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| 260 | 260 | The Art of Mathematics: A Mandala Maker Tutorial | In front-end development, there’s often a great deal of focus on tools that aim to make our work more efficient. But what if you’re new to web development? When you’re just starting out, the amount of new material can be overwhelming, particularly if you don’t have a solid background in Computer Science. But the truth is, once you’ve learned a little bit of JavaScript, you can already make some pretty impressive things. A couple of years back, when I was learning to code, I started working on a side project. I wanted to make something colorful and fun to share with my friends. This is what my app looks like these days: Mandala Maker user interface The coolest part about it is the fact that it’s a tool: anyone can use it to create something original and brand new. In this tutorial, we’ll build a smaller version of this app – a symmetrical drawing tool in ES5, JavaScript and HTML5. The tutorial app will have eight reflections, a color picker and a Clear button. Once we’re done, you’re on your own and can tweak it as you please. Be creative! Preparations: a blank canvas The first thing you’ll need for this project is a designated drawing space. We’ll use the HTML5 canvas element and give it a width and a height of 600px (you can set the dimensions to anything else if you like). Files Create 3 files: index.html, styles.css, main.js. Don’t forget to include your JS and CSS files in your HTML. <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css"> <script src="main.js"></script> </head> <body onload="init()"> <canvas width="600" height="600"> <p>Your browser doesn't support canvas.</p> </canvas> </body> </html> I’ll ask you to update your HTML file at a later point, but the CSS file we’ll start with will stay the same throughout the project. This is the full CSS we are going to use: body { background-color: #ccc; text-align: center; } canvas { touch-action: none; background-color: #fff; } button { font-size: 110%;… | 2018 | Hagar Shilo | hagarshilo | 2018-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2018/the-art-of-mathematics/ | code |
| 71 | 71 | Upping Your Web Security Game | When I started working in web security fifteen years ago, web development looked very different. The few non-static web applications were built using a waterfall process and shipped quarterly at best, making it possible to add security audits before every release; applications were deployed exclusively on in-house servers, allowing Info Sec to inspect their configuration and setup; and the few third-party components used came from a small set of well-known and trusted providers. And yet, even with these favourable conditions, security teams were quickly overwhelmed and called for developers to build security in. If the web security game was hard to win before, it’s doomed to fail now. In today’s web development, every other page is an application, accepting inputs and private data from users; software is built continuously, designed to eliminate manual gates, including security gates; infrastructure is code, with servers spawned with little effort and even less security scrutiny; and most of the code in a typical application is third-party code, pulled in through open source repositories with rarely a glance at who provided them. Security teams, when they exist at all, cannot solve this problem. They are vastly outnumbered by developers, and cannot keep up with the application’s pace of change. For us to have a shot at making the web secure, we must bring security into the core. We need to give it no less attention than that we give browser compatibility, mobile design or web page load times. More broadly, we should see security as an aspect of quality, expecting both ourselves and our peers to address it, and taking pride when we do it well. Where To Start? Embracing security isn’t something you do overnight. A good place to start is by reviewing things you’re already doing – and trying to make them more secure. Here are three concrete steps you can take to get going. HTTPS Threats begin when your system interacts with the outside world, which often means HTTP. As is, HTTP is painfully insecure, allowing attacke… | 2015 | Guy Podjarny | guypodjarny | 2015-12-11T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/upping-your-web-security-game/ | code |
| 265 | 265 | Designing for Perfection | Hello, 24 ways readers. I hope you’re having a nice run up to Christmas. This holiday season I thought I’d share a few things with you that have been particularly meaningful in my work over the last year or so. They may not make you wet your santa pants with new-idea-excitement, but in the context of 24 ways I think they may serve as a nice lesson and a useful seasonal reminder going into the New Year. Enjoy! Story Despite being a largely scruffy individual for most of my life, I had some interesting experiences regarding kitchen tidiness during my third year at university. As a kid, my room had always been pretty tidy, and as a teenager I used to enjoy reordering my CDs regularly (by artist, label, colour of spine – you get the picture); but by the time I was twenty I’d left most of these traits behind me, mainly due to a fear that I was turning into my mother. The one remaining anally retentive part of me that remained however, lived in the kitchen. For some reason, I couldn’t let all the pots and crockery be strewn across the surfaces after cooking. I didn’t care if they were washed up or not, I just needed them tidied. The surfaces needed to be continually free of grated cheese, breadcrumbs and ketchup spills. Also, the sink always needed to be clear. Always. Even a lone teabag, discarded casually into the sink hours previously, would give me what I used to refer to as “kitchen rage”. Whilst this behaviour didn’t cause any direct conflicts, it did often create weirdness. We would be happily enjoying a few pre-night out beverages (Jack Daniels and Red Bull – nice) when I’d notice the state of the kitchen following our round of customized 49p Tesco pizzas. Kitchen rage would ensue, and I’d have to blitz the kitchen, which usually resulted in me having to catch everyone up at the bar afterwards. One evening as we were just about to go out, I was stood there, in front of the shithole that was our kitchen with the intention of cleaning it all up, when a realization popped into my head. In hindsight, it was a… | 2011 | Greg Wood | gregwood | 2011-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2011/designing-for-perfection/ | process |
| 302 | 302 | Flexible Project Management in Inflexible Environments | Handling unforeseen circumstances is an inevitable part of any project. It’s also often the most uncomfortable, and there is no amount of skill or planning that will fully eradicate the need to adapt to change. The ability to be flexible, responsive, and unafraid of facing not only problems, but also potentially positive scope changes and new ideas, isn’t an easy one to master. I am by no means saying that I have, but what I have learned is that there is often the temptation to shut out anything that might derail your plan, even sometimes at the cost of the quality you’re committed to. The reality is that as someone leading a project you know there will be challenges, but, in general, it’s a hassle to try keep the landscape open. Problems are bridges we should cross when we come to them, but intentional changes to the plan, and adapting for the sake of improving your first idea, is harder. There are tight schedules, resource is planned miles ahead, and you’re already juggling twenty other things. If you’re passionate about the quality of work you deliver and are working somewhere that considers itself expert within the field of digital, then having an attitude of flexibility is extremely important. It’s important when you’re overcoming a challenge or problem, but it’s also important for allowing ideas to evolve and be refined as much as they can be throughout the course of a project. Where theory falls short The premise of any Agile methodology, Scrum for example, is based around being able to work efficiently, react quickly and deliver relevant chunks of a product in manageable increments. It’s often hailed as king of flexible management and it can work really well, especially for in-house software products developed over a long or even an indefinite period of time. It holds off defining scope too far ahead and lets teams focus on smaller amounts of work, and allows them to regularly reprioritise. Unfortunately though, not all environments lend themselves as easily to a fully Agile setup. Even the ones that do m… | 2016 | Gillian Sibthorpe | gilliansibthorpe | 2016-12-04T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/flexible-project-management/ | process |
| 4 | 4 | Credits and Recognition | A few weeks ago, I saw a friendly little tweet from a business congratulating a web agency on being nominated for an award. The business was quite happy for them and proud to boot — they commented on how the same agency designed their website, too. What seemed like a nice little shout-out actually made me feel a little disappointed. Why? In reality, I knew that the web agency didn’t actually design the site — I did, when I worked at a different agency responsible for the overall branding and identity. I certainly wasn’t disappointed at the business — after all, saying that someone designed your site when they were responsible for development is an easy mistake to make. Chances are, the person behind the tweets and status updates might not even know the difference between words like design and development. What really disappointed me was the reminder of how many web workers out there never explain their roles in a project when displaying work in a portfolio. If you’re strictly a developer and market yourself as such, there might be less room for confusion, but things can feel a little deceptive if you offer a wide range of services yet never credit the other players when collaboration is part of the game. Unfortunately, this was the case in this situation. Whatever happened to credit where credit’s due? Advertising attribution Have you ever thumbed through an advertising annual or browsed through the winners of an advertising awards website, like the campaign below from Kopenhagen Chocolate on Advertising Age? If so, it’s likely that you’ve noticed some big differences in how the work is credited. Everyone involved in a creative advertising project is mentioned. Art directors, writers, creative directors, photographers, illustrators and, of course, the agency all get a fair shot at fifteen minutes of fame. Why can’t we take this same idea and introduce it to our own showcases? Crediting on client sites Ah, the good old days of web rings, guestbooks, and under construction GIFs, when slipping in a cheeky… | 2013 | Geri Coady | gericoady | 2013-12-16T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/credits-and-recognition/ | process |
| 26 | 26 | Integrating Contrast Checks in Your Web Workflow | It’s nearly Christmas, which means you’ll be sure to find an overload of festive red and green decorating everything in sight—often in the ugliest ways possible. While I’m not here to battle holiday tackiness in today’s 24 ways, it might just be the perfect reminder to step back and consider how we can implement colour schemes in our websites and apps that are not only attractive, but also legible and accessible for folks with various types of visual disabilities. This simulated photo demonstrates how red and green Christmas baubles could appear to a person affected by protanopia-type colour blindness—not as festive as you might think. Source: Derek Bruff I’ve been fortunate to work with Simply Accessible to redesign not just their website, but their entire brand. Although the new site won’t be launching until the new year, we’re excited to let you peek under the tree and share a few treats as a case study into how we tackled colour accessibility in our project workflow. Don’t worry—we won’t tell Santa! Create a colour game plan A common misconception about accessibility is that meeting compliance requirements hinders creativity and beautiful design—but we beg to differ. Unfortunately, like many company websites and internal projects, Simply Accessible has spent so much time helping others that they had not spent enough time helping themselves to show the world who they really are. This was the perfect opportunity for them to practise what they preached. After plenty of research and brainstorming, we decided to evolve the existing Simply Accessible brand. Or, rather, salvage what we could. There was no established logo to carry into the new design (it was a stretch to even call it a wordmark), and the Helvetica typography across the site lacked any character. The only recognizable feature left to work with was colour. It was a challenge, for sure: the oranges looked murky and brown, and the blues looked way too corporate for a company like Simply Accessible. We knew we needed to inject a lot of personalit… | 2014 | Geri Coady | gericoady | 2014-12-22T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/integrating-contrast-checks-in-your-web-workflow/ | design |
| 77 | 77 | Colour Accessibility | Here’s a quote from Josef Albers: In visual perception a colour is almost never seen as it really is[…] This fact makes colour the most relative medium in art.Josef Albers, Interaction of Color, 1963 Albers was a German abstract painter and teacher, and published a very famous course on colour theory in 1963. Colour is very relative — not just in the way that it appears differently across different devices due to screen quality and colour management, but it can also be seen differently by different people — something we really need to be more mindful of when designing. What is colour blindness? Colour blindness very rarely means that you can’t see any colour at all, or that people see things in greyscale. It’s actually a decreased ability to see colour, or a decreased ability to tell colours apart from one another. How does it happen? Inside the typical human retina, there are two types of receptor cells — rods and cones. Rods are the cells that allow us to see dark and light, and shape and movement. Cones are the cells that allow us to perceive colour. There are three types of cones, each responsible for absorbing blue, red, and green wavelengths in the spectrum. Problems with colour vision occur when one or more of these types of cones are defective or absent entirely, and these problems can either be inherited through genetics, or acquired through trauma, exposure to ultraviolet light, degeneration with age, an effect of diabetes, or other factors. Colour blindness is a sex-linked trait and it’s much more common in men than in women. The most common type of colour blindness is called deuteranomaly which occurs in 7% of males, but only 0.5% of females. That’s a pretty significant portion of the population if you really stop and think about it — we can’t ignore this demographic. What does it look like? People with the most common types of colour blindness, like protanopia and deuteranopia, have difficulty discriminating between red and green hues. There are also forms of colour blindness like tritanop… | 2012 | Geri Coady | gericoady | 2012-12-04T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2012/colour-accessibility/ | design |
| 118 | 118 | Ghosts On The Internet | By rights the internet should be full of poltergeists, poor rootless things looking for their real homes. Many events on the internet are not properly associated with their correct timeframe. I don’t mean a server set to the wrong time, though that happens too. Much of the content published on the internet is separated from any proper reference to its publication time. What does publication even mean? Let me tell you a story… “It is 2019 and this is Kathy Clees reporting on the story of the moment, the shock purchase of Microsoft by Apple Inc. A Internet Explorer security scare story from 2008 was responsible, yes from 11 years ago, accidently promoted by an analyst, who neglected to check the date of their sources.” If you think this is fanciful nonsense, then cast your mind back to September 2008, this story in Wired or The Times (UK) about a huge United Airlines stock tumble. A Florida newspaper had a automated popular story section. A random reader looking at a story about United’s 2002 Bankruptcy proceedings caused this story to get picked up by Google’s later visit to the South Florida Sun Sentinel’s news home page. The story was undated, Google’s news engine apparently gave it a 2008 date, an analyst picked it up and pushed it to Bloomberg and within minutes the United stock was tumbling. Their stock price dropped from $12 to $3, then recovered to $11 over the day. An eight percent fall in share price over a mis-configured date Completing this out of order Christmas Carol, lets look at what is current practice and how dates are managed, we might even get to clank some chains. Publication date used to be inseparable from publication, the two things where stamped on the same piece of paper. How can we determine when things have been published, now? Determining publication dates Time as defined by http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime extends ISO 8601, mandating the use of a year value. This is pretty well defined, we can even get very accurate timings down to milliseconds, Ruby and other languages can… | 2008 | Gavin Bell | gavinbell | 2008-12-20T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2008/ghosts-on-the-internet/ | ux |
| 155 | 155 | Minification: A Christmas Diet | The festive season is generally more about gorging ourselves than staying thin but we’re going to change all that with a quick introduction to minification. Performance has been a hot topic this last year. We’re building more complex sites and applications but at the same time trying to make then load faster and behave more responsively. What is a discerning web developer to do? Minification is the process of make something smaller, in the case of web site performance we’re talking about reducing the size of files we send to the browser. The primary front-end components of any website are HTML, CSS, Javascript and a sprinkling of images. Let’s find some tools to trim the fat and speed up our sites. For those that want to play along at home you can download the various utilities for Mac or Windows. You’ll want to be familiar with running apps on the command line too. HTMLTidy HTMLTidy optimises and strips white space from HTML documents. It also has a pretty good go at correcting any invalid markup while it’s at it. tidy -m page.html CSSTidy CSSTidy takes your CSS file, optimises individual rules (for instance transforming padding-top: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; to padding: 10px 0;) and strips unneeded white space. csstidy style.css style-min.css JSMin JSMin takes your javascript and makes it more compact. With more and more websites using javascript to power (progressive) enhancements this can be a real bandwidth hog. Look out for pre-minified versions of libraries and frameworks too. jsmin <script.js >script-min.js Remember to run JSLint before you run JSMin to catch some common problems. OptiPNG Images can be a real bandwidth hog and making all of them smaller with OptiPNG should speed up your site. optipng image.png All of these tools have an often bewildering array of options and generally good documentation included as part of the package. A little experimentation will get you even more bang for your buck. For larger projects you likely won’t want to be manually minifying all your files. T… | 2007 | Gareth Rushgrove | garethrushgrove | 2007-12-06T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/minification-a-christmas-diet/ | process |
| 289 | 289 | Front-End Developers Are Information Architects Too | The theme of this year’s World IA Day was “Information Everywhere, Architects Everywhere”. This article isn’t about what you may consider an information architect to be: someone in the user-experience field, who maybe studied library science, and who talks about taxonomies. This is about a realisation I had a couple of years ago when I started to run an increasing amount of usability-testing sessions with people who have disabilities: that the structure, labelling, and connections that can be made in front-end code is information architecture. People’s ability to be successful online is unequivocally connected to the quality of the code that is written. Places made of information In information architecture we talk about creating places made of information. These places are made of ones and zeros, but we talk about them as physical structures. We talk about going onto a social media platform, posting in blogs, getting locked out of an environment, and building applications. In 2002, Andrew Hinton stated: People live and work in these structures, just as they live and work in their homes, offices, factories and malls. These places are not virtual: they are as real as our own minds. 25 Theses We’re creating structures which people rely on for significant parts of their lives, so it’s critical that we carry out our work responsibly. This means we must use our construction materials correctly. Luckily, our most important material, HTML, has a well-documented specification which tells us how to build robust and accessible places. What is most important, I believe, is to understand the semantics of HTML. Semantics The word “semantic” has its origin in Greek words meaning “significant”, “signify”, and “sign”. In the physical world, a structure can have semantic qualities that tell us something about it. For example, the stunning Westminster Abbey inspires awe and signifies much about the intent and purpose of the structure. The building’s size; the quality of the stone work; the massive, detailed stained glass: these … | 2016 | Francis Storr | francisstorr | 2016-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/front-end-developers-are-information-architects-too/ | code |
| 226 | 226 | Documentation-Driven Design for APIs | Documentation is like gift wrapping. It seems like superfluous fluff, but your family tends to be rather disappointed when their presents arrive in supermarket carrier bags, so you have to feign some sort of attempt at making your gift look enticing. Documentation doesn’t have to be all hard work and sellotaping yourself to a table – you can make it useful and relevant. Documentation gets a pretty rough deal. It tends to get left until the end of a project, when some poor developer is assigned the ‘document project’ ticket and wades through each feature of Whizzy New API 3.0 and needs to recall exactly what each method is meant to do. That’s assuming any time is left for documentation at all. The more common outcome resembles last minute homework scribbled on a post-it note, where just the bare bones of what’s available are put out for your users, and you hope that you’ll spot the inconsistencies and mistakes before they do. Wouldn’t it be nicer for everyone if you could make documentation not only outstanding for your users, but also a valuable tool for your development team – so much so that you couldn’t imagine writing a line of code before you’d documented it? Documentation needs to have three main features: It should have total coverage and document all the features of your project. Private methods should be documented for your developers, and public features need to be available to your users. It should be consistent – a user should know what to expect from your documentation, and terminology should be accurate to your language. It should be current – and that means staying accurate as new versions of your code base are released. But you can also get these bonuses: Act as a suggested specification – a guide that will aid a developer in making something consistent and usable. It can test your API quality. It can enhance the communication skills within your development team. So how do we get our documentation to be rich and full of features, instead of a little worn out like Boxing Day lef… | 2010 | Frances Berriman | francesberriman | 2010-12-11T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2010/documentation-driven-design-for-apis/ | process |
| 54 | 54 | Putting My Patterns through Their Paces | Over the last few years, the conversation around responsive design has shifted subtly, focusing not on designing pages, but on patterns: understanding the small, reusable elements that comprise a larger design system. And given that many of those patterns are themselves responsive, learning to manage these small layout systems has become a big part of my work. The thing is, the more pattern-driven work I do, the more I realize my design process has changed in a number of subtle, important ways. I suppose you might even say that pattern-driven design has, in a few ways, redesigned me. Meet the Teaser Here’s a recent example. A few months ago, some friends and I redesigned The Toast. (It was a really, really fun project, and we learned a lot.) Each page of the site is, as you might guess, stitched together from a host of tiny, reusable patterns. Some of them, like the search form and footer, are fairly unique, and used once per page; others are used more liberally, and built for reuse. The most prevalent example of these more generic patterns is the teaser, which is classed as, uh, .teaser. (Look, I never said I was especially clever.) In its simplest form, a teaser contains a headline, which links to an article: Fairly straightforward, sure. But it’s just the foundation: from there, teasers can have a byline, a description, a thumbnail, and a comment count. In other words, we have a basic building block (.teaser) that contains a few discrete content types – some required, some not. In fact, very few of those pieces need to be present; to qualify as a teaser, all we really need is a link and a headline. But by adding more elements, we can build slight variations of our teaser, and make it much, much more versatile. Nearly every element visible on this page is built out of our generic “teaser” pattern. But the teaser variation I’d like to call out is the one that appears on The Toast’s homepage, on search results or on section fronts. In the main content area, each teaser in the list features larger i… | 2015 | Ethan Marcotte | ethanmarcotte | 2015-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/putting-my-patterns-through-their-paces/ | code |
