Here’s some jQuery love for you front-end types. I have certainly been enjoying using jQuery a lot lately. So damn efficient and easy to use. An active community means there are lots of handy plug-in libraries out there to take care of your tabs, carousels and fadey bits… (If you’re a HTML/CSS person and you […]
Archive for the 'Technical' Tag
Load only the jQuery plugins you need, when you need them
22 April, 2008 in Technical and JavaScript. 0 CommentsUpdate: Firefox 2.0.0.13 is now out and it would appear the bug has been fixed.
Any web developers that spend any time using CSS would be familiar with the Firebug add-on for Firefox. (If you don’t have it, get it. It is the best web development and diagnostics tool out there.)
Having become completely dependent on this […]
I’ve just come across SitePoint’s design contests site. It is presumably intended to be a way for smaller businesses to be able to choose from a variety of creative solutions for a fixed “prize” amount. Sorry, but I’m just not a fan of this concept at all.
This is not just another in a recent […]
A JavaScript overlay image gallery
28 August, 2007 in Technical, Web Standards, Design and JavaScript. 5 CommentsWe interrupt the travelogues to talk about some geeky stuff that’s been going on around these parts.
I’ve recently been using grids of thumbnails to link to Flickr photos as they relate to blog posts (e.g. my previous post). One thing I’ve wanted to do is find a way to show these images without sending viewers […]
Dallas, Austin and SXSW, USA
14 August, 2007 in Technical, Personal, Travel, Web Standards, Design, Usability and Games. 2 CommentsEarly March saw us say goodbye to my Mum at San Francisco airport and move on to Dallas and Austin, Texas. A visit to the Sixth Floor Museum and a little boozing with the very hospitable Jade and Carter lightened up the otherwise dull city of Dallas before we hit Austin, the jewel in the […]
The very funny Flash Website Flowchart (Should I make a Flash site?) I recently linked to (”elsewhere”) featured an interesting discussion in the comments that made me think about Flash again - when is it best to use Flash, and if you do, how do you do it right?
Generally speaking, I’ve been one to […]
I’ve been using Mozilla’s DOM Inspector for a long time now and I’ve come to depend on it as my rapid problem solver. Need to instantly figure out the structure of a page I’ve never worked on? No problem. See all style rules applying to an element then look up their line numbers in the […]
McFarlane Prize - Highly Commended award
29 September, 2006 in Technical, Personal, CSS, Web Standards, Design and Usability. 2 CommentsCongratulations Glass Onion, for the inaugural McFarlane Prize 2nd place “Highly Commended” award for a great team effort on the ACPE website.
It’s great that the McFarlane Prize is giving recognition to developers not only for good design but for all round well built solutions. Building to web standards and best practices is seldomly valued or […]
While I’m sharing techniques, here’s one I’ve been playing around with recently, for making simple CSS drop caps. Y’know, starting a written piece with a nice big letter…
Skip straight to the examples here: Example 1, Example 2.
I know this isn’t new, and can probably be achieved in a variety of ways. I do it by […]
Printer-friendly page headers that work for light on dark designs
31 August, 2006 in Technical and CSS. 3 CommentsHaven’t been posting much on here of late, mainly because I’m busy with big stuff happening (which I will talk about here at a later date), plus working on a much needed major re-design of this site… So apologies for the lack of posting, but I thought I’d break the drought with a little CSS […]
I was at the Web Directions info night last week where I enjoyed listening to Lars Rasmussen speak, one of the lead engineers for Google Maps.
He explained some of the features of the Google Maps system, showed how easy the API was to use and then some examples of mashups using their API.
So this got […]
The slow move to Gradient Dropshadow Curve 3.0…
6 June, 2006 in General, Blogging and Technical. 8 CommentsThe long hard road to an overhaul has begun.
I have had a few stop-starts on a redesign for Gradient Dropshadow Curve. The latest stop sees me leaving the design aside for a while and looking into technology, specifically, upgrading Wordpress. Actually the real reason is the unrelenting barrage of comment-spam I get on this site […]
While recently working with Flash to produce wireframes, I found out Flash MX 2004 has support for reading external CSS files. I’ve known about the TextFormat object as a way of formatting text fields in Flash for some time, but I never knew that you could just read in an external CSS file to […]
I’m working on a project at the moment that involves making recommendations on information architecture and user experience, along with a general re-skin for a new online e-learning application and the website that contains it. It should be officially released in a few months and it’s got substantial backing, so I’m hoping it gets some […]
Freelance work - anyone interested?
