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iKeif

The digital life of Keith Baker - social media research and development, coding mootools and jquery, geek tech blogging entrepenuer and many things Columbus

Third Party PSD to XHTML ServicesNovember 28

No doubt some people feel “basic” coding is beneath them. They feel they should be focusing on Java, JavaScript, UI Design, UX, etc. etc. Coding that PSD to valid, cross browser XHTML? Complete with CSS styling? Dealing with whatever browsers you want to support?

Funk that, especially when we have dozens of businesses fighting to do this for us (for cheap!).

Prolific competition and cheap? How can I lose!

Yes, much like that extended warranty you bought, how could you lose? Very easily!

Generally speaking, it seems you get what you pay for. But sometimes you have to realize that doing research is the best ROI. In the age of the internet, one man shops quickly get bought out by the competition, so that we can go very quickly from “my friend runs this” to “he sold it for more than it’s worth, and now it’s a shit service.” It happens, as I had dug up old reviews and contacted people - which I suggest you do. Never rely on sites and written reviews (they could be paid reviews and not disclosed, and some people will rant and rave after one use, and quickly change their mind after two uses!).

In 2006 they were hot shit! So they still are…right?

No my friend, they are not. Like I said, any time you see a review for a service, research it. Their are prolific sites that offer up reviews but I’

The Return of the <noscript>November 23

As a web developer, you’re constantly approached with pulling off zany schemes. In the words of Ian Malcolm:

Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

Replace “scientists” with “designers” and you see the dilemma. They know you can pull off some funky effects in flash, so they opt to flash. However, flash is still not quite as easilly accessible and searchable that we all would like - and please, you can try to argue this point, but the majority of flash efforts I’ve seen tend to bypass the accessibility and searchability because it’s just easier to do the cool animations/sounds/effects/transparencies in flash (or flex) than it is to do in javascript.

Internet Explorer be damned!

The unholy bastion of a front-end developers existence tends to fall on IE6 - which is at 24% and dropping in its market share. This is always the what I end up falling on when talking to a fellow developer, and it usually goes like this:

Me: We could totally pull off that flash effect! We can do multiple animations using mootools, and it’d be indexable and still be applicable without javascript if we code it right!

Him: You mean those large transparent PNG images that would be sliding into place?

Me: Right! We could..totally… pull it off… in everything except

Are you coding obtrusively?November 11

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

-Lord Acton, in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 1887

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend that I myself have fallen victim to. I’m seeing sites coded where we do more in javascript for our styling needs and interaction, with no fall back support for non-javascript users. Styles are called explicity from javascript (which requires a lot of transversal to find out “is it this #000 or that #000?”). onclick events. Onblur. Really?

Use the power of your framework!

Don’t do the work if you don’t have to!

For example, mootools allows us to grab any item on the page and add events to it:

$$('a').addEvent('mouseenter',function(e){ alert('you entered the anchor!'); });

Why stop with one event?

(straight from the mootools documentation!)

$('myElement').addEvents({ 'mouseover': function(){ alert('mouseover'); }, 'click': function(){ alert('click'); } });

Using mootools we can make our code totally unobtrusive. No more onclicks littering the pages. We can leave the HREF tag pointing to static pages. We can inject elements on teh fly, so if someone doesn’t have flash/javascript we don’t show certain elements:

// don't have flash? if(Browser.Plugins.Flash.version

Enabling GZIP Compression on DreamhostOctober 15

EDIT: So I talked to Toby Miller and he helped clarify some issues I was having - the script has been updated below!

So I’ve been discussing compression - I’m a fiend for it. It’s like a drug to me. I squeeze every byte out of production code.

I’d compress HTML into a single line - I’m just that phucked up. Maybe it’s my OCD, maybe I’m just nutty, but GZIPping seems like a no brainer to me.

1-2-3 COMPRESS!

What’s GZIP? I’m glad you asked, friend!

According to the never-wrong wikipedia article on GZIP:

gzip is a software application used for file compression. gzip is short for GNU zip; the program is a free software replacement for the compress program used in early Unix systems, intended for use by the GNU Project.

What this basically does is compress your files and

Google Analytics Moo-izedOctober 15

As both David Walsh and I wrote about Google Analytics Tracking utilizing Mootools to make your outbound link tracking easier, and David did setup a variable for the Google Tracking code *before* we run the code to tag our outbound links.

Upon second review, it’s a little different than the modified code I presented yesterday, but I dig using the href replacement on your outgoing string.

Here’s the updated code:

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