| 162 | 162 | Conditional Love | “Browser.” The four-letter word of web design. I mean, let’s face it: on the good days, when things just work in your target browsers, it’s marvelous. The air smells sweeter, birds’ songs sound more melodious, and both your design and your code are looking sharp. But on the less-than-good days (which is, frankly, most of them), you’re compelled to tie up all your browsers in a sack, heave them into the nearest river, and start designing all-imagemap websites. We all play favorites, after all: some will swear by Firefox, Opera fans are allegedly legion, and others still will frown upon anything less than the latest WebKit nightly. Thankfully, we do have an out for those little inconsistencies that crop up when dealing with cross-browser testing: CSS patches. Spare the Rod, Hack the Browser Before committing browsercide over some rendering bug, a designer will typically reach for a snippet of CSS fix the faulty browser. Historically referred to as “hacks,” I prefer Dan Cederholm’s more client-friendly alternative, “patches”. But whatever you call them, CSS patches all work along the same principle: supply the proper property value to the good browsers, while giving higher maintenance other browsers an incorrect value that their frustrating idiosyncratic rendering engine can understand. Traditionally, this has been done either by exploiting incomplete CSS support: #content { height: 1%; // Let's force hasLayout for old versions of IE. line-height: 1.6; padding: 1em; } html>body #content { height: auto; // Modern browsers get a proper height value. } or by exploiting bugs in their rendering engine to deliver alternate style rules: #content p { font-size: .8em; /* Hide from Mac IE5 \*/ font-size: .9em; /* End hiding from Mac IE5 */ } We’ve even used these exploits to serve up whole stylesheets altogether: @import url("core.css"); @media tty { i{content:"\";/*" "*/}} @import 'windows-ie5.css'; /*";} }/* */ The list goes on, and on, and on. For every browser, for every bug, there’s a patch availab… | 2007 | Ethan Marcotte | ethanmarcotte | 2007-12-15T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/conditional-love/ | code |
| 238 | 238 | Everything You Wanted To Know About Gradients (And a Few Things You Didn’t) | Hello. I am here to discuss CSS3 gradients. Because, let’s face it, what the web really needed was more gradients. Still, despite their widespread use (or is it overuse?), the smartly applied gradient can be a valuable contributor to a designer’s vocabulary. There’s always been a tension between the inherently two-dimensional nature of our medium, and our desire for more intensity, more depth in our designs. And a gradient can evoke so much: the splay of light across your desk, the slow decrease in volume toward the end of your favorite song, the sunset after a long day. When properly applied, graded colors bring a much needed softness to our work. Of course, that whole ‘proper application’ thing is the tricky bit. But given their place in our toolkit and their prominence online, it really is heartening to see we can create gradients directly with CSS. They’re part of the draft images module, and implemented in two of the major rendering engines. Still, I’ve always found CSS gradients to be one of the more confusing aspects of CSS3. So if you’ll indulge me, let’s take a quick look at how to create CSS gradients—hopefully we can make them seem a bit more accessible, and bring a bit more art into the browser. Gradient theory 101 (I hope that’s not really a thing) Right. So before we dive into the code, let’s cover a few basics. Every gradient, no matter how complex, shares a few common characteristics. Here’s a straightforward one: I spent seconds hours designing this gradient. I hope you like it. At either end of our image, we have a final color value, or color stop: on the left, our stop is white; on the right, black. And more color-rich gradients are no different: (Don’t ever really do this. Please. I beg you.) It’s visually more intricate, sure. But at the heart of it, we have just seven color stops (red, orange, yellow, and so on), making for a fantastic gradient all the way. Now, color stops alone do not a gradient make. Between each is a transition point, the fail-over point between the two stop… | 2010 | Ethan Marcotte | ethanmarcotte | 2010-12-22T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2010/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-gradients/ | code |
| 313 | 313 | Centered Tabs with CSS | Doug Bowman’s Sliding Doors is pretty much the de facto way to build tabbed navigation with CSS, and rightfully so – it is, as they say, rockin’ like Dokken. But since it relies heavily on floats for the positioning of its tabs, we’re constrained to either left- or right-hand navigation. But what if we need a bit more flexibility? What if we need to place our navigation in the center? Styling the li as a floated block does give us a great deal of control over margin, padding, and other presentational styles. However, we should learn to love the inline box – with it, we can create a flexible, centered alternative to floated navigation lists. Humble Beginnings Do an extra shot of ‘nog, because you know what’s coming next. That’s right, a simple unordered list: <div id="navigation"> <ul> <li><a href="#"><span>Home</span></a></li> <li><a href="#"><span>About</span></a></li> <li><a href="#"><span>Our Work</span></a></li> <li><a href="#"><span>Products</span></a></li> <li class="last"><a href="#"><span>Contact Us</span></a></li> </ul> </div> If we were wedded to using floats to style our list, we could easily fix the width of our ul, and trick it out with some margin: 0 auto; love to center it accordingly. But this wouldn’t net us much flexibility: if we ever changed the number of navigation items, or if the user increased her browser’s font size, our design could easily break. Instead of worrying about floats, let’s take the most basic approach possible: let’s turn our list items into inline elements, and simply use text-align to center them within the ul: #navigation ul, #navigation ul li { list-style: none; margin: 0; padding: 0; } #navigation ul { text-align: center; } #navigation ul li { display: inline; margin-right: .75em; } #navigation ul li.last { margin-right: 0; } Our first step is sexy, no? Well, okay, not really – but it gives us a good starting point. We’ve tamed our list by removing its default style… | 2005 | Ethan Marcotte | ethanmarcotte | 2005-12-08T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2005/centered-tabs-with-css/ | code |
| 87 | 87 | Content Planning Demystified | The first thing you learn as a junior editor is that you can’t do everything yourself. You must rely on someone else to do at least part of what must be done: the long-range planning, the initial drafting or shooting or recording, the editing, the production, the final polish. All of those pieces of work that belong to someone else take quite a lot of time — days, weeks, sometimes months. If you’re the sort of person who wrote college term papers the night before they were due, this can come as a bit of a shock. To my twenty-two-year-old self, it certainly did. It turns out that the only real way to avoid a trainwreck with editorial work is to get ahead of the trouble, line everything up carefully, and leave oodles of room for all the pieces to connect on time. The same is true of content strategy, content planning, and just about everything to do with content on the web, except for the writing itself — and that, too, usually takes far longer than anyone expects. If you’re not a professional editor and you suddenly find yourself dealing with content creation, you’re almost certainly going to underestimate the time and effort involved, or to skip something important in the planning process that pops up to bite you later. Without good content, it doesn’t matter how well designed or coded your web project is, because it won’t be doing the thing it’s meant to do. And even if content is far from your specialty, you may well end up being the only one willing to coordinate it far enough in advance to avoid a chaotic ending. Whether you’re hiring writers and editors for a big project, working with a small client, or coaxing some editorial help out of a co-worker, getting the planning work done correctly — and ahead of time — will allow you to orchestrate a glorious ballet of togetherness, instead of feverishly scraping together something to put on your site when the deadline looms. So get out the graph paper and the pocket protector, because we’re going to go Full Nerd on this problem. Know your poison Anyone who’s… | 2012 | Erin Kissane | erinkissane | 2012-12-20T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2012/content-planning-demystified/ | content |
| 241 | 241 | Jank-Free Image Loads | There are a few fundamental problems with embedding images in pages of hypertext; perhaps chief among them is this: text is very light and loads rather fast; images are much heavier and arrive much later. Consequently, millions (billions?) of times a day, a hapless Web surfer will start reading some text on a page, and then — Your browser doesn’t support HTML5 video. Here is a link to the video instead. — oops! — an image pops in above it, pushing said text down the page, and our poor reader loses their place. By default, partially-loaded pages have the user experience of a slippery fish, or spilled jar of jumping beans. For the rest of this article, I shall call that jarring, no-good jumpiness by its name: jank. And I’ll chart a path into a jank-free future – one in which it’s easy and natural to author <img> elements that load like this: Your browser doesn’t support HTML5 video. Here is a link to the video instead. Jank is a very old problem, and there is a very old solution to it: the width and height attributes on <img>. The idea is: if we stick an image’s dimensions right into the HTML, browsers can know those dimensions before the image loads, and reserve some space on the layout for it so that nothing gets bumped down the page when the image finally arrives. width Specifies the intended width of the image in pixels. When given together with the height, this allows user agents to reserve screen space for the image before the image data has arrived over the network. —The HTML 3.2 Specification, published on January 14 1997 Unfortunately for us, when width and height were first spec’d and implemented, layouts were largely fixed and images were usually only intended to render at their fixed, actual dimensions. When image sizing gets fluid, width and height get weird: See the Pen fluid width + fixed height = distortion by Eric Portis (@eeeps) on CodePen. width and height are too rigid for the responsive world. What we need, and have needed for a very long time, is a way to specify fixed aspect ra… | 2018 | Eric Portis | ericportis | 2018-12-21T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2018/jank-free-image-loads/ | code |
| 154 | 154 | Diagnostic Styling | We’re all used to using CSS to make our designs live and breathe, but there’s another way to use CSS: to find out where our markup might be choking on missing accessibility features, targetless links, and just plain missing content. Note: the techniques discussed here mostly work in Firefox, Safari, and Opera, but not Internet Explorer. I’ll explain why that’s not really a problem near the end of the article — and no, the reason is not “everyone should just ignore IE anyway”. Basic Diagnostics To pick a simple example, suppose you want to call out all holdover font and center elements in a site. Simple: you just add the following to your styles. font, center {outline: 5px solid red;} You could take it further and add in a nice lime background or some such, but big thick red outlines should suffice. Now you’ll be able to see the offenders wherever as you move through the site. (Of course, if you do this on your public server, everyone else will see the outlines too. So this is probably best done on a development server or local copy of the site.) Not everyone may be familiar with outlines, which were introduced in CSS2, so a word on those before we move on. Outlines are much like borders, except outlines don’t affect layout. Eh? Here’s a comparison. On the left, you have a border. On the right, an outline. The border takes up layout space, pushing other content around and generally being a nuisance. The outline, on the other hand, just draws into quietly into place. In most current browsers, it will overdraw any content already onscreen, and will be overdrawn by any content placed later — which is why it overlaps the images above it, and is overlapped by those below it. Okay, so we can outline deprecated elements like font and center. Is that all? Oh no. Attribution Let’s suppose you also want to find any instances of inline style — that is, use of the style attribute on elements in the markup. This is generally discouraged (outside of HTML e-mails, which I’m not going to get anywhere … | 2007 | Eric Meyer | ericmeyer | 2007-12-20T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/diagnostic-styling/ | process |
| 65 | 65 | The Accessibility Mindset | Accessibility is often characterized as additional work, hard to learn and only affecting a small number of people. Those myths have no logical foundation and often stem from outdated information or misconceptions. Indeed, it is an additional skill set to acquire, quite like learning new JavaScript frameworks, CSS layout techniques or new HTML elements. But it isn’t particularly harder to learn than those other skills. A World Health Organization (WHO) report on disabilities states that, [i]ncluding children, over a billion people (or about 15% of the world’s population) were estimated to be living with disability. Being disabled is not as unusual as one might think. Due to chronic health conditions and older people having a higher risk of disability, we are also currently paving the cowpath to an internet that we can still use in the future. Accessibility has a very close relationship with usability, and advancements in accessibility often yield improvements in the usability of a website. Websites are also more adaptable to users’ needs when they are built in an accessible fashion. Beyond the bare minimum In the time of table layouts, web developers could create code that passed validation rules but didn’t adhere to the underlying semantic HTML model. We later developed best practices, like using lists for navigation, and with HTML5 we started to wrap those lists in nav elements. Working with accessibility standards is similar. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 can inform your decision to make websites accessible and can be used to test that you met the success criteria. What it can’t do is measure how well you met them. W3C developed a long list of techniques that can be used to make your website accessible, but you might find yourself in a situation where you need to adapt those techniques to be the most usable solution for your particular problem. The checkbox below is implemented in an accessible way: The input element has an id and the label associated with the checkbox refers to the in… | 2015 | Eric Eggert | ericeggert | 2015-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/the-accessibility-mindset/ | code |
| 262 | 262 | Be the Villain | Inclusive Design is the practice of making products and services accessible to, and usable by as many people as reasonably possible without the need for specialized accommodations. The practice was popularized by author and User Experience Design Director Kat Holmes. If getting you to discover her work is the only thing this article succeeds in doing then I’ll consider it a success. As a framework for creating resilient solutions to problems, Inclusive Design is incredible. However, the aimless idealistic aspirations many of its newer practitioners default to can oftentimes run into trouble. Without outlining concrete, actionable outcomes that are then vetted by the people you intend to serve, there is the potential to do more harm than good. When designing, you take a user flow and make sure it can’t be broken. Ensuring that if something is removed, it can be restored. Or that something editable can also be updated at a later date—you know, that kind of thing. What we want to do is avoid surprises. Much like a water slide with a section of pipe missing, a broken flow forcibly ejects a user, to great surprise and frustration. Interactions within a user flow also have to be small enough to be self-contained, so as to avoid creating a none pizza with left beef scenario. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how to expand on this practice. Watertight user flows make for a great immediate experience, but it’s all too easy to miss the forest for the trees when you’re a product designer focused on cranking out features. What I’m concerned about is while to trying to envision how a user flow could be broken, you also think about how it could be subverted. In addition to preventing the removal of a section of water slide, you also keep someone from mugging the user when they shoot out the end. If you pay attention, you’ll start to notice this subversion with increasing frequency: Domestic abusers using internet-controlled devices to spy on and control their partner. Zealots tanking a business’ rating on Google because its … | 2018 | Eric Bailey | ericbailey | 2018-12-06T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2018/be-the-villain/ | ux |
| 15 | 15 | Git for Grown-ups | You are a clever and talented person. You create beautiful designs, or perhaps you have architected a system that even my cat could use. Your peers adore you. Your clients love you. But, until now, you haven’t *&^#^! been able to make Git work. It makes you angry inside that you have to ask your co-worker, again, for that *&^#^! command to upload your work. It’s not you. It’s Git. Promise. Yes, this is an article about the popular version control system, Git. But unlike just about every other article written about Git, I’m not going to give you the top five commands that you need to memorize; and I’m not going to tell you all your problems would be solved if only you were using this GUI wrapper or that particular workflow. You see, I’ve come to a grand realization: when we teach Git, we’re doing it wrong. Let me back up for a second and tell you a little bit about the field of adult education. (Bear with me, it gets good and will leave you feeling both empowered and righteous.) Andragogy, unlike pedagogy, is a learner-driven educational experience. There are six main tenets to adult education: Adults prefer to know why they are learning something. The foundation of the learning activities should include experience. Adults prefer to be able to plan and evaluate their own instruction. Adults are more interested in learning things which directly impact their daily activities. Adults prefer learning to be oriented not towards content, but towards problems. Adults relate more to their own motivators than to external ones. Nowhere in this list does it include “memorize the five most popular Git commands”. And yet this is how we teach version control: init, add, commit, branch, push. You’re an expert! Sound familiar? In the hierarchy of learning, memorizing commands is the lowest, or most basic, form of learning. At the peak of learning you are able to not just analyze and evaluate a problem space, but create your own understanding in relation to your existing body of knowledge. “Fine,” I can hear you say… | 2013 | Emma Jane Westby | emmajanewestby | 2013-12-04T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/git-for-grownups/ | code |
| 31 | 31 | Dealing with Emergencies in Git | The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, In hopes that version control soon would be there. This summer I moved to the UK with my partner, and the onslaught of the Christmas holiday season began around the end of October (October!). It does mean that I’ve had more than a fair amount of time to come up with horrible Git analogies for this article. Analogies, metaphors, and comparisons help the learner hook into existing mental models about how a system works. They only help, however, if the learner has enough familiarity with the topic at hand to make the connection between the old and new information. Let’s start by painting an updated version of Clement Clarke Moore’s Christmas living room. Empty stockings are hung up next to the fireplace, waiting for Saint Nicholas to come down the chimney and fill them with small treats. Holiday treats are scattered about. A bowl of mixed nuts, the holiday nutcracker, and a few clementines. A string of coloured lights winds its way up an evergreen. Perhaps a few of these images are familiar, or maybe they’re just settings you’ve seen in a movie. It doesn’t really matter what the living room looks like though. The important thing is to ground yourself in your own experiences before tackling a new subject. Instead of trying to brute-force your way into new information, as an adult learner constantly ask yourself: ‘What is this like? What does this remind me of? What do I already know that I can use to map out this new territory?’ It’s okay if the map isn’t perfect. As you refine your understanding of a new topic, you’ll outgrow the initial metaphors, analogies, and comparisons. With apologies to Mr. Moore, let’s give it a try. Getting Interrupted in Git When on the roof there arose such a clatter! You’re happily working on your software project when all of a sudden there are freaking reindeer on the roof! Whatever you’ve been working on is going to need to wait while you investigate the commotion. If you’ve got even a little bit of experience working with Git, … | 2014 | Emma Jane Westby | emmajanewestby | 2014-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/dealing-with-emergencies-in-git/ | code |
| 52 | 52 | Git Rebasing: An Elfin Workshop Workflow | This year Santa’s helpers have been tasked with making a garland. It’s a pretty simple task: string beads onto yarn in a specific order. When the garland reaches a specific length, add it to the main workshop garland. Each elf has a specific sequence they’re supposed to chain, which is given to them via a work order. (This is starting to sound like one of those horrible calculus problems. I promise it isn’t. It’s worse; it’s about Git.) For the most part, the system works really well. The elves are able to quickly build up a shared chain because each elf specialises on their own bit of garland, and then links the garland together. Because of this they’re able to work independently, but towards the common goal of making a beautiful garland. At first the elves are really careful with each bead they put onto the garland. They check with one another before merging their work, and review each new link carefully. As time crunches on, the elves pour a little more cheer into the eggnog cooler, and the quality of work starts to degrade. Tensions rise as mistakes are made and unkind words are said. The elves quickly realise they’re going to need a system to change the beads out when mistakes are made in the chain. The first common mistake is not looking to see what the latest chain is that’s been added to the main garland. The garland is huge, and it sits on a roll in one of the corners of the workshop. It’s a big workshop, so it is incredibly impractical to walk all the way to the roll to check what the last link is on the chain. The elves, being magical, have set up a monitoring system that allows them to keep a local copy of the main garland at their workstation. It’s an imperfect system though, so the elves have to request a manual refresh to see the latest copy. They can request a new copy by running the command git pull --rebase=preserve (They found that if they ran git pull on its own, they ended up with weird loops of extra beads off the main garland, so they’ve opted to use this method.) This keeps the shared garl… | 2015 | Emma Jane Westby | emmajanewestby | 2015-12-07T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/git-rebasing/ | code |
| 17 | 17 | Bringing Design and Research Closer Together | The ‘should designers be able to code’ debate has raged for some time, but I’m interested in another debate: should designers be able to research? Are you a designer who can do research? Good research and the insights you uncover inspire fresh ways of thinking and get your creative juices flowing. Good research brings clarity to a woolly brief. Audience insight helps sharpen your focus on what’s really important. Experimentation through research and design brings a sense of playfulness and curiosity to your work. Good research helps you do good design. Being a web designer today is pretty tough, particularly if you’re a freelancer and work on your own. There are so many new ideas, approaches to workflow and trends and tools to keep up with. How do you decide which things to do and which to ignore? A modern web designer needs to be able to consider the needs of the audience, design appropriate IAs and layouts, choose colour palettes, pick appropriate typefaces and type layouts, wrangle with content, style, code, dabble in SEO, and the list goes on and on. Not only that, but today’s web designer also has to keep up with the latest talking points in the industry: responsive design, Agile, accessibility, Sass, Git, lean UX, content first, mobile first, blah blah blah. Any good web designer doesn’t need to be persuaded about the merits of including research in their toolkit, but do you really have time to include research too? Who is responsible for research? Generally, research in the web industry forms part of other disciplines and isn’t so much a discipline in its own right. It’s very often thought of as part of UX, or activities that make up a process such as IA or content strategy. Research is often undertaken by UX designers, information architects or content strategists and isn’t something designers or developers get that involved in. Some people lump all of these activities together and label it design research and have design researchers to do it. Some companies, such as the one I run with my husband Ma… | 2013 | Emma Boulton | emmaboulton | 2013-12-22T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/bringing-design-and-research-closer-together/ | ux |
| 94 | 94 | Using Questionnaires for Design Research | How do you ask the right questions? In this article, I share a bunch of tips and practical advice on how to write and use your own surveys for design research. I’m an audience researcher – I’m not a designer or developer. I’ve spent much of the last thirteen years working with audience data both in creative agencies and on the client-side. I’m also a member of the Market Research Society. I run user surveys and undertake user research for our clients at the design studio I run with my husband – Mark Boulton Design. So let’s get started! Who are you designing for? Good web designers and developers appreciate the importance of understanding the audience they are designing or building a website or app for. I’m assuming that because you are reading a quality publication like 24 ways that you fall into this category, and so I won’t begin this article with a lecture. Suffice it to say, it’s a good idea to involve research of some sort during the life cycle of every project you undertake. I don’t just mean visual or competitor research, which of course is also very important. I mean looking at or finding your own audience or user data. Whether that be auditing existing data or research available from the client, carrying out user interviews, A/B testing, or conducting a simple questionnaire with users, any research is better than none. If you create personas as a design tool, they should always be based on research, so you will need to have plenty of data to hand for that. Where do I start? In the initial kick-off stages of a project, it’s a good idea to start by asking your client (when working in-house you still have a client – you might even be the client) what research or audience data they have available. Some will have loads – analytics, surveys, focus groups and insights – from talking to customers. Some won’t have much at all and you’ll be hard pressed to find out much about the audience. It’s best to review existing research first without rushing headlong into doing new research. Get a picture of what … | 2012 | Emma Boulton | emmaboulton | 2012-12-14T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2012/using-questionnaires-for-design-research/ | business |
