by Alex Holt | Jul 1, 2008 | Dev, Web |
I’ve always used prototype and scriptaculous to do JS stuff in the past. However I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about jQuery and i’d noticed that sites i’d seen using jQuery seemed to have much smoother animation etc. So in the spirit of keeping an open mind (and continuing to learn.. something I don’t find myself doing that often anymore) i set about building a simple JS based web app to test how jQuery would suit my programming etc.. After about 4 minutes of brainstorming, I found myself getting annoyed, and switched to myTweetdeck to distract myself. In a semi-relevant aside, i have to say, tweetdeck makes my twitter usage about 100x as useful.. plug! So i decided it would be cool to try knocking upa simple Ajax application that emulated Tweetdeck’s searching features – using the search.twitter.com api (previously summize). So i downloaded jQuery, and set up 3 simple div based columns to hold the tweets i was going to be grabbing. The beautiful thing i discovered with jQuery is it can cross domain ajax requests, so i can talk directly to the search.twitter.com api without having to write a proxy script on my server – cool! The twitter search API has an option to return JSON data, which is really great for building an app like this, since we end up receiving the data and handling it all in JS with no decoding necessary.. too easy. So, we have our 3 divs and at this point I started to get my hands dirty in jQuery (i’m not a complete beginner, but i never really used it extensively.. so i was keen to...
by Alex Holt | May 3, 2008 | Design, Web |
Having learned design for web around the same time as print, rather than being a converted print designer – I’ve always been a fan of gridless or semi-gridded design. I like fluid layouts that aren’t reliant on exact positioning. Partly this stems from early in my career when people would window switch between nutscrape and ie and ask me to rectify “bugs” where a block of text was starting 1 pixel too high or low. To me (so long as its lining up isn’t a design feature) I couldn’t care less about these so called bugs. The way I see it, unless I can find that design flaw WITHOUT checking both browsers then I see absolutely no reason to “fix” it. After all, day to day users of a web site don’t check the site in multiple browsers, so so long as the page doesnt scream “I shouldn’t look like this” I am happy, the audience are happy and the client ought to be happy. Of course there will always be perfectionists who chant for pixel perfect, cross browser design (I have some clients who still ask for it – and like a good mac monkey, I strive to oblige) but the truth is that as designers and devleopers it is our responsibility to educate our clients about the pros and cons of these sorts of issues. After all we are supposed to be professionals. We are supposed to be experts. And we should behave (and be treated) as such. I firmly believe thay my profession as a web developer is almost as specialised (although slightly more accesible) than that of a...
by Alex Holt | Jun 1, 2007 | Web |
Disclosure : Clicky, my new web stats best friend, offer an affiliate scheme (another reason I like them). So if you are going to sign up.. follow my links when you do it?? I’ve got Google Analytics, why would I change? Everyone knows Google Analytics is free. It’s extensive. It works well. Like all Google applications, it’s interface is dull.. filled with primary colours and non customisable. Well, I was drifting around the internet a few months back.. and I found Clicky – they offered a free account, so I figured “what the heck, I’ll give it a try”. I installed the clicky JS right after the analytics JS, figuring i’d still have my statistics in analytics (in case clicky couldn’t do what I wanted). Live data reporting! The killer feature So for a couple of months, my blog tracked statistics in two places. Clicky and Google Analytics. Clicky’s paid service includes a killer feature that Google lack.. live data reporting (this feature is part of their pro accounts, but new trialists get access to it to trial – it’s worth it… so useful in fact, that I ended up paying for it to be reactivated.) Analytics is very aptly named, it’s great for analysis of numbers.. after the event. But it doesn’t give a good interface or insight into how users are interacting with the web site as they interact. Clickyoffers a feature called Spy – which allows me to watch (via AJAX) as people click into my site, click on elements and click out.. if nothing else.. it’s great for the voyeur in you. BUT that’s not all. The data at Clicky is live updated, so you can analyse your results...
