blog

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Learning on the Web

Keeping abreast of the changes on the interwebs is a never ending battle, most days you feel as if you’re falling behind.

However, one simple way to tell if you’re learning something new is to ask yourself - if I had to do a project over again, what would I change?

Keeping abreast of the changes on the interwebs is a never ending battle—most days you feel as if you’re falling behind.

Lately I’ve had the experience of “duplicating” a website I built for a client six months ago to use on another new website. I thought my first effort was pretty slick - using a CSS grid system (BlueTrip, to be precise). The next time around, I still used BlueTrip (mostly because I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel) but I changed the DTD to html5 and used modernizer to implement some nice CSS3 tricks.

No, the site is not “responsive”, at least not yet. My goal is to make BlueTrip responsive, much like the 1140 grid system is. But nonetheless, there’s a nice fallback for IE6/7. Something I don’t have to worry about using another system.

If you’re aware of developments in the field of web design/development, you know that things move at the speed of light, and most of the time you’re left in the dark. But don’t give up - keep learning/reading/posting. The vast majority of us aren’t like Ethan Marcotte or Jonathan Snook. We’d like to pretend we are, but we aren’t. So we trudge on. And that is good enough.

Posted by Jesse on 06/09 at 03:02 AM

Mobile is what you want (320 and up)

Mobile is what you want.

What if you could design a website for mobile first?

Don’t say that you saw it here first but…check this out.

Yeehaw! Design for mobile first and you’ll be okay.

Posted by Jesse on 04/20 at 02:20 AM

Free Windows web development tools (that rock)

Lately at work, I’ve been mixing it up with regards to open-source Windows web development tools.

My Windows FTP client of choice (for the moment) is WinSCP because it is just blazingly fast and supports SFTP. With all the nonsense going today regarding secure domains, SFTP is going to be the standard of the future. I’ve used FileZilla and I’ve got to say, it’s simply a slow turtle compared to WinSCP. Sure, if you make the switch,  new software takes some getting used to, but WinSCP is quality stuff. And it lets you designate your text editor of choice, when editing files remotely. Enter Notepad++

Lately at work, I’ve been mixing it up with regards to open source Windows web development tools.

Now I know that quality, free Windows text editors are few and far between (if you need to know the difference between a text editor and a word processor, consult wikipedia). Nonetheless, I rely on Notepad++ as my text editor of choice. There are a wealth of plugins to do web development with Notepad++.

So that’s it, a short list of how to do web development on a Windows machine without Dreamweaver. How much does is cost? NOTHING.

Posted by Jesse on 03/03 at 03:13 AM

Experimenting with web fonts and another CSS grid system

Just a quick post here, but lately I’ve been experimenting with web fonts and another CSS grid system (YUI Grids).

Enter the Google Font Directory. Stupid simple to set up and implement. Who would’ve thought that web fonts could progress this far for free?

Surprised? Yeah, me too. I was given some comps with “non-web” fonts so of course that sent me packing to look for some good alternatives (we haven’t agreed on Typekit and the like, yet). Enter the Google Font Directory. Stupid simple to set up and implement. Who would’ve thought that web fonts could progress this far for free? Check out the 2010 24ways.org article on the same.

On YUI Grids, there’s a much older 24ways.org article on the implementation, and it still stands the test of time. Why YUI Grids?  Because YUI eats there own dog food. Yahoo serves more web content than I could ever hope to. Besides, it’s hard to fault a microgrid-inspired design that’s only 4kb yet serves up over 1000K layout variations. Thank you, YUI! and I hope the best part you isn’t sold off into obsolescence.

So yeah, working on the web is still cool.

Posted by Jesse on 02/27 at 03:03 AM

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