| 99 | 99 | A Christmas hCard From Me To You | So apparently Christmas is coming. And what is Christmas all about? Well, cleaning out your address book, of course! What better time to go through your contacts, making sure everyone’s details are up date and that you’ve deleted all those nasty clients who never paid on time? It’s also a good time to make sure your current clients and colleagues have your most up-to-date details, so instead of filling up their inboxes with e-cards, why not send them something useful? Something like a… vCard! (See what I did there?) Just in case you’ve been working in a magical toy factory in the upper reaches of Scandinavia for the last few years, I’m going to tell you that now would also be the perfect time to get into microformats. Using the hCard format, we’ll build a very simple web page and markup our contact details in such a way that they’ll be understood by microformats plugins, like Operator or Tails for Firefox, or the cross-browser Microformats Bookmarklet. Oh, and because Christmas is all about dressing up and being silly, we’ll make the whole thing look nice and have a bit of fun with some CSS3 progressive enhancement. If you can’t wait to see what we end up with, you can preview it here. Step 1: Contact Details First, let’s decide what details we want to put on the page. I’d put my full name, my email address, my phone number, and my postal address, but I’d rather not get surprise visits from strangers when I’m fannying about with my baubles, so I’m going to use Father Christmas instead (that’s Santa to you Yanks). Father Christmas fatherchristmas@elliotjaystocks.com 25 Laughingallthe Way Snow Falls Lapland Finland 010 60 58 000 Step 2: hCard Creator Now I’m not sure about you, but I rather like getting the magical robot pixies to do the work for me, so head on over to the hCard Creator and put those pixies to work! Pop in your details and they’ll give you some nice microformatted HTML in turn. <div id="hcard-Father-Christmas" class="vcard"> <a class="url fn" href="http://elliotjaystocks.com/fatherc… | 2008 | Elliot Jay Stocks | elliotjaystocks | 2008-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2008/a-christmas-hcard-from-me-to-you/ | code |
| 145 | 145 | The Neverending (Background Image) Story | Everyone likes candy for Christmas, and there’s none better than eye candy. Well, that, and just more of the stuff. Today we’re going to combine both of those good points and look at how to create a beautiful background image that goes on and on… forever! Of course, each background image is different, so instead of agonising over each and every pixel, I’m going to concentrate on five key steps that you can apply to any of your own repeating background images. In this example, we’ll look at the Miami Beach background image used on the new FOWA site, which I’m afraid is about as un-festive as you can get. 1. Choose your image wisely I find there are three main criteria when judging photos you’re considering for repetition manipulation (or ‘repetulation’, as I like to say)… simplicity (beware of complex patterns) angle and perspective (watch out for shadows and obvious vanishing points) consistent elements (for easy cloning) You might want to check out this annotated version of the image, where I’ve highlighted elements of the photo that led me to choose it as the right one. The original image purchased from iStockPhoto. The Photoshopped version used on the FOWA site. 2. The power of horizontal lines With the image chosen and your cursor poised for some Photoshop magic, the most useful thing you can do is drag out the edge pixels from one side of the image to create a kind of rough colour ‘template’ on which to work over. It doesn’t matter which side you choose, although you might find it beneficial to use the one with the simplest spread of colour and complex elements. Click and hold on the marquee tool in the toolbar and select the ‘single column marquee tool’, which will span the full height of your document but will only be one pixel wide. Make the selection right at the edge of your document, press ctrl-c / cmd-c to copy the selection you made, create a new layer, and hit ctrl-v / cmd-v to paste the selection onto your new layer. using free transform (ctrl-t / cmd-t), drag out your selection so t… | 2007 | Elliot Jay Stocks | elliotjaystocks | 2007-12-03T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/the-neverending-background-image-story/ | code |
| 170 | 170 | A Pet Project is For Life, Not Just for Christmas | I’m excited: as December rolls on, I’m winding down from client work and indulging in a big pet project I’ve been dreaming up for quite some time, with the aim of releasing it early next year. I’ve always been a bit of a sucker for pet projects and currently have a few in the works: the big one, two collaborations with friends, and my continuing (and completely un-web-related) attempt at music. But when I think about the other designers and developers out there whose work I admire, one thing becomes obvious: they’ve all got pet projects! Look around the web and you’ll see that anyone worth their salt has some sort of side project on the go. If you don’t have yours yet, now’s the time! Have a pet project to collaborate with your friends It’s not uncommon to find me staring at my screen, looking at beautiful websites my friends have made, grinning inanely because I feel so honoured to know such talented individuals. But one thing really frustrates me: I hardly ever get to work with these people! Sure, there are times when it’s possible to do so, but due to various project situations, it’s a rarity. So, in order to work with my friends, I’ve found the best way is to instigate the collaboration outside of client work; in other words, have a pet project together! Free from the hard realities of budgets, time restraints, and client demands, you and your friends can come up with something purely for your own pleasures. If you’ve been looking for an excuse to work with other designers or developers whose work you love, the pet project is that excuse. They don’t necessarily have to be friends, either: if the respect is mutual, it can be a great way of breaking the ice and getting to know someone. Figure 1: A forthcoming secret love-child from myself and Tim Van Damme Have a pet project to escape from your day job We all like to moan about our clients and bosses, don’t we? But if leaving your job or firing your evil client just isn’t an option, why not escape from all that and pour your creative energies into somet… | 2009 | Elliot Jay Stocks | elliotjaystocks | 2009-12-18T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2009/a-pet-project-is-for-life-not-just-for-christmas/ | business |
| 270 | 270 | From Side Project to Not So Side Project | In the last article I wrote for 24 ways, back in 2009, I enthused about the benefits of having a pet project, suggesting that we should all have at least one so that we could collaborate with our friends, escape our day jobs, fulfil our own needs, help others out, raise our profiles, make money, and — most importantly — have fun. I don’t think I need to offer any further persuasions: it seems that designers and developers are launching their own pet projects left, right and centre. This makes me very happy. However, there still seems to be something of a disconnect between having a side project and turning it into something that is moderately successful; in particular, the challenge of making enough money to sustain the project and perhaps even elevating it from the sidelines so that it becomes something not so on the side at all. Before we even begin this, let’s spend a moment talking about money, also known as… Evil, nasty, filthy money Over the last couple of years, I’ve started referring to myself as an accidental businessman. I say accidental because my view of the typical businessman is someone who is driven by money, and I usually can’t stand such people. Those who are motivated by profit, obsessed with growth, and take an active interest in the world’s financial systems don’t tend to be folks with whom I share a beer, unless it’s to pour it over them. Especially if they’re wearing pinstriped suits. That said, we all want to make money, don’t we? And most of us want to make a relatively decent amount, too. I don’t think there’s any harm in admitting that, is there? Hello, I’m Elliot and I’m a capitalist. The key is making money from doing what we love. For most people I know in our community, we’ve already achieved that — I’m hard-pressed to think of anyone who isn’t extremely passionate about working in our industry and I think it’s one of the most positive, unifying benefits we enjoy as a group of like-minded people — but side projects usually arise from another kind of passion: a passion for somet… | 2011 | Elliot Jay Stocks | elliotjaystocks | 2011-12-22T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2011/from-side-project-to-not-so-side-project/ | business |
| 62 | 62 | Being Customer Supportive | Every day in customer support is an inbox, a Twitter feed, or a software forum full of new questions. Each is brimming with your customers looking for advice, reassurance, or fixes for their software problems. Each one is an opportunity to take a break from wrestling with your own troublesome tasks and assist someone else in solving theirs. Sometimes the questions are straightforward and can be answered in a few minutes with a short greeting, a link to a help page, or a prewritten bit of text you use regularly: how to print a receipt, reset a password, or even, sadly, close your account. More often, a support email requires you to spend some time unpacking the question, asking for more information, and writing a detailed personal response, tailored to help that particular user on this particular day. Here I offer a few of my own guidelines on how to make today’s email the best support experience for both me and my customer. And even if you don’t consider what you do to be customer support, you might still find the suggestions useful for the next time you need to communicate with a client, to solve a software problem with teammates, or even reach out and ask for help yourself. (All the examples appearing in this article are fictional. Any resemblance to quotes from real, software-using persons is entirely coincidental. Except for the bit about Star Wars. That happened.) Who’s TAHT girl I’ll be honest: I briefly tried making these recommendations into a clever mnemonic like FAST (facial drooping, arm weakness, speech difficulties, time) or PAD (pressure, antiseptic, dressing). But instead, you get TAHT: tone, ask, help, thank. Ah, well. As I work through each message in my support queue, I listen to the tone of the email ask clarifying questions bring in extra help as needed and thank the customer when the problem is solved. Let’s open an email and get started! Leave your message at the sound of the tone With our enthusiasm for emoji, it can be very hard to infer someone’s tone from plain text. How much time have… | 2015 | Elizabeth Galle | elizabethgalle | 2015-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/being-customer-supportive/ | process |
| 323 | 323 | Introducing UDASSS! | Okay. What’s that mean? Unobtrusive Degradable Ajax Style Sheet Switcher! Boy are you in for treat today ‘cause we’re gonna have a whole lotta Ajaxifida Unobtrucitosity CSS swappin’ Fun! Okay are you really kidding? Nope. I’ve even impressed myself on this one. Unfortunately, I don’t have much time to tell you the ins and outs of what I actually did to get this to work. We’re talking JavaScript, CSS, PHP…Ajax. But don’t worry about that. I’ve always believed that a good A.P.I. is an invisible A.P.I… and this I felt I achieved. The only thing you need to know is how it works and what to do. A Quick Introduction Anyway… First of all, the idea is very simple. I wanted something just like what Paul Sowden put together in Alternative Style: Working With Alternate Style Sheets from Alistapart Magazine EXCEPT a few minor (not-so-minor actually) differences which I’ve listed briefly below: Allow users to switch styles without JavaScript enabled (degradable) Preventing the F.O.U.C. before the window ‘load’ when getting preferred styles Keep the JavaScript entirely off our markup (no onclick’s or onload’s) Make it very very easy to implement (ok, Paul did that too) What I did to achieve this was used server-side cookies instead of JavaScript cookies. Hence, PHP. However this isn’t a “PHP style switcher” – which is where Ajax comes in. For the extreme technical folks, no, there is no xml involved here, or even a callback response. I only say Ajax because everyone knows what ‘it’ means. With that said, it’s the Ajax that sets the cookies ‘on the fly’. Got it? Awesome! What you need Luckily, I’ve done the work for you. It’s all packaged up in a nice zip file (at the end…keep reading for now) – so from here on out, just follow these instructions As I’ve mentioned, one of the things we’ll be working with is PHP. So, first things first, open up a file called index and save it with a ‘.php’ extension. Next, place the following text at the top of your document (even above your DOCTYPE) <?php require_once('uti… | 2005 | Dustin Diaz | dustindiaz | 2005-12-18T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2005/introducing-udasss/ | code |
| 222 | 222 | Golden Spirals | As building blocks go, the rectangle is not one to overwhelm the designer with decisions. On the face of it, you have two options: you can set the width, and the height. But despite this apparent simplicity, there are combinations of width and height that can look unbalanced. If a rectangle is too tall and slim, it might appear precarious. If it is not tall enough, it may simply look flat. But like a guitar string that’s out of tune, you can tweak the proportions little by little until a rectangle feels, as Goldilocks said, just right. A golden rectangle has its height and width in the golden ratio, which is approximately 1:1.618. These proportions have long been recognised as being aesthetically harmonious. Whether through instruction or by intuition, artists have understood how to exploit these proportions over the centuries. Examples can be found in classical architecture, medieval book construction, and even in the recent #newtwitter redesign. A mathematical curiosity The golden rectangle is unique, in that if you remove a square section from it, what is left behind is itself a golden rectangle. The removal of a square can be repeated on the rectangle that is left behind, and then repeated again, as many times as you like. This means that the golden rectangle can be treated as a building block for recursive patterns. In this article, we will exploit this property to build a golden spiral, using only HTML and CSS. The markup The HTML we’ll use for this study is simply a series of nested <div>s. <body> <div id="container"> <div class="cycle"> <div> <div> <div> <div class="cycle"> <div> <div> <div> <div class="cycle"> <div> <div> <div> <div class="cycle"></div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </body> The first of these has the class cycle, and so do… | 2010 | Drew Neil | drewneil | 2010-12-07T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2010/golden-spirals/ | design |
| 16 | 16 | URL Rewriting for the Fearful | I think it was Marilyn Monroe who said, “If you can’t handle me at my worst, please just fix these rewrite rules, I’m getting an internal server error.” Even the blonde bombshell hated configuring URL rewrites on her website, and I think most of us know where she was coming from. The majority of website projects I work on require some amount of URL rewriting, and I find it mildly enjoyable — I quite like a good rewrite rule. I suspect you may not share my glee, so in this article we’re going to go back to basics to try to make the whole rigmarole more understandable. When we think about URL rewriting, usually that means adding some rules to an .htaccess file for an Apache web server. As that’s the most common case, that’s what I’ll be sticking to here. If you work with a different server, there’s often documentation specifically for translating from Apache’s mod_rewrite rules. I even found an automatic converter for nginx. This isn’t going to be a comprehensive guide to every URL rewriting problem you might ever have. That would take us until Christmas. If you consider yourself a trial-and-error dabbler in the HTTP 500-infested waters of URL rewriting, then hopefully this will provide a little bit more of a basis to help you figure out what you’re doing. If you’ve ever found yourself staring at the white screen of death after screwing up your .htaccess file, don’t worry. As Michael Jackson once insipidly whined, you are not alone. The basics Rewrite rules form part of the Apache web server’s configuration for a website, and can be placed in a number of different locations as part of your virtual host configuration. By far the simplest and most portable option is to use an .htaccess file in your website root. Provided your server has mod_rewrite available, all you need to do to kick things off in your .htaccess file is: RewriteEngine on The general formula for a rewrite rule is: RewriteRule URL/to/match URL/to/use/if/it/matches [options] When we talk about URL rewriting, we’re normally talking about one o… | 2013 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2013-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/url-rewriting-for-the-fearful/ | code |
| 29 | 29 | What It Takes to Build a Website | In 1994 we lost Kurt Cobain and got the world wide web as a weird consolation prize. In the years that followed, if you’d asked me if I knew how to build a website I’d have said yes, I know HTML, so I know how to build a website. If you’d then asked me what it takes to build a website, I’d have had to admit that HTML would hardly feature. Among the design nerdery and dev geekery it’s easy to think that the nuts and bolts of building a page just need to be multiplied up and Ta-da! There’s your website. That can certainly be true with weekend projects and hackery for fun. It works for throwing something together on GitHub or experimenting with ideas on your personal site. But what about working professionally on client projects? The web is important, so we need to build it right. It’s 2015 – your job involves people paying you money for building websites. What does it take to build a website and to do it right? What practices should we adopt to make really great, successful and professional web projects in 2015? I put that question to some friends and 24 ways authors to see what they thought. Getting the tech right Inevitably, it all starts with the technology. We work in a technical medium, after all. From Notepad and WinFTP through to continuous integration and deployment – how do you build sites? Create a stable development environment There’s little more likely to send a web developer into a wild panic and a client into a wild rage than making a new site live and things just not working. That’s why it’s important to have realistic development and staging environments that mimic the live server as closely as possible. Are you in the habit of developing new sites right on the client’s server? Or maybe in a subfolder on your local machine? It’s time to reconsider. Charlie Perrins writes: Don’t work on a live server – this feels like one of those gear-changing moments for a developer’s growth. Build something that works just as well locally on your own machine as it does on a live server, and capture th… | 2014 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2014-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/what-it-takes-to-build-a-website/ | business |
| 66 | 66 | Solve the Hard Problems | So, here we find ourselves on the cusp of 2016. We’ve had a good year – the web is still alive, no one has switched it off yet. Clients still have websites, teenagers still have phone apps, and there continue to be plenty of online brands to meaningfully engage with each day. Good job team, high fives all round. As it’s the time to make resolutions, I wanted to share three small ideas to take into the new year. Get good at what you do “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” the old joke goes. “Practise, practise, practise.” We work in an industry where there is an awful lot to learn. There’s a lot to learn to get started and then once you do, there’s a lot more to learn to keep your skills current. Just when you think you’ve mastered something, it changes. This is true of many industries, of course, but the sheer pace of change for us makes learning not an annual activity, but daily. Learning takes time, and while I’m not convinced that every skill takes the fabled ten thousand hours to master, there is certainly no escaping that to remain current we must reinvest time in keeping our skills up to date. Picking where to spend your time One of the hardest aspects of this thing of ours is just choosing what to learn. If you, like me, invested any time in learning the Less CSS preprocessor over the last few years, you’ll probably now be spending your time relearning Sass instead. If you spent time learning Grunt, chances are you’ll now be thinking about whether you should switch to Gulp. It’s not just that there are new types of tools, there are new tools and frameworks to do the things you’re already doing, but, well, differently. Deciding what to learn is hard and the costs of backing the wrong horse can seriously mount up; so much so that by the time you’ve learned and then relearned the tools everyone says you need for your job, there’s rarely enough time to spend really getting to know how best to use them. Practise, practise, practise Do you know how you don’t get to Carnegie Hall? By learning a new instrument eac… | 2015 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2015-12-24T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/solve-the-hard-problems/ | process |
| 80 | 80 | HTML5 Video Bumpers | Video is a bigger part of the web experience than ever before. With native browser support for HTML5 video elements freeing us from the tyranny of plugins, and the availability of faster internet connections to the workplace, home and mobile networks, it’s now pretty straightforward to publish video in a way that can be consumed in all sorts of ways on all sorts of different web devices. I recently worked on a project where the client had shot some dedicated video shorts to publish on their site. They also had some five-second motion graphics produced to top and tail the videos with context and branding. This pretty common requirement is a great idea on the web, where a user might land at your video having followed a link and be viewing a page without much context. Known as bumpers, these short introduction clips help brand a video and make it look a lot more professional. Adding bumpers to a video The simplest way to add bumpers to a video would be to edit them on to the start and end of the video file itself. Cooking the bumpers into the video file is easy, but should you ever want to update them it can become a real headache. If the branding needs updating, for example, you’d need to re-edit and re-encode all your videos. Not a fun task. What if the bumpers could be added dynamically? That would enable you to use the same bumper for multiple videos (decreasing download time for users who might watch more than one) and to update the bumpers whenever you wanted. You could change them seasonally, update them for special promotions, run different advertising slots, perform multivariate testing, or even target different bumpers to different users. The trade-off, of course, is that if you dynamically add your bumpers, there’s a chance that a user in a given circumstance might not see the bumper. For example, if the main video feature was uploaded to YouTube, you’d have no way to control the playback. As always, you need to weigh up the pros and cons and make your choice. HTML5 bumpers If you wanted to dyna… | 2012 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2012-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2012/html5-video-bumpers/ | code |
| 101 | 101 | Easing The Path from Design to Development | As a web developer, I have the pleasure of working with a lot of different designers. There has been a lot of industry discussion of late about designers and developers, focusing on how different we sometimes are and how the interface between our respective phases of a project (that is to say moving from a design phase into production) can sometimes become a battleground. I don’t believe it has to be a battleground. It’s actually more like being a dance partner – our steps are different, but as long as we know our own part and have a little knowledge of our partner’s steps, it all goes together to form a cohesive dance. Albeit with less spandex and fewer sequins (although that may depend on the project in question). As the process usually flows from design towards development, it’s most important that designers have a little knowledge of how the site is going to be built. At the specialist web development agency I’m part of, we find that designs that have been well considered from a technical perspective help to keep the project on track and on budget. Based on that experience, I’ve put together my checklist of things that designers should consider before handing their work over to a developer to build. Layout One rookie mistake made by traditionally trained designers transferring to the web is to forget a web browser is not a fixed medium. Unlike designing a magazine layout or a piece of packaging, there are lots of available options to consider. Should the layout be fluid and resize with the window, or should it be set to a fixed width? If it’s fluid, which parts expand and which not? If it’s fixed, should it sit in the middle of the window or to one side? If any part of the layout is going to be flexible (get wider and narrower as required), consider how any graphics are affected. Images don’t usually look good if displayed at anything other that their original size, so should they behave? If a column is going to get wider than it’s shown in the Photoshop comp, it may be necessary to provide separate wid… | 2008 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2008-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2008/easing-the-path-from-design-to-development/ | process |