15 March, 2006 in General, Technical, Personal and Usability. 0 CommentsJust about every other day, I get a request for freelance web design work. I’m not personally taking on any at the moment, full-time work plus the odd side-project is really quite enough… but I do get asked if I know anyone else interested. Most of my good buddies that I used to pass work […]
Finally, a piece on a subject that I want to write more about and something I do a fair bit of work in at my day job, design and usability. The good thing about usability is that it covers things that makes sense to a lot of people, not just techies, and that’s the user […]
Positive user experience - the most important aspect of branding
7 January, 2006 in General, Technical, Personal and Travel. 19 CommentsI’ve just returned from a 10 day holiday at peaceful Safety Beach, where I got plenty of sun, good food, wine and sleep. I also enjoyed my first bee sting. At least I think it was a bee, the little bastard.
I want to talk about branding and good customer experience, and the good experience I […]
OK so I’m at the bus stop and there’s an old guy with some sort of cheap third-party iPod, and he’s listening to a podcast of horse racing!
Amazing! This technology is really hitting the bigtime, even old guys in the street are using it. This guy must have had wireless broadband on there too because […]
An article I wrote for Glass Onion’s eNewsletter about the business benefits of running a blog.
Web Standards - Making the web accessible (but only for Firefox users)
14 November, 2005 in General and Technical. 0 CommentsHere we go, another “browser upgrade initiative” or “Get the world on Firefox” campaign. This one is Explorer Destroyer. I love Firefox as much as the next guy, but come on, are web standards really about saying “sorry, you use Internet Explorer, which is not compatible with my site - get Browser X”.
Sorry, but […]
Been quiet around here of late.. maybe because I’ve been playing with some new toys and watching lots of recorded TV and stuff.
Fortune would have it that some money came my way after a long financial drought. Enough to pay off all debts (including the car!), put a decent amount away and the bit […]
I thought I would break my drought in posts with this interesting technique that we’ve been looking into at work as a potential headache preventer. Using CSS and a bit of DOM scripting, Alessandro Fulciniti has combined some good ideas to produce a powerful technique to create clean rounded edges (which I like around here) […]
I’ve just encountered an annoying problem / bug / feature with Flash MX 2004 in its handling of FLA files with large libraries. Under Windows XP, this problem rears its ugly head with the somewhat mistifying error message of:
“There is not enough memory to open this scene. Your document is not damaged and may safely […]
Whoa, what happened?
I seem to remember getting wasted last night, and upon waking up today, Gradient Dropshadow Curve has become liquid… well at least in FireFox. The only other thing I remember, is that due to IE’s inability to understand the concept of “min-width”, I chucked it in the too hard basket, to be left […]
Ok, finally my overdue post on Web Essentials 2004. Day 2 featured more practical demonstrations of tricks and techniques (Dave Shea, Doug Bowman), a practical insight into the experience of unsighted web users (David Woodbridge, Robbert Spriggs) and some light entertainment in the form of standards evangelism meets wrestlemania (this is truly a strange secret […]
Ok so I’m home now after the first day of WE04 and admitedly a little drunk.
I must say I’ve enjoyed the presentations and having a drink with the folks behind them, specifically Doug Bowman (Stop Design), Dave Shea (Mezzoblue, CSS Zen Garden), John Allsop (Westciv) and the rest of the crew. Good also […]
On Friday night, circa 3am, our company launched the newly redesigned website of a large, fairly well known financial services company. It would be nice to be able to mention the company and link to the site, but I’ve been advised against it.
The new site features a fresh, clean design, clear and simple […]
I’ve just added in a new section “Work” to the site in the last few days. Just a small showcase of what I’ve been up to for the past couple of years in terms of paid work. A mini-portfolio, if you will. Had to brush up with my JS/DOM scripting to make the image changer […]
Just a quick one to share some great posts on people’s sites I’ve read lately.
Over at The Weekly Standards Adam talks about web design crutches, those techniques and styles you fall back on when all else fails or when you’ve just given up trying.
Don’t I know about it. I’m up-front with mine, hence the […]
Or in other words, getting rid of tables for layout.
Although the web standards movement is not new, the majority of web designers and developers have yet to embrace these approaches, perhaps because they are unaware or because changing from old established methods might be considered too daunting and time consuming. So here is a […]
It’s been one week since installing WordPress as my blog engine, and I’ve tweaked the source, reskinned and renamed it. My significant other has been out of town for the weekend, and though tempted to sit in front of the TV, drinking beer and scratching myself, I decided to devote some time to properly designing […]
The ultimate nightmare when using stock imagery. The brief says use a stock image library. Royalty free of course. What could be worse than using a photo that’s already been used on other sites? Using a photo used on your (or your client’s) largest competitor’s site…
This lucky girl appears to have gone back […]
Ok, rant time. This one’s about a perennial pet peeve of mine. Careless spelling.
Whilst, it may be acceptable to let the spelling drop in instant communication such as IRC, online instant messaging, SMS (don’t get me started on SMS), or the odd quick informal email, poor spelling in official documents such as proposals, functional specifications, […]
After a long and arduous labour, Glass Onion gives birth to the new Cement Australia site.
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