemed poised to storm the social media market. One day after…
A recurring problem I find is when web developers, their support teams and their managers try to evaluate who is using their site(s) by reviewing their web logs (or Google Analytics) in a vacuum. It is far too easy to simply look at statistics reporting what browsers use a site…
In November I wrote up a post (How Many Users Support JavaScript?) outlining the process and results from Yahoo’s study about how many users have JavaScript disabled (How many users have JavaScript disabled? and Followup: How many users have JavaScript disabled?). The Numbers In those articles, Yahoo stated that even…
I can’t turn on the TV, surf the web, or peer into my Twitter feed without stumbling into another year-end wrap-up of 2010. These dime-a-dozen contrivances abound like the proverbial lemming to the cliff (lemmings don’t really do that, it’s also a contrivance). However, there have been enough of some…
One of the ongoing truths about search engine optimization (SEO) has been that inbound links are usually a good thing. This has caused SEO scammers to abuse the practice by creating and using “link farms,” sites that exist solely to link back to client sites. This “spamdexing” technique is based…
It’s like I’m running out of novel titles or something. With the launch of Google Instant a couple months ago, the landscape for SEO changed as now site authors had to consider targeting keywords for search results that appear as the user types (see my post at evolt.org: Google Instant…