| 124 | 124 | Writing Responsible JavaScript | Without a doubt, JavaScript has been making something of a comeback in the last year. If you’re involved in client-side development in any way at all, chances are that you’re finding yourself writing more JavaScript now than you have in a long time. If you learned most of your JavaScript back when DHTML was all the rage and before DOM Scripting was in vogue, there have been some big shifts in the way scripts are written. Most of these are in the way event handlers are assigned and functions declared. Both of these changes are driven by the desire to write scripts that are responsible page citizens, both in not tying behaviour to content and in taking care not to conflict with other scripts. I thought it may be useful to look at some of these more responsible approaches to learn how to best write scripts that are independent of the page content and are safely portable between different applications. Event Handling Back in the heady days of Web 1.0, if you wanted to have an object on the page react to something like a click, you would simply go ahead and attach an onclick attribute. This was easy and understandable, but much like the font tag or the style attribute, it has the downside of mixing behaviour or presentation in with our content. As we’re learned with CSS, there are big benefits in keeping those layers separate. Hey, if it works for CSS, it should work for JavaScript too. Just like with CSS, instead of adding an attribute to our element within the document, the more responsible way to do that is to look for the item from your script (like CSS does with a selector) and then assign the behaviour to it. To give an example, take this oldskool onclick use case: <a id="anim-link" href="#" onclick="playAnimation()">Play the animation</a> This could be rewritten by removing the onclick attribute, and instead doing the following from within your JavaScript. document.getElementById('anim-link').onclick = playAnimation; It’s all in the timing Of course, it’s never quite that easy. To be able to attach tha… | 2006 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2006-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2006/writing-responsible-javascript/ | code |
| 132 | 132 | Tasty Text Trimmer | In most cases, when designing a user interface it’s best to make a decision about how data is best displayed and stick with it. Failing to make a decision ultimately leads to too many user options, which in turn can be taxing on the poor old user. Under some circumstances, however, it’s good to give the user freedom in customising their workspace. One good example of this is the ‘Article Length’ tool in Apple’s Safari RSS reader. Sliding a slider left of right dynamically changes the length of each article shown. It’s that kind of awesomey magic stuff that’s enough to keep you from sleeping. Let’s build one. The Setup Let’s take a page that has lots of long text items, a bit like a news page or like Safari’s RSS items view. If we were to attach a class name to each element we wanted to resize, that would give us something to hook onto from the JavaScript. Example 1: The basic page. As you can see, I’ve wrapped my items in a DIV and added a class name of chunk to them. It’s these chunks that we’ll be finding with the JavaScript. Speaking of which … Our Core Functions There are two main tasks that need performing in our script. The first is to find the chunks we’re going to be resizing and store their original contents away somewhere safe. We’ll need this so that if we trim the text down we’ll know what it was if the user decides they want it back again. We’ll call this loadChunks. var loadChunks = function(){ var everything = document.getElementsByTagName('*'); var i, l; chunks = []; for (i=0, l=everything.length; i<l; i++){ if (everything[i].className.indexOf(chunkClass) > -1){ chunks.push({ ref: everything[i], original: everything[i].innerHTML }); } } }; The variable chunks is stored outside of this function so that we can access it from our next core function, which is doTrim. var doTrim = function(interval) { if (!chunks) loadChunks(); var i, l; for (i=0, l=chunks.length; i<l; i++){ var a = chunks[i].original.split(' '); a = a.slice(0, interval); chunks[i].ref.inner… | 2006 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2006-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2006/tasty-text-trimmer/ | code |
| 165 | 165 | Transparent PNGs in Internet Explorer 6 | Newer breeds of browser such as Firefox and Safari have offered support for PNG images with full alpha channel transparency for a few years. With the use of hacks, support has been available in Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6, but the hacks are non-ideal and have been tricky to use. With IE7 winning masses of users from earlier versions over the last year, full PNG alpha-channel transparency is becoming more of a reality for day-to-day use. However, there are still numbers of IE6 users out there who we can’t leave out in the cold this Christmas, so in this article I’m going to look what we can do to support IE6 users whilst taking full advantage of transparency for the majority of a site’s visitors. So what’s alpha channel transparency? Cast your minds back to the Ghost of Christmas Past, the humble GIF. Images in GIF format offer transparency, but that transparency is either on or off for any given pixel. Each pixel’s either fully transparent, or a solid colour. In GIF, transparency is effectively just a special colour you can chose for a pixel. The PNG format tackles the problem rather differently. As well as having any colour you chose, each pixel also carries a separate channel of information detailing how transparent it is. This alpha channel enables a pixel to be fully transparent, fully opaque, or critically, any step in between. This enables designers to produce images that can have, for example, soft edges without any of the ‘halo effect’ traditionally associated with GIF transparency. If you’ve ever worked on a site that has different colour schemes and therefore requires multiple versions of each graphic against a different colour, you’ll immediately see the benefit. What’s perhaps more interesting than that, however, is the extra creative freedom this gives designers in creating beautiful sites that can remain web-like in their ability to adjust, scale and reflow. The Internet Explorer problem Up until IE7, there has been no fully native support for PNG alpha channel transparency in Internet Expl… | 2007 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2007-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/supersleight-transparent-png-in-ie6/ | code |
| 166 | 166 | Performance On A Shoe String | Back in the summer, I happened to notice the official Wimbledon All England Tennis Club site had jumped to the top of Alexa’s Movers & Shakers list — a list that tracks sites that have had the biggest upturn or downturn in traffic. The lawn tennis championships were underway, and so traffic had leapt from almost nothing to crazy-busy in a no time at all. Many sites have similar peaks in traffic, especially when they’re based around scheduled events. No one cares about the site for most of the year, and then all of a sudden – wham! – things start getting warm in the data centre. Whilst the thought of chestnuts roasting on an open server has a certain appeal, it’s less attractive if you care about your site being available to visitors. Take a look at this Alexa traffic graph showing traffic patterns for superbowl.com at the beginning of each year, and wimbledon.org in the month of July. Traffic graph from Alexa.com Whilst not on the same scale or with such dramatic peaks, we have a similar pattern of traffic here at 24ways.org. Over the last three years we’ve seen a dramatic pick up in traffic over the month of December (as would be expected) and then a much lower, although steady load throughout the year. What we do have, however, is the luxury of knowing when the peaks will be. For a normal site, be that a blog, small scale web app, or even a small corporate site, you often just cannot predict when you might get slashdotted, end up on the front page of Digg or linked to from a similarly high-profile site. You just don’t know when the peaks will be. If you’re a big commercial enterprise like the Super Bowl, scaling up for that traffic is simply a cost of doing business. But for most of us, we can’t afford to have massive capacity sat there unused for 90% of the year. What you have to do instead is work out how to deal with as much traffic as possible with the modest resources you have. In this article I’m going to talk about some of the things we’ve learned about keeping 24 ways running throughout December,… | 2007 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2007-12-24T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/performance-on-a-shoe-string/ | ux |
| 181 | 181 | Working With RGBA Colour | When Tim and I were discussing the redesign of this site last year, one of the clear goals was to have a graphical style without making the pages heavy with a lot of images. When we launched, a lot of people were surprised that the design wasn’t built with PNGs. Instead we’d used RGBA colour values, which is part of the CSS3 specification. What is RGBA Colour? We’re all familiar with specifying colours in CSS using by defining the mix of red, green and blue light required to achieve our tone. This is fine and dandy, but whatever values we specify have one thing in common — the colours are all solid, flat, and well, a bit boring. Flat RGB colours CSS3 introduces a couple of new ways to specify colours, and one of those is RGBA. The A stands for Alpha, which refers to the level of opacity of the colour, or to put it another way, the amount of transparency. This means that we can set not only the red, green and blue values, but also control how much of what’s behind the colour shows through. Like with layers in Photoshop. Don’t We Have Opacity Already? The ability to set the opacity on a colour differs subtly from setting the opacity on an element using the CSS opacity property. Let’s look at an example. Here we have an H1 with foreground and background colours set against a page with a patterned background. Heading with no transparency applied h1 { color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); } By setting the CSS opacity property, we can adjust the transparency of the entire element and its contents: Heading with 50% opacity on the element h1 { color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); opacity: 0.5; } RGBA colour gives us something different – the ability to control the opacity of the individual colours rather than the entire element. So we can set the opacity on just the background: 50% opacity on just the background colour h1 { color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.5); } Or leave the background solid and change the opacity on just th… | 2009 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2009-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2009/working-with-rgba-colour/ | code |
| 208 | 208 | All That Glisters | Tradition has it that at this time of year, families gather together, sit, eat and share stories. It’s an opportunity for the wisdom of the elders to be passed down to the younger members of the tribe. Tradition also has it that we should chase cheese downhill and dunk the nice lady to prove she’s a witch, so maybe let’s not put too much stock in that. I’ve been building things on the web professionally for about twenty years, and although the web has changed immeasurably, it’s probably not changed as much as I have. While I can happily say I’m not the young (always right, always arrogant) developer that I once was, unfortunately I’m now an approaching-middle-age developer who thinks he’s always right and on top of it is extremely pompous. What can you do? Nature has devised this system with the distinct advantage of allowing us to always be right, and only ever wrong in the future or in the past. So let’s roll with it. Increasingly, there seems to be a sense of fatigue within our industry. Just when you think you’ve got a handle on whatever the latest tool or technology is, something new comes out to replace it. Suddenly you find that you’ve invested precious time learning something new and it’s already old hat. The pace of change is so rapid, that new developers don’t know where to start, and experienced developers don’t know where it ends. With that in mind, here’s some fireside thoughts from a pompous old developer, that I hope might bring some Christmas comfort. Reliable and boring beats shiny and new There are so many new tools, frameworks, techniques, styles and libraries to learn. You know what? You don’t have to use them. You’re not a bad developer if you use Grunt even though others have switched to Gulp or Brunch or Webpack or Banana Sandwich. It’s probably misguided to spend lots of project time messing around with build tool fashions when your so last year build tool is already doing what you need. Just a little reminder that it’s about 100 times more important what you build than how you build it.— … | 2017 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2017-12-24T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/all-that-glisters/ | business |
| 220 | 220 | Finding Your Way with Static Maps | Since the introduction of the Google Maps service in 2005, online maps have taken off in a way not really possible before the invention of slippy map interaction. Although quickly followed by a plethora of similar services from both commercial and non-commercial parties, Google’s first-mover advantage, and easy-to-use developer API saw Google Maps become pretty much the de facto mapping service. It’s now so easy to add a map to a web page, there’s no reason not to. Dropping an iframe map into your page is as simple as embedding a YouTube video. But there’s one crucial drawback to both the solution Google provides for you to drop into your page and the code developers typically implement themselves – they don’t work without JavaScript. A bit about JavaScript Back in October of this year, The Yahoo! Developer Network blog ran some tests to measure how many visitors to the Yahoo! home page didn’t have JavaScript available or enabled in their browser. It’s an interesting test when you consider that the audience for the Yahoo! home page (one of the most visited pages on the web) represents about as mainstream a sample as you’ll find. If there’s any such thing as an ‘average Web user’ then this is them. The results surprised me. It varied from region to region, but at most just two per cent of visitors didn’t have JavaScript running. To be honest, I was expecting it to be higher, but this quote from the article caught my attention: While the percentage of visitors with JavaScript disabled seems like a low number, keep in mind that small percentages of big numbers are also big numbers. That’s right, of course, and it got me thinking about what that two per cent means. For many sites, two per cent is the number of visitors using the Opera web browser, using IE6, or using Mobile Safari. So, although a small percentage of the total, users without JavaScript can’t just be forgotten about, and catering for them is at the very heart of how the web is supposed to work. Starting with content in HTML, we layer on … | 2010 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2010-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2010/finding-your-way-with-static-maps/ | code |
| 264 | 264 | Dynamic Social Sharing Images | Way back when social media was new, you could be pretty sure that whatever you posted would be read by those who follow you. If you’d written a blog post and you wanted to share it with those who follow you, you could post a link and your followers would see it in their streams. Oh heady days! With so many social channels and a proliferation of content and promotions flying past in everyone’s streams, it’s no longer enough to share content on social media, you have to actively sell it if you want it to be seen. You really need to make the most of every opportunity to catch a reader’s attention if you’re trying to get as many eyes as possible on that sweet, sweet social content. One of the best ways to grab attention with your posts or tweets is to include an image. There’s heaps of research that says that having images in your posts helps them stand out to followers. Reports I found showed figures from anything from 35% to 150% improvement from just having image in a post. Unfortunately, the details were surrounded with gross words like engagement and visual marketing assets and so I had to close the page before I started to hate myself too much. So without hard stats to quote, we’ll call it a rule of thumb. The rule of thumb is that posts with images will grab more attention than those without, so it makes sense that when adding pages to a website, you should make sure that they have social media sharing images associated with them. Adding sharing images The process for declaring an image to be used in places like Facebook and Twitter is very simple, and at this point is familiar to many of us. You add a meta tag to the head of the page to point to the location of the image to use. When a link to the page is added to a post, the social network will fetch the page, look for the meta tag and then use the image you specified. <meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/my_image.jpg"> There’s a good post on this over at CSS-Tricks if you need to bone up on the details of this and other similar meta tags … | 2018 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2018-12-24T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2018/dynamic-social-sharing-images/ | code |
| 271 | 271 | Creating Custom Font Stacks with Unicode-Range | Any web designer or front-end developer worth their salt will be familiar with the CSS @font-face rule used for embedding fonts in a web page. We’ve all used it — either directly in our code ourselves, or via one of the web font services like Fontdeck, Typekit or Google Fonts. If you’re like me, however, you’ll be used to just copying and pasting in a specific incantation of lines designed to get different formats of fonts working in different browsers, and may not have really explored all the capabilities of @font-face properties as defined by the spec. One such property — the unicode-range descriptor — sounds pretty dull and is easily overlooked. It does, however, have some fairly interesting possibilities when put to use in creative ways. Unicode-range The unicode-range descriptor is designed to help when using fonts that don’t have full coverage of the characters used in a page. By adding a unicode-range property to a @font-face rule it is possible to specify the range of characters the font covers. @font-face { font-family: BBCBengali; src: url(fonts/BBCBengali.ttf) format("opentype"); unicode-range: U+00-FF; } In this example, the font is to be used for characters in the range of U+00 to U+FF which runs from the unexciting control characters at the start of the Unicode table (symbols like the exclamation mark start at U+21) right through to ÿ at U+FF – the extent of the Basic Latin character range. By adding multiple @font-face rules for the same family but with different ranges, you can build up complete coverage of the characters your page uses by using different fonts. When I say that it’s possible to specify the range of characters the font covers, that’s true, but what you’re really doing with the unicode-range property is declaring which characters the font should be used for. This becomes interesting, because instead of merely working with the technical constraints of available characters in a given font, we can start picking and choosing characters to use and selectively mix fon… | 2011 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2011-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2011/creating-custom-font-stacks-with-unicode-range/ | code |
| 300 | 300 | Taking Device Orientation for a Spin | When The Police sang “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” they weren’t talking about using a smartphone to view a panoramic image on Facebook, but they could have been. For years, technology has driven relentlessly towards devices we can carry around in our pockets, and now that we’re there, we’re expected to take the thing out of our pocket and wave it around in front of our faces like a psychotic donkey in search of its own dangly carrot. But if you can’t beat them, join them. A brave new world A couple of years back all sorts of specs for new HTML5 APIs sprang up much to our collective glee. Emboldened, we ran a few tests and found they basically didn’t work in anything and went off disheartened into the corner for a bit of a sob. Turns out, while we were all busy boohooing, those browser boffins have actually being doing some work, and lo and behold, some of these APIs are even half usable. Mostly literally half usable—we’re still talking about browsers, after all. Now, of course they’re all a bit JavaScripty and are going to involve complex methods and maths and science and probably about a thousand dependancies from Github that will fall out of fashion while we’re still trying to locate the documentation, right? Well, no! So what if we actually wanted to use one of these APIs, say to impress our friends with our ability to make them wave their phones in front of their faces (because no one enjoys looking hapless more than the easily-technologically-impressed), how could we do something like that? Let’s find out. The Device Orientation API The phone-wavy API is more formally known as the DeviceOrientation Event Specification. It does a bunch of stuff that basically doesn’t work, but also gives us three values that represent orientation of a device (a phone, a tablet, probably not a desktop computer) around its x, y and z axes. You might think of it as pitch, roll and yaw if you like to spend your weekends wearing goggles and a leather hat. The main way we access these values is through an event listener, which can … | 2016 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2016-12-24T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/taking-device-orientation-for-a-spin/ | code |
| 314 | 314 | Easy Ajax with Prototype | There’s little more impressive on the web today than a appropriate touch of Ajax. Used well, Ajax brings a web interface much closer to the experience of a desktop app, and can turn a bear of an task into a pleasurable activity. But it’s really hard, right? It involves all the nasty JavaScript that no one ever does often enough to get really good at, and the browser support is patchy, and urgh it’s just so much damn effort. Well, the good news is that – ta-da – it doesn’t have to be a headache. But man does it still look impressive. Here’s how to amaze your friends. Introducing prototype.js Prototype is a JavaScript framework by Sam Stephenson designed to help make developing dynamic web apps a whole lot easier. In basic terms, it’s a JavaScript file which you link into your page that then enables you to do cool stuff. There’s loads of capability built in, a portion of which covers our beloved Ajax. The whole thing is freely distributable under an MIT-style license, so it’s good to go. What a nice man that Mr Stephenson is – friends, let us raise a hearty cup of mulled wine to his good name. Cheers! sluurrrrp. First step is to download the latest Prototype and put it somewhere safe. I suggest underneath the Christmas tree. Cutting to the chase Before I go on and set up an example of how to use this, let’s just get to the crux. Here’s how Prototype enables you to make a simple Ajax call and dump the results back to the page: var url = 'myscript.php'; var pars = 'foo=bar'; var target = 'output-div'; var myAjax = new Ajax.Updater(target, url, {method: 'get', parameters: pars}); This snippet of JavaScript does a GET to myscript.php, with the parameter foo=bar, and when a result is returned, it places it inside the element with the ID output-div on your page. Knocking up a basic example So to get this show on the road, there are three files we need to set up in our site alongside prototype.js. Obviously we need a basic HTML page with prototype.js linked in. This is the page the user interacts with. Secondl… | 2005 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2005-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2005/easy-ajax-with-prototype/ | code |
| 315 | 315 | Edit-in-Place with Ajax | Back on day one we looked at using the Prototype library to take all the hard work out of making a simple Ajax call. While that was fun and all, it didn’t go that far towards implementing something really practical. We dipped our toes in, but haven’t learned to swim yet. So here is swimming lesson number one. Anyone who’s used Flickr to publish their photos will be familiar with the edit-in-place system used for quickly amending titles and descriptions on photographs. Hovering over an item turns its background yellow to indicate it is editable. A simple click loads the text into an edit box, right there on the page. Prototype includes all sorts of useful methods to help reproduce something like this for our own projects. As well as the simple Ajax GETs we learned how to do last time, we can also do POSTs (which we’ll need here) and a whole bunch of manipulations to the user interface – all through simple library calls. Here’s what we’re building, so let’s do it. Getting Started There are two major components to this process; the user interface manipulation and the Ajax call itself. Our set-up is much the same as last time (you may wish to read the first article if you’ve not already done so). We have a basic HTML page which links in the prototype.js file and our own editinplace.js. Here’s what Santa dropped down my chimney: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/> <title>Edit-in-Place with Ajax</title> <link href="editinplace.css" rel="Stylesheet" type="text/css" /> <script src="prototype.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="editinplace.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head> <body> <h1>Edit-in-place</h1> <p id="desc">Dashing through the snow on a one horse open sleigh.</p> </body> </html> So that’s our page. The editable item is … | 2005 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2005-12-23T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2005/edit-in-place-with-ajax/ | code |
| 318 | 318 | Auto-Selecting Navigation | In the article Centered Tabs with CSS Ethan laid out a tabbed navigation system which can be centred on the page. A frequent requirement for any tab-based navigation is to be able to visually represent the currently selected tab in some way. If you’re using a server-side language such as PHP, it’s quite easy to write something like class="selected" into your markup, but it can be even simpler than that. Let’s take the navigation div from Ethan’s article as an example. <div id="navigation"> <ul> <li><a href="#"><span>Home</span></a></li> <li><a href="#"><span>About</span></a></li> <li><a href="#"><span>Our Work</span></a></li> <li><a href="#"><span>Products</span></a></li> <li class="last"><a href="#"><span>Contact Us</span></a></li> </ul> </div> As you can see we have a standard unordered list which is then styled with CSS to look like tabs. By giving each tab a class which describes it’s logical section of the site, if we were to then apply a class to the body tag of each page showing the same, we could write a clever CSS selector to highlight the correct tab on any given page. Sound complicated? Well, it’s not a trivial concept, but actually applying it is dead simple. Modifying the markup First thing is to place a class name on each li in the list: <div id="navigation"> <ul> <li class="home"><a href="#"><span>Home</span></a></li> <li class="about"><a href="#"><span>About</span></a></li> <li class="work"><a href="#"><span>Our Work</span></a></li> <li class="products"><a href="#"><span>Products</span></a></li> <li class="last contact"><a href="#"><span>Contact Us</span></a></li> </ul> </div> Then, on each page of your site, apply the a matching class to the body tag to indicate which section of the site that page is in. For example, on your About page: <body class="about">...</body> Writing the CSS selector You can now write a single CSS rule to match the selected tab on any give… | 2005 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2005-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2005/auto-selecting-navigation/ | code |
