I got sent a link to an MSDN usability article with “20 Tips for a Better, Functional User Experience”. Number 9 on the list is “Never Disrupt the User” – which was amusingly accompanied by an invitation to take an online survey. It made me laugh so I thought I’d share it.
Louis Lazarus over at impressivewebs.com recently wote an interesting article on the skills which front end developers should have. It was an interesting post though I felt it turned into a bit of a framework/buzzword list, so I thought I would put together my own thoughts on the matter. The main difference I think is [...]
I needed to sort an array of objects in JavaScript recently and was quite frankly amazed by 2 things: I’d never done it before in 7+ years of JavaScript It’s really rather easy! JavaScript has Array.sort that will order an array’s contents in ascending alphabetical order. So: var testArray = ['c', 'a', 'b']; testArray.sort(); //sorts [...]
It’s been stated many times before that you only have a small window of opportunity to capture a user’s attention when they visit your website. One factor in grabbing this user and holding on to them is in ensuring the web page they land on loads quickly. Page download speed is also a factor in [...]
There is always a lovely balance to be had between the worlds of design and code, especially when it comes to balancing the wants and desires of the product owner, especially when factoring in search engine optimisation (SEO). A recent project had a large SEO requirement which included the (mostly automated) optimisation of many thousands [...]
A quick and simple means of using PHP to convert a MySQL timestamp field into the required format for the RSS pubDate field. date(‘D, d M Y H:i:s O’, strtotime($mysql_timestamp_val));
This is one of those really annoying pieces of syntax that I can never remember and that I always have to look up so I figured that other people would surely have the same issue :) Anyway, see below for how to write CDATA comments in your JavaScript to make it XHTML compliant.
On a recent project I was required to write some QUnit based tests for some jQuery widgets that I’d built. The goal was to try and test all of the functionality of the widget in isolation, however some aspects of the widget required animations to fire and complete before I could test the outcome. QUnit [...]
On a recent project I was asked to add some client side functionality to an input field, so that people clicking in the input box would have the contents auto-selected. Not a problem, a fairly easy piece of work, especially with jQuery . This evolved into additional functionality to improve the usability of the input [...]
On a recent project I had to write a test to ensure that certain JavaScript code was loaded on an order confirmation page. This was to pass some data to Yahoo! Analytics provider that the client could then verify against an order in their system. It was the first time I had had to verify [...]