| 336 | 336 | Practical Microformats with hCard | You’ve probably heard about microformats over the last few months. You may have even read the easily digestible introduction at Digital Web Magazine, but perhaps you’ve not found time to actually implement much yet. That’s understandable, as it can sometimes be difficult to see exactly what you’re adding by applying a microformat to a page. Sure, you’re semantically enhancing the information you’re marking up, and the Semantic Web is a great idea and all, but what benefit is it right now, today? Well, the answer to that question is simple: you’re adding lots of information that can be and is being used on the web here and now. The big ongoing battle amongst the big web companies if one of territory over information. Everyone’s grasping for as much data as possible. Some of that information many of us are cautious to give away, but a lot of is happy to be freely available. Of the data you’re giving away, it makes sense to give it as much meaning as possible, thus enabling anyone from your friends and family to the giant search company down the road to make the most of it. Ok, enough of the waffle, let’s get working. Introducing hCard You may have come across hCard. It’s a microformat for describing contact information (or really address book information) from within your HTML. It’s based on the vCard format, which is the format the contacts/address book program on your computer uses. All the usual fields are available – name, address, town, website, email, you name it. If you’re running Firefox and Greasemonkey (or if you can, just to try this out), install this user script. What it does is look for instances of the hCard microformat in a page, and then add in a link to pass any hCards it finds to a web service which will convert it to a vCard. Take a look at the About the author box at the bottom of this article. It’s a hCard, so you should be able to click the icon the user script inserts and add me to your Outlook contacts or OS X Address Book with just a click. So microformats are useful after all. Free… | 2005 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2005-12-06T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2005/practical-microformats-with-hcard/ | code |
| 59 | 59 | Animating Your Brand | Let’s talk about how we add animation to our designs, in a way that’s consistent with other aspects of our brand, such as fonts, colours, layouts and everything else. Animating is fun. Adding animation to our designs can bring them to life and make our designs stand out. Animations can show how the pieces of our designs fit together. They provide context and help people use our products. All too often animation is something we tack on at the end. We put a transition on a modal window or sliding menu and we often don’t think about whether that animation is consistent with our overall design. Style guides to the rescue A style guide is a document that establishes and enforces style to improve communication. It can cover anything from typography and writing style to ethics and other, broader goals. It might be a static visual document showing every kind of UI, like in the Codecademy.com redesign shown below. UI toolkit from “Reimagining Codecademy.com” by @mslima It might be a technical reference with code examples. CodePen’s new design patterns and style guide is a great example of this, showing all the components used throughout the website as live code. CodePen’s design patterns and style guide A style guide gives a wide view of your project, it maintains consistency when adding new content, and we can use our style guide to present animations. Living documents Style guides don’t need to be static. We can use them to show movement. We can share CSS keyframe animations or transitions that can then go into production. We can also explain why animation is there in the first place. Just as a style guide might explain why we chose a certain font or layout, we can use style guides to explain the intent behind animation. This means that if someone else wants to create a new component, they will know why animation applies. If you haven’t yet set up a style guide, you might want to take a look at Pattern Lab. It’s a great tool for setting up your own style guide and includes loads of design patterns to get started. There … | 2015 | Donovan Hutchinson | donovanhutchinson | 2015-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/animating-your-brand/ | design |
| 135 | 135 | A Scripting Carol | We all know the stories of the Ghost of Scripting Past – a time when the web was young and littered with nefarious scripting, designed to bestow ultimate control upon the developer, to pollute markup with event handler after event handler, and to entrench advertising in the minds of all that gazed upon her. And so it came to be that JavaScript became a dirty word, thrown out of solutions by many a Scrooge without regard to the enhancements that JavaScript could bring to any web page. JavaScript, as it was, was dead as a door-nail. With the arrival of our core philosophy that all standardistas hold to be true: “separate your concerns – content, presentation and behaviour,” we are in a new era of responsible development the Web Standards Way™. Or are we? Have we learned from the Ghosts of Scripting Past? Or are we now faced with new problems that come with new ways of implementing our solutions? The Ghost of Scripting Past If the Ghost of Scripting Past were with us it would probably say: You must remember your roots and where you came from, and realize the misguided nature of your early attempts for control. That person you see down there, is real and they are the reason you exist in the first place… without them, you are nothing. In many ways we’ve moved beyond the era of control and we do take into account the user, or at least much more so than we used to. Sadly – there is one advantage that old school inline event handlers had where we assigned and reassigned CSS style property values on the fly – we knew that if JavaScript wasn’t supported, the styles wouldn’t be added because we ended up doing them at the same time. If anything, we need to have learned from the past that just because it works for us doesn’t mean it is going to work for anyone else – we need to test more scenarios than ever to observe the multitude of browsing arrangements we’ll observe: CSS on with JavaScript off, CSS off/overridden with JavaScript on, both on, both off/not supported. It is a situation that is ripe for conflict. … | 2006 | Derek Featherstone | derekfeatherstone | 2006-12-21T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2006/a-scripting-carol/ | code |
| 335 | 335 | Naughty or Nice? CSS Background Images | Web Standards based development involves many things – using semantically sound HTML to provide structure to our documents or web applications, using CSS for presentation and layout, using JavaScript responsibly, and of course, ensuring that all that we do is accessible and interoperable to as many people and user agents as we can. This we understand to be good. And it is good. Except when we don’t clearly think through the full implications of using those techniques. Which often happens when time is short and we need to get things done. Here are some naughty examples of CSS background images with their nicer, more accessible counterparts. Transaction related messages I’m as guilty of this as others (or, perhaps, I’m the only one that has done this, in which case this can serve as my holiday season confessional) We use lovely little icons to show status messages for a transaction to indicate if the action was successful, or was there a warning or error? For example: “Your postal/zip code was not in the correct format.” Notice that we place a nice little icon there, and use background colours and borders to convey a specific message: there was a problem that needs to be fixed. Notice that all of this visual information is now contained in the CSS rules for that div: <div class="error"> <p>Your postal/zip code was not in the correct format.</p> </div> div.error { background: #ffcccc url(../images/error_small.png) no-repeat 5px 4px; color: #900; border-top: 1px solid #c00; border-bottom: 1px solid #c00; padding: 0.25em 0.5em 0.25em 2.5em; font-weight: bold; } Using this approach also makes it very easy to create a div.success and div.warning CSS rules meaning we have less to change in our HTML. Nice, right? No. Naughty. Visual design communicates The CSS is being used to convey very specific information. The choice of icon, the choice of background colour and borders tell us visually that there is something wrong. With the icon as a background image – there… | 2005 | Derek Featherstone | derekfeatherstone | 2005-12-20T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2005/naughty-or-nice-css-background-images/ | code |
| 207 | 207 | Want to Break Out of Comparison Syndrome? Do a Media Detox | “Comparison is the thief of joy.” —Theodore Roosevelt I grew up in an environment of perpetual creativity and inventiveness. My father Dennis built and flew experimental aircraft as a hobby. During my entire childhood, there was an airplane fuselage in the garage instead of a car. My mother Deloria was a self-taught master artisan who could quickly acquire any skills that it took to work with fabric and weaving. She could sew any garment she desired, and was able to weave intricate wall hangings just by looking at a black and white photos in magazines. My older sister Diane blossomed into a consummate fine artist who drew portraits with uncanny likeness, painted murals, and studied art and architecture. In addition, she loved good food and had a genius for cooking and baking, which converged in her creating remarkable art pieces out of cake that were incredibly delicious to boot. Yes. This was the household in which I grew up. While there were countless positives to being surrounded by people who were compelled to create, there was also a downside to it. I incessantly compared myself to my parents and older sister and always found myself lacking. It wasn’t a fair comparison, but tell that to a sensitive kid who wanted to fit in to her family by being creative as well. From my early years throughout my teens, I convinced myself that I would never understand how to build an airplane or at least be as proficient with tools as my father, the aeronautical engineer. Even though my sister was six years older than I was, I lamented that I would never be as good a visual artist as she was. And I marveled at my mother’s seemingly magical ability to make and tailor clothes and was certain that I would never attain her level of mastery. This habit of comparing myself to others grew over the years, continuing to subtly and effectively undermine my sense of self. I had almost reached an uneasy truce with my comparison habit when social media happened. As an early adopter of Twitter, I loved staying connected to people I met a… | 2017 | Denise Jacobs | denisejacobs | 2017-12-19T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/do-a-media-detox/ | process |
| 195 | 195 | Levelling Up for Junior Developers | If you are a junior developer starting out in the web industry, things can often seem a little daunting. There are so many things to learn, and as soon as you’ve learnt one framework or tool, there seems to be something new out there. I am lucky enough to lead a team of developers building applications for the web. During a recent One to One meeting with one of our junior developers, he asked me about a learning path and the basic fundamentals that every developer should know. After a bit of digging around, I managed to come up with a (not so exhaustive) list of principles that was shared with him. In this article, I will share the list with you, and hopefully help you level up from junior developer and become a better developer all round. This list doesn’t focus on an particular programming language, but rather coding concepts as a whole. The idea behind this list is that whether you are a front-end developer, back-end developer, full stack developer or just a curious one, these principles apply to everyone that writes code. I have tried to be technology agnostic, so that you can use these tips to guide you, whatever your tech stack might be. Without any further ado and in no particular order, let’s get started. Refactoring code like a boss The Boy Scouts have a rule that goes “always leave the campground cleaner than you found it.” This rule can be applied to code too and ensures that you leave code cleaner than you found it. As a junior developer, it’s almost certain that you will either create or come across older code that could be improved. The resources below are a guide that will help point you in the right direction. My favourite book on this subject has to be Clean Code by Robert C. Martin. It’s a must read for anyone writing code as it helps you identify bad code and shows you techniques that you can use to improve existing code. If you find that in your day to day work you deal with a lot of legacy code, Improving Existing Technology through Refactoring is another useful read. Design Patterns are a… | 2017 | Dean Hume | deanhume | 2017-12-05T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/levelling-up-for-junior-developers/ | code |
| 309 | 309 | HTTP/2 Server Push and Service Workers: The Perfect Partnership | Being a web developer today is exciting! The web has come a long way since its early days and there are so many great technologies that enable us to build faster, better experiences for our users. One of these technologies is HTTP/2 which has a killer feature known as HTTP/2 Server Push. During this year’s Chrome Developer Summit, I watched a really informative talk by Sam Saccone, a Software Engineer on the Google Chrome team. He gave a talk entitled Planning for Performance, and one of the topics that he covered immediately piqued my interest; the idea that HTTP/2 Server Push and Service Workers were the perfect web performance combination. If you’ve never heard of HTTP/2 Server Push before, fear not - it’s not as scary as it sounds. HTTP/2 Server Push simply allows the server to send data to the browser without having to wait for the browser to explicitly request it first. In this article, I am going to run through the basics of HTTP/2 Server Push and show you how, when combined with Service Workers, you can deliver the ultimate in web performance to your users. What is HTTP/2 Server Push? When a user navigates to a URL, a browser will make an HTTP request for the underlying web page. The browser will then scan the contents of the HTML document for any assets that it may need to retrieve such as CSS, JavaScript or images. Once it finds any assets that it needs, it will then make multiple HTTP requests for each resource that it needs and begin downloading one by one. While this approach works well, the problem is that each HTTP request means more round trips to the server before any data arrives at the browser. These extra round trips take time and can make your web pages load slower. Before we go any further, let’s see what this might look like when your browser makes a request for a web page. If you were to view this in the developer tools of your browser, it might look a little something like this: As you can see from the image above, once the HTML file has been downloaded and parsed, the browser then mak… | 2016 | Dean Hume | deanhume | 2016-12-15T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/http2-server-push-and-service-workers/ | code |
| 257 | 257 | The (Switch)-Case for State Machines in User Interfaces | You’re tasked with creating a login form. Email, password, submit button, done. “This will be easy,” you think to yourself. Login form by Selecto You’ve made similar forms many times in the past; it’s essentially muscle memory at this point. You’re working closely with a designer, who gives you a beautiful, detailed mockup of a login form. Sure, you’ll have to translate the pixels to meaningful, responsive CSS values, but that’s the least of your problems. As you’re writing up the HTML structure and CSS layout and styles for this form, you realize that you don’t know what the successful “logged in” page looks like. You remind the designer, who readily gives it to you. But then you start thinking more and more about how the login form is supposed to work. What if login fails? Where do those errors show up? Should we show errors differently if the user forgot to enter their email, or password, or both? Or should the submit button be disabled? Should we validate the email field? When should we show validation errors – as they’re typing their email, or when they move to the password field, or when they click submit? (Note: many, many login forms are guilty of this.) When should the errors disappear? What do we show during the login process? Some loading spinner? What if loading takes too long, or a server error occurs? Many more questions come up, and you (and your designer) are understandably frustrated. The lack of upfront specification opens the door to scope creep, which readily finds itself at home in all the unexplored edge cases. Modeling Behavior Describing all the possible user flows and business logic of an application can become tricky. Ironically, user stories might not tell the whole story – they often leave out potential edge-cases or small yet important bits of information. However, one important (and very old) mathematical model of computation can be used for describing the behavior and all possible states of a user interface: the finite state machine. The general idea, as it applies to user interfa… | 2018 | David Khourshid | davidkhourshid | 2018-12-12T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2018/state-machines-in-user-interfaces/ | code |
| 171 | 171 | Rock Solid HTML Emails | At some stage in your career, it’s likely you’ll be asked by a client to design a HTML email. Before you rush to explain that all the cool kids are using social media, keep in mind that when done correctly, email is still one of the best ways to promote you and your clients online. In fact, a recent survey showed that every dollar spent on email marketing this year generated more than $40 in return. That’s more than any other marketing channel, including the cool ones. There are a whole host of ingredients that contribute to a good email marketing campaign. Permission, relevance, timeliness and engaging content are all important. Even so, the biggest challenge for designers still remains building an email that renders well across all the popular email clients. Same same, but different Before getting into the details, there are some uncomfortable facts that those new to HTML email should be aware of. Building an email is not like building for the web. While web browsers continue their onward march towards standards, many email clients have stubbornly stayed put. Some have even gone backwards. In 2007, Microsoft switched the Outlook rendering engine from Internet Explorer to Word. Yes, as in the word processor. Add to this the quirks of the major web-based email clients like Gmail and Hotmail, sprinkle in a little Lotus Notes and you’ll soon realize how different the email game is. While it’s not without its challenges, rest assured it can be done. In my experience the key is to focus on three things. First, you should keep it simple. The more complex your email design, the more likely is it to choke on one of the popular clients with poor standards support. Second, you need to take your coding skills back a good decade. That often means nesting tables, bringing CSS inline and following the coding guidelines I’ll outline below. Finally, you need to test your designs regularly. Just because a template looks nice in Hotmail now, doesn’t mean it will next week. Setting your lowest common denominator To maintain … | 2009 | David Greiner | davidgreiner | 2009-12-13T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2009/rock-solid-html-emails/ | code |
| 234 | 234 | An Introduction to CSS 3-D Transforms | Ladies and gentlemen, it is the second decade of the third millennium and we are still kicking around the same 2-D interface we got three decades ago. Sure, Apple debuted a few apps for OSX 10.7 that have a couple more 3-D flourishes, and Microsoft has had that Flip 3D for a while. But c’mon – 2011 is right around the corner. That’s Twenty Eleven, folks. Where is our 3-D virtual reality? By now, we should be zipping around the Metaverse on super-sonic motorbikes. Granted, the capability of rendering complex 3-D environments has been present for years. On the web, there are already several solutions: Flash; three.js in <canvas>; and, eventually, WebGL. Finally, we meagre front-end developers have our own three-dimensional jewel: CSS 3-D transforms! Rationale Like a beautiful jewel, 3-D transforms can be dazzling, a true spectacle to behold. But before we start tacking 3-D diamonds and rubies to our compositions like Liberace‘s tailor, we owe it to our users to ask how they can benefit from this awesome feature. An entire application should not take advantage of 3-D transforms. CSS was built to style documents, not generate explorable environments. I fail to find a benefit to completing a web form that can be accessed by swivelling my viewport to the Sign-Up Room (although there have been proposals to make the web just that). Nevertheless, there are plenty of opportunities to use 3-D transforms in between interactions with the interface, via transitions. Take, for instance, the Weather App on the iPhone. The application uses two views: a details view; and an options view. Switching between these two views is done with a 3-D flip transition. This informs the user that the interface has two – and only two – views, as they can exist only on either side of the same plane. Flipping from details view to options view via a 3-D transition Also, consider slide shows. When you’re looking at the last slide, what cues tip you off that advancing will restart the cycle at the first slide? A better paradigm might be achi… | 2010 | David DeSandro | daviddesandro | 2010-12-14T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2010/intro-to-css-3d-transforms/ | code |
| 134 | 134 | Photographic Palettes | How many times have you seen a colour combination that just worked, a match so perfect that it just seems obvious? Now, how many times do you come up with those in your own work? A perfect palette looks easy when it’s done right, but it’s often maddeningly difficult and time-consuming to accomplish. Choosing effective colour schemes will always be more art than science, but there are things you can do that will make coming up with that oh-so-smooth palette just a little a bit easier. A simple trick that can lead to incredibly gratifying results lies in finding a strong photograph and sampling out particularly harmonious colours. Photo Selection Not all photos are created equal. You certainly want to start with imagery that fits the eventual tone you’re attempting to create. A well-lit photo of flowers might lead to a poor colour scheme for a funeral parlour’s web site, for example. It’s worth thinking about what you’re trying to say in advance, and finding a photo that lends itself to your message. As a general rule of thumb, photos that have a lot of neutral or de-saturated tones with one or two strong colours make for the best palette; bright and multi-coloured photos are harder to derive pleasing results from. Let’s start with a relatively neutral image. Sampling In the above example, I’ve surrounded the photo with three different background colours directly sampled from the photo itself. Moving from left to right, you can see how each of the sampled colours is from an area of increasingly smaller coverage within the photo, and yet there’s still a strong harmony between the photo and the background image. I don’t really need to pick the big obvious colours from the photo to create that match, I can easily concentrate on more interesting colours that might work better for what I intend. Using a similar palette, let’s apply those colour choices to a more interesting layout: In this mini-layout, I’ve re-used the same tan colour from the previous middle image as a background, and sampled out a nicely… | 2006 | Dave Shea | daveshea | 2006-12-22T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2006/photographic-palettes/ | design |
| 151 | 151 | Get In Shape | Pop quiz: what’s wrong with the following navigation? Maybe nothing. But then again, maybe there’s something bugging you about the way it comes together, something you can’t quite put your finger on. It seems well-designed, but it also seems a little… off. The design decisions that led to this eventual form were no doubt well-considered: Client: The top level needs to have a “current page” status indicator of some sort. Designer: How about a white tab? Client: Great! The second level needs to show up underneath the first level though… Designer: Okay, but that white tab I just added makes it hard to visually connect the bottom nav to the top. Client: Too late, we’ve seen the white tab and we love it. Try and make it work. Designer: Right. So I placed the second level in its own box. Client: Hmm. They seem too separated. I can’t tell that the yellow nav is the second level of the first. Designer: How about an indicator arrow? Client: Brilliant! The problem is that the end result feels awkward and forced. During the design process, little decisions were made that ultimately affect the overall shape of the navigation. What started out as a neatly contained rounded rectangle ended up as an ambiguous double shape that looks funny, though it’s often hard to pinpoint precisely why. The Shape of Things Well the why in this case is because seemingly unrelated elements in a design still end up visually interacting. Adding a new item to a page impacts everything surrounding it. In this navigation example, we’re looking at two individual objects that are close enough to each other that they form a relationship; if we reduce them to strictly their outlines, it’s a little easier to see that this particular combination registers oddly. The two shapes float with nothing really grounding them. If they were connected, perhaps it would be a different story. The white tab divides the top shape in half, leaving a gap in the middle of it. There’s very little balance in this pairing because the overall shape of the… | 2007 | Dave Shea | daveshea | 2007-12-16T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/get-in-shape/ | design |
| 35 | 35 | SEO in 2015 (and Why You Should Care) | If your business is healthy, you can always find plenty of reasons to leave SEO on your to-do list in perpetuity. After all, SEO is technical, complicated, time-consuming and potentially dangerous. The SEO industry is full of self-proclaimed gurus whose lack of knowledge can be deadly. There’s the terrifying fact that even if you dabble in SEO in the most gentle and innocent way, you might actually end up in a worse state than you were to begin with. To make matters worse, Google keeps changing the rules. There have been a bewildering number of major updates, which despite their cuddly names have had a horrific impact on website owners worldwide. Fear aside, there’s also the issue of time. It’s probably tricky enough to find the time to read this article. Setting up, planning and executing an SEO campaign might well seem like an insurmountable obstacle. So why should you care enough about SEO to do it anyway? The main reason is that you probably already see between 30% and 60% of your website traffic come from the search engines. That might make you think that you don’t need to bother, because you’re already doing so well. But you’re almost certainly wrong. If you have a look through the keyword data in your Google Webmaster Tools account, you’ll probably see that around 30–50% of the keywords used to find your website are brand names – the names of your products or companies. These are searches carried out by people who already know about you. But the people who don’t know who you are but are searching for what you sell aren’t finding you right now. This is your opportunity. If a person goes looking for a company or product by name, Google will steer them towards what they’re looking for. Their intelligence does have limits, however, and even though they know your name they won’t be completely clear about what you sell. That’s where SEO would come in. Still need more convincing? How about the fact that the seeming complexities of SEO mean that your competition are almost certainly neglecting it too. They … | 2014 | Dave Collins | davecollins | 2014-12-15T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/seo-in-2015-and-why-you-should-care/ | business |
| 41 | 41 | What Is Vagrant and Why Should I Care? | If you run a web server, a database server and your scripting language(s) of choice on your main machine and you have not yet switched to using virtualisation in your workflow then this essay may be of some value to you. I know you exist because I bump into you daily: freelancers coming in to work on our projects; internet friends complaining about reinstalling a development environment because of an operating system upgrade; fellow agency owners who struggle to brief external help when getting a particular project up and running; or even hardcore back-end developers who “don’t do ops” and prefer to run their development stack of choice locally. There are many perfectly reasonable arguments as to why you may not have already made the switch, from being simply too busy, all the way through to a distrust of the new. I’ll admit that there are many new technologies or workflows that I hear of daily and instantly disregard because I have tool overload, that feeling I get when I hear about a new shiny thing and think “Well, what I do now works – I’ll leave it for others to play with.” If that’s you when it comes to Vagrant then I hope you’ll hear me out. The business case is compelling enough for you to make that switch; as a bonus it’s also really easy to get going. In this article we’ll start off by going through the high level, the tools available and how it all fits together. Then we’ll touch on the justification for making the switch, providing a few use cases that might resonate with you. Finally, I’ll provide a very simple example that you can follow to get yourself up and running. What? You already know what virtualisation is. You use the ability to run an operating system within another operating system every day. Whether that’s Parallels or VMware on your laptop or similar server-based tools that drive the ‘cloud’, squeezing lots of machines on to physical hardware and making it really easy to copy servers and even clusters of servers from one place to another. It’s an amazing technology which has change… | 2014 | Darren Beale | darrenbeale | 2014-12-05T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/what-is-vagrant-and-why-should-i-care/ | process |
| 253 | 253 | Clip Paths Know No Bounds | CSS Shapes are getting a lot of attention as browser support has increased for properties like shape-outside and clip-path. There are a few ways that we can use CSS Shapes, in particular with the clip-path property, that are not necessarily evident at first glance. The basics of a clip path Before we dig into specific techniques to expand on clip paths, we should first take a look at a basic shape and clip-path. Clip paths can apply a CSS Shape such as a circle(), ellipse(), inset(), or the flexible polygon() to any element. Everywhere in the element that is not within the bounds of our shape will be visually removed. Using the polygon shape function, for example, we can create triangles, stars, or other straight-edged shapes as on Bennett Feely’s Clippy. While fixed units like pixels can be used when defining vertices/points (where the sides meet), percentages will give more flexibility to adapt to the element’s dimensions. See the Pen Clip Path Box by Dan Wilson (@danwilson) on CodePen. So for an octagon, we can set eight x, y pairs of percentages to define those points. In this case we start 30% into the width of the box for the first x and at the top of the box for the y and go clockwise. The visible area becomes the interior of the shape made by connecting these points with straight lines. clip-path: polygon( 30% 0%, 70% 0%, 100% 30%, 100% 70%, 70% 100%, 30% 100%, 0% 70%, 0% 30% ); A shape with less vertices than the eye can see It’s reasonable to look at the polygon() function and assume that we need to have one pair of x, y coordinates for every point in our shape. However, we gain some flexibility by thinking outside the box — or more specifically when we think outside the range of 0% - 100%. Our element’s box model will be the ultimate boundary for a clip-path, but we can still define points that exist beyond that natural box for an element. See the Pen CSS Shapes Know No Bounds by Dan Wilson (@danwilson) on CodePen. By going beyond the 0% - 100% range we can turn a polygon with three p… | 2018 | Dan Wilson | danwilson | 2018-12-20T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2018/clip-paths-know-no-bounds/ | code |
| 98 | 98 | Absolute Columns | CSS layouts have come quite a long way since the dark ages of web publishing, with all sorts of creative applications of floats, negative margins, and even background images employed in order to give us that most basic building block, the column. As the title implies, we are indeed going to be discussing columns today—more to the point, a handy little application of absolute positioning that may be exactly what you’ve been looking for… Care for a nightcap? If you’ve been developing for the web for long enough, you may be familiar with this little children’s fable, passed down from wizened Shaolin monks sitting atop the great Mt. Geocities: “Once upon a time, multiple columns of the same height could be easily created using TABLES.” Now, though we’re all comfortably seated on the standards train (and let’s be honest: even if you like to think you’ve fallen off, if you’ve given up using tables for layout, rest assured your sleeper car is still reserved), this particular—and as page layout goes, quite basic—trick is still a thorn in our CSSides compared to the ease of achieving the same effect using said Tables of Evil™. See, the orange juice masks the flavor… Creative solutions such as Dan Cederholm’s Faux Columns do a good job of making it appear as though adjacent columns maintain equal height as content expands, using a background image to fill the space that the columns cannot. Now, the Holy Grail of CSS columns behaving exactly how they would as table cells—or more to the point, as columns—still eludes us (cough CSS3 Multi-column layout module cough), but sometimes you just need, for example, a secondary column (say, a sidebar) to match the height of a primary column, without involving the creation of images. This is where a little absolute positioning can save you time, while possibly giving your layout a little more flexibility. Shaken, not stirred You’re probably familiar by now with the concept of Making the Absolute, Relative as set forth long ago by Doug Bowman, but let’s quickly review just in c… | 2008 | Dan Rubin | danrubin | 2008-12-22T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2008/absolute-columns/ | code |
| 174 | 174 | Type-Inspired Interfaces | One of the things that terrifies me most about a new project is the starting point. How is the content laid out? What colors do I pick? Once things like that are decided, it becomes significantly easier to continue design, but it’s the blank page where I spend the most time. To that end, I often start by choosing type. I don’t need to worry about colors or layout or anything else… just the right typefaces that support the art direction. (This article won’t focus on how to choose a typeface, but there are some really great resources if you interested in that sort of thing.) And just like that, all your work is done. “Hold it just a second,” you might say. “All I’ve done is pick type. I still have to do the rest!” To which I would reply, “Silly rabbit. You already have!” You see, picking the right typeface gets you farther than you might think. Here are a few tips on taking cues from type to design interfaces and interface elements. Perfecting Web 2.0 If you’re going for that beloved rounded corner look, you might class it up a bit by choosing the wonderful Omnes Pro by Joshua Darden. As the typeface already has a rounded aesthetic, making buttons that fit the style should be pretty easy. I’ve found that using multiples helps to keep your interfaces looking balanced and proportional. Noticing that the top left edge of the letter “P” has about an 12px corner radius, let’s choose a 24px radius for our button (a multiple of 2), so that we get proper rounded corners. By taking mathematical measurements from the typeface, our button looks more thought out than just “place arbitrary text on arbitrarily-sized button.” Pretty easy, eh? What’s in a name(plate)? Rounded buttons are pretty popular buttons nowadays, so let’s try something a bit more stylized. Have a gander at Brothers, a sturdy face from Emigre. The chiseled edges give us a perfect cue for a stylized button. Using the same slope, you can make plated-looking buttons that fit a different kind of style. Headlining You might even take some cues from… | 2009 | Dan Mall | danmall | 2009-12-07T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2009/type-inspired-interfaces/ | design |
| 235 | 235 | Real Animation Using JavaScript, CSS3, and HTML5 Video | When I was in school to be a 3-D animator, I read a book called Timing for Animation. Though only 152 pages long, it’s essentially the bible for anyone looking to be a great animator. In fact, Pixar chief creative officer John Lasseter used the first edition as a reference when he was an animator at Walt Disney Studios in the early 1980s. In the book, authors John Halas and Harold Whitaker advise: Timing is the part of animation which gives meaning to movement. Movement can easily be achieved by drawing the same thing in two different positions and inserting a number of other drawings between the two. The result on the screen will be movement; but it will not be animation. But that’s exactly what we’re doing with CSS3 and JavaScript: we’re moving elements, not animating them. We’re constantly specifying beginning and end states and allowing the technology to interpolate between the two. And yet, it’s the nuances within those middle frames that create the sense of life we’re looking for. As bandwidth increases and browser rendering grows more consistent, we can create interactions in different ways than we’ve been able to before. We’re encountering motion more and more on sites we’d generally label ‘static.’ However, this motion is mostly just movement, not animation. It’s the manipulation of an element’s properties, most commonly width, height, x- and y-coordinates, and opacity. So how do we create real animation? The metaphor In my experience, animation is most believable when it simulates, exaggerates, or defies the real world. A bowling ball falls differently than a racquetball. They each have different weights and sizes, which affect the way they land, bounce, and impact other objects. This is a major reason that JavaScript animation frequently feels mechanical; it doesn’t complete a metaphor. Expanding and collapsing a <div> feels very different than a opening a door or unfolding a piece of paper, but it often shouldn’t. The interaction itself should tie directly to the art direction of a page. P… | 2010 | Dan Mall | danmall | 2010-12-15T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2010/real-animation-using-javascript-css3-and-html5-video/ | code |
| 74 | 74 | Should We Be Reactive? | Evolution Looking at the evolution of the web and the devices we use should help remind us that the times we’re adjusting to are just another step on a journey. These times seem to be telling us that we need to embrace flexibility. Imagine an HTML file containing nothing but text. It’s viewable on any web-capable device and reasonably readable: the notion of the universality of the web was very much a founding principle. Right from the beginning, browser vendors understood that we’d want text to reflow (why wouldn’t we?), so I consider the first websites to have been fluid. As we attempted to exert more control through our designs in the early days of the web, debates about whether we should produce fixed or fluid sites raged. We could create fluid designs using tables, but what we didn’t have then was a wide range of web capable devices or the ability to control this fluidity. The biggest changes occurred when stats showed enough people using a different screen resolution we could cater for. To me, the techniques of responsive web design provide the control we were missing. Combining new approaches to layout and images with media queries empowered us to learn how to embrace the inherent flexibility of the web in ways to suit our work and the devices used by our audience. Perhaps another kind of flexibility might be found in how we use context to affect how we present our content; to consider how we might use the information we can access from people, browsers and devices to provide web experiences – effectively creating sites that react to initial or changing circumstances in the relationship between people and our content. Embracing flexibility So what is context? Put simply, you could think of it as a secondary piece of information that helps clarify the meaning of the first. It helps set a scene or describe circumstances. I think that Cennydd Bowles has summed it up really well through talks he’s given recently, in which he’s arrived at the acronym DETAILS (Device, Environment, Time, Activity, Individ… | 2012 | Dan Donald | dandonald | 2012-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2012/should-we-be-reactive/ | design |
| 133 | 133 | Gravity-Defying Page Corners | While working on Stikkit, a “page curl” came to be. Not being as crafty as Veerle, you see. I fired up Photoshop to see what could be. “Another copy is running on the network“ … oopsie. With license issues sorted out and a concept in mind I set out to create something flexible and refined. One background image and code that is sure to be lean. A simple solution for lazy people like me. The curl I’ll be showing isn’t a curl at all. It’s simply a gradient that’s 18 pixels tall. With a fade to the left that’s diagonally aligned and a small fade on the right that keeps the illusion defined. Create a selection with the marquee tool (keeping in mind a reasonable minimum width) and drag a gradient (black to transparent) from top to bottom. Now drag a gradient (the background color of the page to transparent) from the bottom left corner to the top right corner. Finally, drag another gradient from the right edge towards the center, about 20 pixels or so. But the top is flat and can be positioned precisely just under the bottom right edge very nicely. And there it will sit, never ever to be busted by varying sizes of text when adjusted. <div id="page"> <div id="page-contents"> <h2>Gravity-Defying!</h2> <p>Lorem ipsum dolor ...</p> </div> </div> Let’s dive into code and in the markup you’ll see “is that an extra div?” … please don’t kill me? The #page div sets the width and bottom padding whose height is equal to the shadow we’re adding. The #page-contents div will set padding in ems to scale with the text size the user intends. The background color will be added here too but not overlapping the shadow where #page’s padding makes room. A simple technique that you may find amusing is to substitute a PNG for the GIF I was using. For that would be crafty and future-proof, too. The page curl could sit on any background hue. I hope you’ve enjoyed this easy little trick. It’s hardly earth-shattering, and arguably slick. But it could come in handy, you just never know. Happy Holidays! And pleasant dreams o… | 2006 | Dan Cederholm | dancederholm | 2006-12-24T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2006/gravity-defying-page-corners/ | design |
| 5 | 5 | Managing a Mind | On 21 May 2013, I woke in a hospital bed feeling exhausted, disorientated and ashamed. The day before, I had tried to kill myself. It’s very hard to write about this and share it. It feels like I’m opening up the deepest recesses of my soul and laying everything bare, but I think it’s important we share this as a community. Since starting tentatively to write about my experience, I’ve had many conversations about this: sharing with others; others sharing with me. I’ve been surprised to discover how many people are suffering similarly, thinking that they’re alone. They’re not. Due to an insane schedule of teaching, writing, speaking, designing and just generally trying to keep up, I reached a point where my buffers completely overflowed. I was working so hard on so many things that I was struggling to maintain control. I was living life on fast-forward and my grasp on everything was slowly slipping. On that day, I reached a low point – the lowest point of my life – and in that moment I could see only one way out. I surrendered. I can’t really describe that moment. I’m still grappling with it. All I know is that I couldn’t take it any more and I gave up. I very nearly died. I’m very fortunate to have survived. I was admitted to hospital, taken there unconscious in an ambulance. On waking, I felt overwhelmed with shame and overcome with remorse, but I was resolved to grasp the situation and address it. The experience has forced me to confront a great deal of issues in my life; it has also encouraged me to seek a deeper understanding of my situation and, in particular, the mechanics of the mind. The relentless pace of change We work in a fast-paced industry: few others, if any, confront the daily challenges we face. The landscape we work within is characterised by constant flux. It’s changing and evolving at a rate we have never experienced before. Few industries reinvent themselves yearly, monthly, weekly… Ours is one of these industries. Technology accelerates at an alarming rate and keeping abreast of this … | 2013 | Christopher Murphy | christophermurphy | 2013-12-21T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/managing-a-mind/ | process |
| 259 | 259 | Designing Your Future | I’ve had the pleasure of working for a variety of clients – both large and small – over the last 25 years. In addition to my work as a design consultant, I’ve worked as an educator, leading the Interaction Design team at Belfast School of Art, for the last 15 years. In July, 2018 – frustrated with formal education, not least the ever-present hand of ‘austerity’ that has ravaged universities in the UK for almost a decade – I formally reduced my teaching commitment, moving from a full-time role to a half-time role. Making the move from a (healthy!) monthly salary towards a position as a freelance consultant is not without its challenges: one month your salary’s arriving in your bank account (and promptly disappearing to pay all of your bills); the next month, that salary’s been drastically reduced. That can be a shock to the system. In this article, I’ll explore the challenges encountered when taking a life-changing leap of faith. To help you confront ‘the fear’ – the nervousness, the sleepless nights and the ever-present worry about paying the bills – I’ll provide a set of tools that will enable you to take a leap of faith and pursue what deep down drives you. In short: I’ll bare my soul and share everything I’m currently working on to – once and for all – make a final bid for freedom. This isn’t easy. I’m sharing my innermost hopes and aspirations, and I might open myself up to ridicule, but I believe that by doing so, I might help others, by providing them with tools to help them make their own leap of faith. The power of visualisation As designers we have skills that we use day in, day out to imagine future possibilities, which we then give form. In our day-to-day work, we use those abilities to design products and services, but I also believe we can use those skills to design something every bit as important: ourselves. In this article I’ll explore three tools that you can use to design your future: Product DNA Artefacts From the Future Tomorrow Clients Each of these tools is designed to help you visualise y… | 2018 | Christopher Murphy | christophermurphy | 2018-12-15T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2018/designing-your-future/ | process |
| 301 | 301 | Stretching Time | Time is valuable. It’s a precious commodity that, if we’re not too careful, can slip effortlessly through our fingers. When we think about the resources at our disposal we’re often guilty of forgetting the most valuable resource we have to hand: time. We are all given an allocation of time from the time bank. 86,400 seconds a day to be precise, not a second more, not a second less. It doesn’t matter if we’re rich or we’re poor, no one can buy more time (and no one can save it). We are all, in this regard, equals. We all have the same opportunity to spend our time and use it to maximum effect. As such, we need to use our time wisely. I believe we can ‘stretch’ time, ensuring we make the most of every second and maximising the opportunities that time affords us. Through a combination of ‘Structured Procrastination’ and ‘Focused Finishing’ we can open our eyes to all of the opportunities in the world around us, whilst ensuring that we deliver our best work precisely when it’s required. A win win, I’m sure you’ll agree. Structured Procrastination I’m a terrible procrastinator. I used to think that was a curse – “Why didn’t I just get started earlier?” – over time, however, I’ve started to see procrastination as a valuable tool if it is used in a structured manner. Don Norman refers to procrastination as ‘late binding’ (a term I’ve happily hijacked). As he argues, in Why Procrastination Is Good, late binding (delay, or procrastination) offers many benefits: Delaying decisions until the time for action is beneficial… it provides the maximum amount of time to think, plan, and determine alternatives. We live in a world that is constantly changing and evolving, as such the best time to execute is often ‘just in time’. By delaying decisions until the last possible moment we can arrive at solutions that address the current reality more effectively, resulting in better outcomes. Procrastination isn’t just useful from a project management perspective, however. It can also be useful for allowing your mind the space to wande… | 2016 | Christopher Murphy | christophermurphy | 2016-12-21T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/stretching-time/ | process |
| 104 | 104 | Sitewide Search On A Shoe String | One of the questions I got a lot when I was building web sites for smaller businesses was if I could create a search engine for their site. Visitors should be able to search only this site and find things without the maintainer having to put “related articles” or “featured content” links on every page by hand. Back when this was all fields this wasn’t easy as you either had to write your own scraping tool, use ht://dig or a paid service from providers like Yahoo, Altavista or later on Google. In the former case you had to swallow the bitter pill of computing and indexing all your content and storing it in a database for quick access and in the latter it hurt your wallet. Times have moved on and nowadays you can have the same functionality for free using Yahoo’s “Build your own search service” – BOSS. The cool thing about BOSS is that it allows for a massive amount of hits a day and you can mash up the returned data in any format you want. Another good feature of it is that it comes with JSON-P as an output format which makes it possible to use it without any server-side component! Starting with a working HTML form In order to add a search to your site, you start with a simple HTML form which you can use without JavaScript. Most search engines will allow you to filter results by domain. In this case we will search “bbc.co.uk”. If you use Yahoo as your standard search, this could be: <form id="customsearch" action="http://search.yahoo.com/search"> <div> <label for="p">Search this site:</label> <input type="text" name="p" id="term"> <input type="hidden" name="vs" id="site" value="bbc.co.uk"> <input type="submit" value="go"> </div> </form> The Google equivalent is: <form id="customsearch" action="http://www.google.co.uk/search"> <div> <label for="p">Search this site:</label> <input type="text" name="as_q" id="term"> <input type="hidden" name="as_sitesearch" id="site" value="bbc.co.uk"> <input type="submit" value="go"> </div> </form> In any case make sure to use the ID term for the searc… | 2008 | Christian Heilmann | chrisheilmann | 2008-12-04T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2008/sitewide-search-on-a-shoestring/ | code |
| 139 | 139 | Flickr Photos On Demand with getFlickr | In case you don’t know it yet, Flickr is great. It is a lot of fun to upload, tag and caption photos and it is really handy to get a vast network of contacts through it. Using Flickr photos outside of it is a bit of a problem though. There is a Flickr API, and you can get almost every page as an RSS feed, but in general it is a bit tricky to use Flickr photos inside your blog posts or web sites. You might not want to get into the whole API game or use a server side proxy script as you cannot retrieve RSS with Ajax because of the cross-domain security settings. However, Flickr also provides an undocumented JSON output, that can be used to hack your own solutions in JavaScript without having to use a server side script. If you enter the URL http://flickr.com/photos/tags/panda you get to the flickr page with photos tagged “panda”. If you enter the URL http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=panda&format=rss_200 you get the same page as an RSS feed. If you enter the URL http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=panda&format=json you get a JavaScript function called jsonFlickrFeed with a parameter that contains the same data in JSON format You can use this to easily hack together your own output by just providing a function with the same name. I wanted to make it easier for you, which is why I created the helper getFlickr for you to download and use. getFlickr for Non-Scripters Simply include the javascript file getflickr.js and the style getflickr.css in the head of your document: <script type="text/javascript" src="getflickr.js"></script> <link rel="stylesheet" href="getflickr.css" type="text/css"> Once this is done you can add links to Flickr pages anywhere in your document, and when you give them the CSS class getflickrphotos they get turned into gallery links. When a visitor clicks these links they turn into loading messages and show a “popup” gallery with the connected photos once they were loaded. As the JSON returned is very small it won’t take long. You can… | 2006 | Christian Heilmann | chrisheilmann | 2006-12-03T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2006/flickr-photos-on-demand/ | code |
| 161 | 161 | Keeping JavaScript Dependencies At Bay | As we are writing more and more complex JavaScript applications we run into issues that have hitherto (god I love that word) not been an issue. The first decision we have to make is what to do when planning our app: one big massive JS file or a lot of smaller, specialised files separated by task. Personally, I tend to favour the latter, mainly because it allows you to work on components in parallel with other developers without lots of clashes in your version control. It also means that your application will be more lightweight as you only include components on demand. Starting with a global object This is why it is a good plan to start your app with one single object that also becomes the namespace for the whole application, say for example myAwesomeApp: var myAwesomeApp = {}; You can nest any necessary components into this one and also make sure that you check for dependencies like DOM support right up front. Adding the components The other thing to add to this main object is a components object, which defines all the components that are there and their file names. var myAwesomeApp = { components :{ formcheck:{ url:'formcheck.js', loaded:false }, dynamicnav:{ url:'dynamicnav.js', loaded:false }, gallery:{ url:'gallery.js', loaded:false }, lightbox:{ url:'lightbox.js', loaded:false } } }; Technically you can also omit the loaded properties, but it is cleaner this way. The next thing to add is an addComponent function that can load your components on demand by adding new SCRIPT elements to the head of the documents when they are needed. var myAwesomeApp = { components :{ formcheck:{ url:'formcheck.js', loaded:false }, dynamicnav:{ url:'dynamicnav.js', loaded:false }, gallery:{ url:'gallery.js', loaded:false }, lightbox:{ url:'lightbox.js', loaded:false } }, addComponent:function(component){ var c = this.components[component]; if(c && c.loaded === false){ var s = document.createElement('script'); s.setAttribut… | 2007 | Christian Heilmann | chrisheilmann | 2007-12-18T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/keeping-javascript-dependencies-at-bay/ | code |
| 186 | 186 | The Web Is Your CMS | It is amazing what you can do these days with the services offered on the web. Flickr stores terabytes of photos for us and converts them automatically to all kind of sizes, finds people in them and even allows us to edit them online. YouTube does almost the same complete job with videos, LinkedIn allows us to maintain our CV, Delicious our bookmarks and so on. We don’t have to do these tasks ourselves any more, as all of these systems also come with ways to use the data in the form of Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs for short. APIs give us raw data when we send requests telling the system what we want to get back. The problem is that every API has a different idea of what is a simple way of accessing this data and in which format to give it back. Making it easier to access APIs What we need is a way to abstract the pains of different data formats and authentication formats away from the developer — and this is the purpose of the Yahoo Query Language, or YQL for short. Libraries like jQuery and YUI make it easy and reliable to use JavaScript in browsers (yes, even IE6) and YQL allows us to access web services and even the data embedded in web documents in a simple fashion – SQL style. Select * from the web and filter it the way I want YQL is a web service that takes a few inputs itself: A query that tells it what to get, update or access An output format – XML, JSON, JSON-P or JSON-P-X A callback function (if you defined JSON-P or JSON-P-X) You can try it out yourself – check out this link to get back Flickr photos for the search term ‘santa’*%20from%20flickr.photos.search%20where%20text%3D%22santa%22&format=xml in XML format. The YQL query for this is select * from flickr.photos.search where text="santa" The easiest way to take your first steps with YQL is to look at the console. There you get sample queries, access to all the data sources available to you and you can easily put together complex queries. In this article, however, let’s use PHP to put together a web page that pulls i… | 2009 | Christian Heilmann | chrisheilmann | 2009-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2009/the-web-is-your-cms/ | code |
| 233 | 233 | Wrapping Things Nicely with HTML5 Local Storage | HTML5 is here to turn the web from a web of hacks into a web of applications – and we are well on the way to this goal. The coming year will be totally and utterly awesome if you are excited about web technologies. This year the HTML5 revolution started and there is no stopping it. For the first time all the browser vendors are rallying together to make a technology work. The new browser war is fought over implementation of the HTML5 standard and not over random additions. We live in exciting times. Starting with a bang As with every revolution there is a lot of noise with bangs and explosions, and that’s the stage we’re at right now. HTML5 showcases are often CSS3 showcases, web font playgrounds, or video and canvas examples. This is great, as it gets people excited and it gives the media something to show. There is much more to HTML5, though. Let’s take a look at one of the less sexy, but amazingly useful features of HTML5 (it was in the HTML5 specs, but grew at such an alarming rate that it warranted its own spec): storing information on the client-side. Why store data on the client-side? Storing information in people’s browsers affords us a few options that every application should have: You can retain the state of an application – when the user comes back after closing the browser, everything will be as she left it. That’s how ‘real’ applications work and this is how the web ones should, too. You can cache data – if something doesn’t change then there is no point in loading it over the Internet if local access is so much faster You can store user preferences – without needing to keep that data on your server at all. In the past, storing local data wasn’t much fun. The pain of hacky browser solutions In the past, all we had were cookies. I don’t mean the yummy things you get with your coffee, endorsed by the blue, furry junkie in Sesame Street, but the other, digital ones. Cookies suck – it isn’t fun to have an unencrypted HTTP overhead on every server request for storing four kilobytes of data… | 2010 | Christian Heilmann | chrisheilmann | 2010-12-06T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2010/html5-local-storage/ | code |
| 284 | 284 | Subliminal User Experience | The term ‘user experience’ is often used vaguely to quantify common elements of the interaction design process: wireframing, sitemapping and so on. UX undoubtedly involves all of these principles to some degree, but there really is a lot more to it than that. Good UX is characterized by providing the user with constant feedback as they step through your interface. It means thinking about and providing fallbacks and error resolutions in even the rarest of scenarios. It’s about omitting clutter to make way for the necessary, and using the most fundamental of design tools to influence a user’s path. It means making no assumptions, designing right down to the most distinct details and going one step further every single time. In many cases, good UX is completely subliminal. There are simple tools and subtleties we can build into our products to enhance the overall experience but, in order to do so, we really have to step beyond where we usually draw the line on what to design. The purpose of this article is not to provide technical how-tos, as the functionality is, in most cases, quite simple and could be implemented in a myriad of ways. Rather, it will present a handful of ideas for enhancing the experience of an interface at a deeper level of design without relying on the container. We’ll cover three elements that should get you thinking in the right mindset: progress activity and post-active states pseudo-class preloading buttons and their (mis)behaviour Progress activity and the post-active state We’ve long established that we can’t control the devices our products are viewed on, which browser they’ll run in or what connection speed will be used to access them. We accept this all as factual, so why is it so often left to the browser to provide feedback to the user when an event is triggered or an error encountered? The browser isn’t part of the interface — it’s merely a container. A simple, visual recognition of your users’ activity may be all it takes to make or break the product. Let’s begin with a… | 2011 | Chris Sealey | chrissealey | 2011-12-03T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2011/subliminal-user-experience/ | ux |
| 18 | 18 | Grunt for People Who Think Things Like Grunt are Weird and Hard | Front-end developers are often told to do certain things: Work in as small chunks of CSS and JavaScript as makes sense to you, then concatenate them together for the production website. Compress your CSS and minify your JavaScript to make their file sizes as small as possible for your production website. Optimize your images to reduce their file size without affecting quality. Use Sass for CSS authoring because of all the useful abstraction it allows. That’s not a comprehensive list of course, but those are the kind of things we need to do. You might call them tasks. I bet you’ve heard of Grunt. Well, Grunt is a task runner. Grunt can do all of those things for you. Once you’ve got it set up, which isn’t particularly difficult, those things can happen automatically without you having to think about them again. But let’s face it: Grunt is one of those fancy newfangled things that all the cool kids seem to be using but at first glance feels strange and intimidating. I hear you. This article is for you. Let’s nip some misconceptions in the bud right away Perhaps you’ve heard of Grunt, but haven’t done anything with it. I’m sure that applies to many of you. Maybe one of the following hang-ups applies to you. I don’t need the things Grunt does You probably do, actually. Check out that list up top. Those things aren’t nice-to-haves. They are pretty vital parts of website development these days. If you already do all of them, that’s awesome. Perhaps you use a variety of different tools to accomplish them. Grunt can help bring them under one roof, so to speak. If you don’t already do all of them, you probably should and Grunt can help. Then, once you are doing those, you can keep using Grunt to do more for you, which will basically make you better at doing your job. Grunt runs on Node.js — I don’t know Node You don’t have to know Node. Just like you don’t have to know Ruby to use Sass. Or PHP to use WordPress. Or C++ to use Microsoft Word. I have other ways to do the things Grunt could do for me Are the… | 2013 | Chris Coyier | chriscoyier | 2013-12-11T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/grunt-is-not-weird-and-hard/ | code |
| 204 | 204 | Cascading Web Design with Feature Queries | Feature queries, also known as the @supports rule, were introduced as an extension to the CSS2 as part of the CSS Conditional Rules Module Level 3, which was first published as a working draft in 2011. It is a conditional group rule that tests if the browser’s user agent supports CSS property:value pairs, and arbitrary conjunctions (and), disjunctions (or), and negations (not) of them. The motivation behind this feature was to allow authors to write styles using new features when they were supported but degrade gracefully in browsers where they are not. Even though the nature of CSS already allows for graceful degradation, for example, by ignoring unsupported properties or values without disrupting other styles in the stylesheet, sometimes we need a bit more than that. CSS is ultimately a holistic technology, in that, even though you can use properties in isolation, the full power of CSS shines through when used in combination. This is especially evident when it comes to building web layouts. Having native feature detection in CSS makes it much more convenient to build with cutting-edge CSS for the latest browsers while supporting older browsers at the same time. Browser support Opera first implemented feature queries in November 2012, both Chrome and Firefox had it since May 2013. There have been several articles about feature queries written over the years, however, it seems that awareness of its broad support isn’t that well-known. Much of the earlier coverage on feature queries was not written in English, and perhaps that was a limiting factor. @supports ― CSSのFeature Queries by Masataka Yakura, August 8 2012 Native CSS Feature Detection via the @supports Rule by Chris Mills, December 21 2012 CSS @supports by David Walsh, April 3 2013 Responsive typography with CSS Feature Queries by Aral Balkan, April 9 2013 How to use the @supports rule in your CSS by Lea Verou, January 31 2014 CSS Feature Queries by Amit Tal, June 2 2014 Coming Soon: CSS Feature Queries by Adobe Web Platform Team, August 21 2014 CSS featu… | 2017 | Chen Hui Jing | chenhuijing | 2017-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/cascading-web-design/ | code |
| 8 | 8 | Coding Towards Accessibility | “Can we make it AAA-compliant?” – does this question strike fear into your heart? Maybe for no other reason than because you will soon have to wade through the impenetrable WCAG documentation once again, to find out exactly what AAA-compliant means? I’m not here to talk about that. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are a comprehensive and peer-reviewed resource which we’re lucky to have at our fingertips. But they are also a pig to read, and they may have contributed to the sense of mystery and dread with which some developers associate the word accessibility. This Christmas, I want to share with you some thoughts and some practical tips for building accessible interfaces which you can start using today, without having to do a ton of reading or changing your tools and workflow. But first, let’s clear up a couple of misconceptions. Dreary, flat experiences I recently built a front-end framework for the Post Office. This was a great gig for a developer, but when I found out about my client’s stringent accessibility requirements I was concerned that I’d have to scale back what was quite a complex set of visual designs. Sites like Jakob Neilsen’s old workhorse useit.com and even the pioneering GOV.UK may have to shoulder some of the blame for this. They put a premium on usability and accessibility over visual flourish. (Although, in fairness to Mr Neilsen, his new site nngroup.com is really quite a snazzy affair, comparatively.) Of course, there are other reasons for these sites’ aesthetics — and it’s not because of the limitations of the form. You can make an accessible site look as glossy or as plain as you want it to look. It’s always our own ingenuity and attention to detail that are going to be the limiting factors. Synecdoche We must always guard against the tendency to assume that catering to screen readers means we have the whole accessibility ballgame covered. There’s so much more to accessibility than assistive technology, as you know. And within the field of assistive technology there ar… | 2013 | Charlie Perrins | charlieperrins | 2013-12-03T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/coding-towards-accessibility/ | code |
| 45 | 45 | Is Agile Harder for Agencies? | I once sat in a pitch meeting and watched a new business exec tell a potential client that his agency followed an agile workflow process at all times. The potential client nodded wisely, and they both agreed that agile was indeed the way to go. The meeting progressed and they signed off on a contract for a massive project, to be delivered in a standard waterfall fashion, with all manner of phases and key deliverables. Of course both of them left the meeting perfectly happy, because neither of them knew nor cared what an agile workflow process might be. That was about five years ago. As 2015 heaves into view I think it’s fair to say that attitudes have changed. Perhaps the same number of people claim to do Agile™ now as in 2010, but I think more of them are telling the truth. As a developer in an agency that works primarily with larger organisations, this year I have started to see a shift from agencies pushing agile methodologies with their clients, to clients requesting and even demanding agile practices from their agencies. Only a couple of years ago this would have been unusual behaviour. So what’s the problem? We should be happy then, no? Those of us in agencies will get to spend more time delivering great products, and less time arguing over out-of-date functional specs or battling through an adversarial change management procedure because somebody had a good idea during development rather than planning. We get to be a little bit more like our brothers and sisters in vaunted teams like the Government Digital Service, which is using agile approaches to great effect on projects that have a real benefit to their users. Almost. Unfortunately, it seems to be the case that adhering to an agile framework such as scrum is more difficult within an agency/client structure than it is for an in-house development team. This is no surprise. The Agile Manifesto was written in 2001 by a group of software developers for their own use. Many of the underlying principles of a framework like Scrum assume the existence of… | 2014 | Charlie Perrins | charlieperrins | 2014-12-12T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/is-agile-harder-for-agencies/ | process |
| 228 | 228 | The Great Unveiling | The moment of unveiling our designs should be among our proudest, but it never seems to work out that way. Instead of a chance to show how we can bring our clients’ visions to life, critique can be a tense, worrying ordeal. And yes, the stakes are high: a superb design is only superb if it goes live. Mismanage the feedback process and your research, creativity and hard work can be wasted, and your client may wonder whether you’ve been worth the investment. The great unveiling is a pivotal part of the design process, but it needn’t be a negative one. Just as usability testing teaches us whether our designs meet user needs, presenting our work to clients tells us whether we’ve met important business goals. So how can we turn the tide to make presenting designs a constructive experience, and to give good designs a chance to shine through? Timing is everything First, consider when you should seek others’ opinions. Your personal style will influence whether you show early sketches or wait to demonstrate something more complete. Some designers thrive at low fidelity, sketching out ideas that, despite their rudimentary nature, easily spark debate. Other designers take time to create more fully-realised versions. Some even argue that the great unveiling should be eliminated altogether by working directly alongside the client throughout, collaborating on the design to reach its full potential. Whatever your individual preference, you’ll rarely have the chance to do it entirely your own way. Contracts, clients, and deadlines will affect how early and often you share your work. However, try to avoid the trap of presenting too late and at too high fidelity. My experience has taught me that skilled designers tend to present their work earlier and allow longer for iteration than novices do. More aware of the potential flaws in their solutions, these designers cling less tightly to their initial efforts. Working roughly and seeking early feedback gives you the flexibility to respond more fully to nuances you may have misse… | 2010 | Cennydd Bowles | cennyddbowles | 2010-12-12T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2010/the-great-unveiling/ | business |
| 40 | 40 | Don’t Push Through the Pain | In 2004, I lost my web career. In a single day, it was gone. I was in too much pain to use a keyboard, a Wacom tablet (I couldn’t even click the pen), or a trackball. Switching my mouse to use my left (non-dominant) hand only helped a bit; then that hand went, too. I tried all the easy-to-find equipment out there, except for expensive gizmos with foot pedals. I had tingling in my fingers—which, when I was away from the computer, would rhythmically move as if some other being controlled them. I worried about Parkinson’s because the movements were so dramatic. Pen on paper was painful. Finally, I discovered one day that I couldn’t even turn a doorknob. The only highlight was that I couldn’t dust, scrub, or vacuum. We were forced to hire someone to come in once a week for an hour to whip through the house. You can imagine my disappointment. My injuries had gradually slithered into my life without notice. I’d occasionally have sore elbows, or my wrist might ache for a day, or my shoulders feel tight. But nothing to keyboard home about. That’s the critical bit of news. One day, you’re pretty fine. The next day, you don’t have your job—or any job that requires the use of your hands and wrists. I had to walk away from the computer for over four months—and partially for several months more. That’s right: no income. If I hadn’t found a gifted massage therapist, the right book of stretches, the equipment I should have been using all along, and learned how to pay attention to my body—even just a little bit more—I quite possibly wouldn’t be writing this article today. I wouldn’t be writing anything, anywhere. Most of us have heard of (and even claimed to have read all of) Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, who describes the state of flow—the place our minds go when we are fully engaged and in our element. This lovely state of highly focused activity is deeply satisfying, often creative, and quite familiar to many of us on the web who just can’t quit until the copy sings or t… | 2014 | Carolyn Wood | carolynwood | 2014-12-06T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/dont-push-through-the-pain/ | business |
| 32 | 32 | Cohesive UX | With Yosemite, Apple users can answer iPhone calls on their MacBooks. This is weird. And yet it’s representative of a greater trend toward cohesion. Shortly after upgrading to Yosemite, a call came in on my iPhone and my MacBook “rang” in parallel. And I was all, like, “Wut?” This was a new feature in Yosemite, and honestly it was a little bizarre at first. Apple promotional image showing a phone call ringing simultaneously on multiple devices. However, I had just spoken at a conference on the very topic you’re reading about now, and therefore I appreciated the underlying concept: the cohesion of user experience, the cohesion of screens. This is just one of many examples I’ve encountered since beginning to speak about this topic months ago. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s look back at the past few years, specifically the role of responsive web design. RWD != cohesive experience I needn’t expound on the virtues of responsive web design (RWD). You’ve likely already encountered more than a career’s worth on the topic. This is a good thing. Count me in as one of its biggest fans. However, if we are to sing the praises of RWD, we must also acknowledge its shortcomings. One of these is that RWD ends where the browser ends. For all its goodness, RWD really has no bearing on native apps or any other experiences that take place outside the browser. This makes it challenging, therefore, to create cohesion for multi-screen users if RWD is the only response to “let’s make it work everywhere.” We need something that incorporates the spirit of RWD while unifying all touchpoints for the entire user experience—single device or several devices, in browser or sans browser, native app or otherwise. I call this cohesive UX, and I believe it’s the next era of successful user experiences. Toward a unified whole Simply put, the goal of cohesive UX is to deliver a consistent, unified user experience regardless of where the experience begins, continues, and ends. Two facets are vital to cohesive UX: Function a… | 2014 | Cameron Moll | cameronmoll | 2014-12-24T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/cohesive-ux/ | ux |
| 144 | 144 | The Mobile Web, Simplified | A note from the editors: although eye-opening in 2006, this article is no longer relevant to today’s mobile web. Considering a foray into mobile web development? Following are four things you need to know before making the leap. 1. 4 billion mobile subscribers expected by 2010 Fancy that. Coupled with the UN prediction of 6.8 billion humans by 2010, 4 billion mobile subscribers (source) is an astounding 59% of the planet. Just how many of those subscribers will have data plans and web-enabled phones is still in question, but inevitably this all means one thing for you and me: A ton of potential eyes to view our web content on a mobile device. 2. Context is king Your content is of little value to users if it ignores the context in which it is viewed. Consider how you access data on your mobile device. You might be holding a bottle of water or gripping a handle on the subway/tube. You’re probably seeking specific data such as directions or show times, rather than the plethora of data at your disposal via a desktop PC. The mobile web, a phrase often used to indicate “accessing the web on a mobile device”, is very much a context-, content-, and component-specific environment. Expressed in terms of your potential target audience, access to web content on a mobile device is largely influenced by surrounding circumstances and conditions, information relevant to being mobile, and the feature set of the device being used. Ask yourself, What is relevant to my users and the tasks, problems, and needs they may encounter while being mobile? Answer that question and you’ll be off to a great start. 3. WAP 2.0 is an XHTML environment In a nutshell, here are a few fundamental tenets of mobile internet technology: Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is the protocol for enabling mobile access to internet content. Wireless Markup Language (WML) was the language of choice for WAP 1.0. Nearly all devices sold today are WAP 2.0 devices. With the in… | 2006 | Cameron Moll | cameronmoll | 2006-12-19T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2006/the-mobile-web-simplified/ | ux |
| 177 | 177 | HTML5: Tool of Satan, or Yule of Santa? | It would lead to unseasonal arguments to discuss the title of this piece here, and the arguments are as indigestible as the fourth turkey curry of the season, so we’ll restrict our article to the practical rather than the philosophical: what HTML5 can you reasonably expect to be able to use reliably cross-browser in the early months of 2010? The answer is that you can use more than you might think, due to the seasonal tinsel of feature-detection and using the sparkly pixie-dust of IE-only VML (but used in a way that won’t damage your Elf). Canvas canvas is a 2D drawing API that defines a blank area of the screen of arbitrary size, and allows you to draw on it using JavaScript. The pictures can be animated, such as in this canvas mashup of Wolfenstein 3D and Flickr. (The difference between canvas and SVG is that SVG uses vector graphics, so is infinitely scalable. It also keeps a DOM, whereas canvas is just pixels so you have to do all your own book-keeping yourself in JavaScript if you want to know where aliens are on screen, or do collision detection.) Previously, you needed to do this using Adobe Flash or Java applets, requiring plugins and potentially compromising keyboard accessibility. Canvas drawing is supported now in Opera, Safari, Chrome and Firefox. The reindeer in the corner is, of course, Internet Explorer, which currently has zero support for canvas (or SVG, come to that). Now, don’t pull a face like all you’ve found in your Yuletide stocking is a mouldy satsuma and a couple of nuts—that’s not the end of the story. Canvas was originally an Apple proprietary technology, and Internet Explorer had a similar one called Vector Markup Language which was submitted to the W3C for standardisation in 1998 but which, unlike canvas, was not blessed with retrospective standardisation. What you need, then, is some way for Internet Explorer to translate canvas to VML on-the-fly, while leaving the other, more standards-compliant browsers to use the HTML5. And such a way exists—it’s a JavaScript library called … | 2009 | Bruce Lawson | brucelawson | 2009-12-05T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2009/html5-tool-of-satan-or-yule-of-santa/ | code |
| 216 | 216 | Styling Components - Typed CSS With Stylable | There’s been a lot of debate recently about how best to style components for web apps so that styles don’t accidentally ‘leak’ out of the component they’re meant for, or clash with other styles on the page. Elaborate CSS conventions have sprung up, such as OOCSS, SMACSS, BEM, ITCSS, and ECSS. These work well, but they are methodologies, and require everyone in the team to know them and follow them, which can be a difficult undertaking across large or distributed teams. Others just give up on CSS and put all their styles in JavaScript. Now, I’m not bashing JS, especially so close to its 22nd birthday, but CSS-in-JS has problems of its own. Browsers have 20 years experience in optimising their CSS engines, so JavaScript won’t be as fast as using real CSS, and in any case, this requires waiting for JS to download, parse, execute then render the styles. There’s another problem with CSS-in-JS, too. Since Responsive Web Design hit the streets, most designers no longer make comps in Photoshop or its equivalents; instead, they write CSS. Why hire an expensive design professional and require them to learn a new way of doing their job? A recent thread on Twitter asked “What’s your biggest gripe with CSS-in-JS?”, and the replies were illuminating: “Always having to remember to camelCase properties then spending 10min pulling hair out when you do forget”, “the cryptic domain-specific languages that each of the frameworks do just ever so slightly differently”, “When I test look and feel in browser, then I copy paste from inspector, only to have to re-write it as a JSON object”, “Lack of linting, autocomplete, and css plug-ins for colors/ incrementing/ etc”. If you’re a developer, and you’re still unconvinced, I challenge you to let designers change the font in your IDE to Zapf Chancery and choose a new colour scheme, simply because they like it better. Does that sound like fun? Will that boost your productivity? Thought not. Some chums at Wix Engineering and I wanted to see if we could square this circle. Wix-hosted sites h… | 2017 | Bruce Lawson | brucelawson | 2017-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/styling-components-typed-css-with-stylable/ | code |
| 23 | 23 | Animating Vectors with SVG | It is almost 2014 and fifteen years ago the W3C started to develop a web-based scalable vector graphics (SVG) format. As web technologies go, this one is pretty old and well entrenched. See the Pen yJflC by Drew McLellan (@drewm) on CodePen Embed not working on your device? Try direct. Unlike rasterized images, SVG files will stay crisp and sharp at any resolution. With high-DPI phones, tablets and monitors, all those rasterized icons are starting to look a bit old and blocky. There are several options to get simpler, decorative pieces to render smoothly and respond to various device widths, shapes and sizes. Symbol fonts are one option; the other is SVG. I’m a big fan of SVG. SVG is an XML format, which means it is possible to write by hand or to script. The most common way to create an SVG file is through the use of various drawing applications like Illustrator, Inkscape or Sketch. All of them open and save the SVG format. But, if SVG is so great, why doesn’t it get more attention? The simple answer is that for a long time it wasn’t well supported, so no one touched the technology. SVG’s adoption has always been hampered by browser support, but that’s not the case any more. Every modern browser (at least three versions back) supports SVG. Even IE9. Although the browsers support SVG, it is implemented in many different ways. SVG in HTML Some browsers allow you to embed SVG right in the HTML: the <svg> element. Treating SVG as a first-class citizen works — sometimes. Another way to embed SVG is via the <img> element; using the src attribute, you can refer to an SVG file. Again, this only works sometimes and leaves you in a tight space if you need to have a fallback for older browsers. The most common solution is to use the <object> element, with the data attribute referencing the SVG file. When a browser does not support this, it falls back to the content inside the <object>. This could be a rasterized fallback <img>. This method gets you the best of both worlds: a nice vector image with an alternati… | 2013 | Brian Suda | briansuda | 2013-12-07T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/animating-vectors-with-svg/ | |
| 89 | 89 | Direction, Distance and Destinations | With all these new smartphones in the hands of lost and confused owners, we need a better way to represent distances and directions to destinations. The immediate examples that jump to mind are augmented reality apps which let you see another world through your phone’s camera. While this is interesting, there is a simpler way: letting people know how far away they are and if they are getting warmer or colder. In the app world, you can easily tap into the phone’s array of sensors such as the GPS and compass, but what people rarely know is that you can do the same with HTML. The native versus web app debate will never subside, but at least we can show you how to replicate some of the functionality progressively in HTML and JavaScript. In this tutorial, we’ll walk through how to create a simple webpage listing distances and directions of a few popular locations around the world. We’ll use JavaScript to access the device’s geolocation API and also attempt to access the compass to get a heading. Both of these APIs are documented, to be included in the W3C geolocation API specification, and can be used on both desktop and mobile devices today. To get started, we need a list of a few locations around the world. I have chosen the highest mountain peak on each continent so you can see a diverse set of distances and directions. Mountain °Latitude °Longitude Kilimanjaro -3.075833 37.353333 Vinson Massif -78.525483 -85.617147 Puncak Jaya -4.078889 137.158333 Everest 27.988056 86.925278 Elbrus 43.355 42.439167 Mount McKinley 63.0695 -151.0074 Aconcagua -32.653431 -70.011083 Source: Wikipedia We can put those into an HTML list to be styled and accessed by JavaScript to create some distance and directions calculations. The next thing we need to do is check to see if the browser and operating system have geolocation support. To do this we test to see if the function is available or not using a si… | 2012 | Brian Suda | briansuda | 2012-12-19T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2012/direction-distance-and-destinations/ | code |
| 100 | 100 | Moo'y Christmas | A note from the editors: Moo has changed their API since this article was written. As the web matures, it is less and less just about the virtual world. It is becoming entangled with our world and it is harder to tell what is virtual and what is real. There are several companies who are blurring this line and make the virtual just an extension of the physical. Moo is one such company. Moo offers simple print on demand services. You can print business cards, moo mini cards, stickers, postcards and more. They give you the ability to upload your images, customize them, then have them sent to your door. Many companies allow this sort of digital to physical interaction, but Moo has taken it one step further and has built an API. Printable stocking stuffers The Moo API consists of a simple XML file that is sent to their servers. It describes all the information needed to dynamically assemble and print your object. This is very helpful, not just for when you want to print your own stickers, but when you want to offer them to your customers, friends, organization or community with no hassle. Moo handles the check-out and shipping, all you need to do is what you do best, create! Now using an API sounds complicated, but it is actually very easy. I am going to walk you through the options so you can easily be printing in no time. Before you can begin sending data to the Moo API, you need to register and get an API key. This is important, because it allows Moo to track usage and to credit you. To register, visit http://www.moo.com/api/ and click “Request an API key”. In the following examples, I will use {YOUR API KEY HERE} as a place holder, replace that with your API key and everything will work fine. First thing you need to do is to create an XML file to describe the check-out basket. Open any text-editor and start with some XML basics. Don’t worry, this is pretty simple and Moo gives you a few tools to check your XML for errors before… | 2008 | Brian Suda | briansuda | 2008-12-19T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2008/mooy-christmas/ | code |
| 160 | 160 | Tracking Christmas Cheer with Google Charts | A note from the editors: Since this article was written Google has retired the Charts API. Let’s get something out in the open: I love statistics. As an informatician I can’t get enough graphs, charts, and numbers. So you can imagine when Google released their Charts API I thought Christmas had come early. I immediately began to draw up graphs for the holiday season using the new API; and using my new found chart-making skills I’ll show you what you can and can’t do with Google Charts. Mummy, it’s my first chart The Google Charts API allows you to send data to Google; in return they give you back a nicely-rendered graph. All the hard work is done on Google’s servers — you need only reference an image in your HTML. You pass along the data — the numbers for the charts, axis labels, and so on — in the query string of the image’s URL. If you want to add charts to your blog or web site, there’s probably no quicker way to get started. Here’s a simple example: if we add the following line to an HTML page: <img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=lc&chs=200x125&chd=s:ZreelPuevfgznf2008" /> Then we’ll see the line graph in Figure 1 appear in our page. That graph is hosted on Google’s own server1: http://chart.apis.google.com/. Figure 1: A simple example of a line graph created with Google Charts. If you look at the URL used in the example you’ll notice we’re passing some parameters along in the query string (the bit after the question mark). The query string looks like this: cht=lc&chs=200x125&chd=s:ZreelPuevfgznf2008 It’s contains everything Google Charts needs to draw the graph. There are three parameters in the query string: cht; this specifies the type of chart Google Charts will generate (in this case, lc is a line chart). chs, the value of which is 200x125; this defines the chart’s size (200 pixels wide by 125 pixels high). chd, the value of which is s:ZreelPuevfgznf2008; this is the actual chart data, which we’ll discus… | 2007 | Brian Suda | briansuda | 2007-12-11T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/tracking-christmas-cheer-with-google-charts/ | ux |
| 223 | 223 | Calculating Color Contrast | Some websites and services allow you to customize your profile by uploading pictures, changing the background color or other aspects of the design. As a customer, this personalization turns a web app into your little nest where you store your data. As a designer, letting your customers have free rein over the layout and design is a scary prospect. So what happens to all the stock text and images that are designed to work on nice white backgrounds? Even the Mac only lets you choose between two colors for the OS, blue or graphite! Opening up the ability to customize your site’s color scheme can be a recipe for disaster unless you are flexible and understand how to find maximum color contrasts. In this article I will walk you through two simple equations to determine if you should be using white or black text depending on the color of the background. The equations are both easy to implement and produce similar results. It isn’t a matter of which is better, but more the fact that you are using one at all! That way, even with the craziest of Geocities color schemes that your customers choose, at least your text will still be readable. Let’s have a look at a range of various possible colors. Maybe these are pre-made color schemes, corporate colors, or plucked from an image. Now that we have these potential background colors and their hex values, we need to find out whether the corresponding text should be in white or black, based on which has a higher contrast, therefore affording the best readability. This can be done at runtime with JavaScript or in the back-end before the HTML is served up. There are two functions I want to compare. The first, I call ’50%’. It takes the hex value and compares it to the value halfway between pure black and pure white. If the hex value is less than half, meaning it is on the darker side of the spectrum, it returns white as the text color. If the result is greater than half, it’s on the lighter side of the spectrum and returns black as the text value. In PHP: function getContra… | 2010 | Brian Suda | briansuda | 2010-12-24T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2010/calculating-color-contrast/ | code |
| 150 | 150 | A Gift Idea For Your Users: Respect, Yo | If, indeed, it is the thought that counts, maybe we should pledge to make more thoughtful design decisions. In addition to wowing people who use the Web sites we build with novel features, nuanced aesthetics and the new new thing, maybe we should also thread some subtle things throughout our work that let folks know: hey, I’m feeling ya. We’re simpatico. I hear you loud and clear. It’s not just holiday spirit that moves me to talk this way. As good as people are, we need more than the horizon of karma to overcome that invisible demon, inertia. Makers of the Web, respectful design practices aren’t just the right thing, they are good for business. Even if your site is the one and only place to get experience x, y or zed, you don’t rub someone’s face in it. You keep it free flowing, you honor the possible back and forth of a healthy transaction, you are Johnny Appleseed with the humane design cues. You make it clear that you are in it for the long haul. A peek back: Think back to what search (and strategy) was like before Google launched a super clean page with “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. Aggregation was the order of the day (just go back and review all the ‘strategic alliances’ that were announced daily.) Yet the GOOG comes along with this zen layout (nope, we’re not going to try to make you look at one of our media properties) and a bold, brash, teleport-me-straight-to-the-first-search-result button. It could have been titled “We’re Feeling Cocky”. These were radical design decisions that reset how people thought about search services. Oh, you mean I can just find what I want and get on with it? It’s maybe even more impressive today, after the GOOG has figured out how to monetize attention better than anyone. “I’m Feeling Lucky” is still there. No doubt, it costs the company millions. But by leaving a little money on the table, they keep the basic bargain they started to strike in 1997. We’re going to get you where you want to go as quickly as possible. Where are the places we might make … | 2007 | Brian Oberkirch | brianoberkirch | 2007-12-23T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/a-gift-idea-for-your-users-respect-yo/ | ux |
| 156 | 156 | Mobile 2.0 | Thinking 2.0 As web geeks, we have a thick skin towards jargon. We all know that “Web 2.0” has been done to death. At Blue Flavor we even have a jargon bucket to penalize those who utter such painfully overused jargon with a cash deposit. But Web 2.0 is a term that has lodged itself into the conscience of the masses. This is actually a good thing. The 2.0 suffix was able to succinctly summarize all that was wrong with the Web during the dot-com era as well as the next evolution of an evolving media. While the core technologies actually stayed basically the same, the principles, concepts, interactions and contexts were radically different. With that in mind, this Christmas I want to introduce to you the concept of Mobile 2.0. While not exactly a new concept in the mobile community, it is relatively unknown in the web community. And since the foundation of Mobile 2.0 is the web, I figured it was about time for you to get to know each other. It’s the Carriers’ world. We just live in it. Before getting into Mobile 2.0, I thought first I should introduce you to its older brother. You know the kind, the kid with emotional problems that likes to beat up on you and your friends for absolutely no reason. That is the mobile of today. The mobile ecosystem is a very complicated space often and incorrectly compared to the Web. If the Web was a freewheeling hippie — believing in freedom of information and the unity of man through communities — then Mobile is the cutthroat capitalist — out to pillage and plunder for the sake of the almighty dollar. Where the Web is relatively easy to publish to and ultimately make a buck, Mobile is wrought with layers of complexity, politics and obstacles. I can think of no better way to summarize these challenges than the testimony of Jason Devitt to the United States Congress in what is now being referred to as the “iPhone Hearing.” Jason is the co-founder and CEO of SkyDeck a new wireless startup and former CEO of Vindigo an early pioneer in mobile content. As Jason points out, th… | 2007 | Brian Fling | brianfling | 2007-12-21T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/mobile-2-0/ | business |
| 83 | 83 | Cut Copy Paste | Long before I got into this design thing, I was heavily into making my own music inspired by the likes of Coldcut and Steinski. I would scour local second-hand record shops in search of obscure beats, loops and bits of dialogue in the hope of finding that killer sample I could then splice together with other things to make a huge hit that everyone would love. While it did eventually lead to a record contract and getting to release a few 12″ singles, ultimately I knew I’d have to look for something else to pay the bills. I may not make my own records any more, but the approach I took back then – finding (even stealing) things, cutting and pasting them into interesting combinations – is still at the centre of how I work, only these days it’s pretty much bits of code rather than bits of vinyl. Over the years I’ve stored these little bits of code (some I’ve found, some I’ve created myself) in Evernote, ready to be dialled up whenever I need them. So when Drew got in touch and asked if I’d like to do something for this year’s 24 ways I thought it might be kind of cool to share with you a few of these snippets that I find really useful. Think of these as a kind of coding mix tape; but remember – don’t just copy as is: play around, combine and remix them into other wonderful things. Some of this stuff is dirty; some of it will make hardcore programmers feel ill. For those people, remember this – while you were complaining about the syntax, I made something. Create unique colours Let’s start right away with something I stole. Well, actually it was given away at the time by Matt Biddulph who was then at Dopplr before Nokia destroyed it. Imagine you have thousands of words and you want to assign each one a unique colour. Well, Matt came up with a crazily simple but effective way to do that using an MD5 hash. Just encode said word using an MD5 hash, then take the first six characters of the string you get back to create a hexadecimal colour representation. I can’t guarantee that it will be a harmonious colour palet… | 2012 | Brendan Dawes | brendandawes | 2012-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2012/cut-copy-paste/ | code |
| 3 | 3 | Project Hubs: A Home Base for Design Projects | SCENE: A design review meeting. Laptop screens. Coffee cups. Project manager: Hey, did you get my email with the assets we’ll be discussing? Client: I got an email from you, but it looks like there’s no attachment. PM: Whoops! OK. I’m resending the files with the attachments. Check again? Client: OK, I see them. It’s homepage_v3_brian-edits_FINAL_for-review.pdf, right? PM: Yeah, that’s the one. Client: OK, hang on, Bill’s going to print them out. (3-minute pause. Small talk ensues.) Client: Alright, Bill’s back. We’re good to start. Brian: Oh, actually those homepage edits we talked about last time are in the homepage_v4_brian_FINAL_v2.pdf document that I posted to Basecamp earlier today. Client: Oh, OK. What message thread was that in? Brian: Uh, I’m pretty sure it’s in “Homepage Edits and Holiday Schedule.” Client: Alright, I see them. Bill’s going back to the printer. Hang on a sec… This is only a slightly exaggerated version of my experience in design review meetings. The design project dance is a sloppy one. It involves a slew of email attachments, PDFs, PSDs, revisions, GitHub repos, staging environments, and more. And while tools like Basecamp can help manage all these moving parts, it can still be incredibly challenging to extract only the important bits, juggle deliverables, and see how your project is progressing. Enter project hubs. Project hubs A project hub consolidates all the key design and development materials onto a single webpage presented in reverse chronological order. The timeline lives online (either publicly available or password protected), so that everyone involved in the team has easy access to it. A project hub. I was introduced to project hubs after seeing Dan Mall’s open redesign of Reading Is Fundamental. Thankfully, I had a chance to work with Dan on two projects where I got to see firsthand how beneficial a project hub can be. Here’s what makes a project hub great: Serves as a centralized home base for the project Trains clients and teams to decide i… | 2013 | Brad Frost | bradfrost | 2013-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/project-hubs/ | process |
| 85 | 85 | Starting Your Project on the Right Foot (and Keeping It There) | I’m not sure if anything is as terrifying as beginning a new design project. I often spend hours trying to find the best initial footing in a design, so I’ve been working hard to improve my process, particularly for the earliest stages of a project. I want to smooth out the bumps that disrupt my creative momentum and focus on the emotional highs and lows I experience, and then try to minimize the lows and ride the highs as long as possible. Design is often a struggle broken up by blissful moments of creative clarity that provide valuable force to move your work forward. Momentum is a powerful tool in creative work, and it’s something we don’t always maximize when we’re working because of the hectic nature of our field. Obviously, every designer is going to have a different process, but I thought I’d share some of the methods I’ve begun to adopt. I hope this will spark a conversation among designers who are interested in looking at process in a new way. Jump-starting a project I cannot overstate the importance of immersing yourself in design and collecting ample amounts of inspiration when beginning a project. I make it a daily practice to visit a handful of sites (Dribbble, Graphic Exchange, Web Creme, siteInspire, Designspiration, and others) and save any examples of design that I like. I then sort them into general categories (publication design, illustration, typography, web design, and so on). Enjoying a bit of fresh design every day helps me absorb it and analyze why it’s effective instead of just imitating it. Many designers are afraid to look at too much design for fear that they’ll be tempted to copy it, but I feel a steady influx of design inspiration reduces that possibility. You’re much more likely to take the easy way out and rip off a design if you’re scrambling for inspiration after getting stuck. If you are immersed in design from a variety of mediums, you’ll engage your creative brain on multiple levels and have an easier time creating something unique for your project. Looking at good desig… | 2012 | Bethany Heck | bethanyheck | 2012-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2012/starting-your-project-on-the-right-foot/ | process |
| 109 | 109 | Geotag Everywhere with Fire Eagle | A note from the editors: Since this article was written Yahoo! has retired the Fire Eagle service. Location, they say, is everywhere. Everyone has one, all of the time. But on the web, it’s taken until this year to see the emergence of location in the applications we use and build. The possibilities are broad. Increasingly, mobile phones provide SDKs to approximate your location wherever you are, browser extensions such as Loki and Mozilla’s Geode provide browser-level APIs to establish your location from the proximity of wireless networks to your laptop. Yahoo’s Brickhouse group launched Fire Eagle, an ambitious location broker enabling people to take their location from any of these devices or sources, and provide it to a plethora of web services. It enables you to take the location information that only your iPhone knows about and use it anywhere on the web. That said, this is still a time of location as an emerging technology. Fire Eagle stores your location on the web (protected by application-specific access controls), but to try and give an idea of how useful and powerful your location can be — regardless of the services you use now — today’s 24ways is going to build a bookmarklet to call up your location on demand, in any web application. Location Support on the Web Over the past year, the number of applications implementing location features has increased dramatically. Plazes and Brightkite are both full featured social networks based around where you are, whilst Pownce rolled in Fire Eagle support to allow geotagging of all the content you post to their microblogging service. Dipity’s beautiful timeline shows for you moving from place to place and Six Apart’s activity stream for Movable Type started exposing your movements. The number of services that hook into Fire Eagle will increase as location awareness spreads through the developer community, but you can use your location on other sites indirectly too. Consider Flickr. … | 2008 | Ben Ward | benward | 2008-12-21T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2008/geotag-everywhere-with-fire-eagle/ | code |
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