Yeah, I’m going there. I want to talk about frameworks again. Bear with me… I know I’ve discussed this topic at great length before, but it keeps coming up, and I still don’t have a very good understanding of all the positions people have taken on the topic. Last time I discussed this, I jumped to my own conclusions about why some people don’t like frameworks. This turned out to be a horrible idea, because people got on the defensive instead of trying to...

Along with the good folks at DZone, I’ve been working on a series of reference cards. Refcardz are “cheat sheets” that offer quick but key aspects of various languages, techniques and methodologies. The first of my three part Core CSS reference is available for free download to registered members (registration is free too, of [...]

Yesterday John Battelle emailed me to ask about Rae’s post. This will be a little inside baseball to some people who don’t live and breathe search and Twitter, but I figured I’d take what I emailed to John, add some pictures, and post it here. Here’s the email: Sorry for the delay in replying; I’m really [...]

In this next installment of Review Fridays, we have a new book from Apress titled, Practical Prototype and script.aculo.us by Andrew Dupont. Andrew is one of the core developers of the Prototype library. Prototype is the library that helped open up a new world of techniques for me and, likely, many other JavaScript developers with its Ruby-inspired approach. Prototype is automatically bundled with Ruby on Rails and CakePHP, which has led to much of its success. Things have progressed...

It’s D-Day in Brighton. In just a few more hours, dConstruct will commence at the Brighton Dome. Twitter is all a-twitter as the geek invasion reaches critical mass. It’s wonderful having so many friends descend on Brighton in one go. It seems like half of the UK geek scene and a goodly portion of San Francisco are already here. As you can imagine, things have been pretty busy at Clearleft Towers. We just successfully wrapped up two days of workshops and now it’s...

As you may have noticed it's been over three months since I last posted anything here. Just in case you missed it, the reason is that I have been on parental leave . Well, as of this week I am now back at work, and hope to start posting reasonably regularly here again within the next few weeks. There will be a few changes compared to how things have worked here in the past. Time is becoming more and more precious for me, especially with a one-year-old to take care of, and I need to find...

There's a new beta of MW Latest Tweet available. It does four new things. Four and a half if you count the new options setting as a half.

It’s easy to find out what Google Chrome’s user-agent is. Using the same trick as I did with the iPhone, I searched for phpinfo HTTP_USER_AGENT in Google Chrome. Click on one of the results and search for HTTP_USER_AGENT on the page. Here’s the image that I see: My exact user-agent is Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; [...]

I need a little help with WordPress and subversion, if someone could spare the cycles to assist a newb. (Which would be me.)

Alright, I’ve got another conspiracy theory misconception to dispel. After reading through the Chrome Terms of Service, some people are worried that Google is trying to assert rights on everything that you do on Chrome. From one example story by Marshall Kirkpatrick: The terms include a section giving Google “a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and [...]

A friend of mine recently asked the question "Why the Hate on Internet Explorer 6?" He explains some very logical reasons why it doesn't make sense to be so negative about IE6, and as I agree with him on just about all points, I thought I'd give the clearest answer I could.

I spend a fair amount of my time debunking misconceptions about Google. So when I found out that Google Chrome was going to be released, I put on my thinking cap about what objections people would throw out about Google Chrome. Here are the questions that I came up with, along with my personal answers. [...]

I've been hacking on some Perl code that extracts data that comes from web users around the world and been stored into MySQL (with no real encoding information, of course). My goal it to generate well-formed, valid XML that can be read by another tool . Now I'll be the first to admit that I never really took the time to like, understand, or pay much attention to all the changes in Perl's character and byte handling over the years. I'm one of those developers that, I...

For better or worse, my blog is popular with the Google conspiracy-theorist demographic. I knew that as soon as Google Chrome launched, some readers would ask tough questions about privacy and how/when Google Chrome communicates with google.com. So I decided to tackle this issue head-on. I talked to the Chrome team to find out if [...]

Producing a usable design takes time, money, and resources. It also requires an organization’s dedication to focus on usability testing and customer needs throughout the entire design process. Knowing how to sell usability testing will substantially help it get approved and supported by an organization. Most development teams we work with understand the benefits of usability [...]

This week we take a walk through computing history with noted engineer and designer Bill Verplank, who was present at many of the defining points!

When we were just 3 people trying to get Wufoo launched on a limited budget and timeframe, we felt that it was necessary for us to work 7 days a week and expect 80+ hours out of each member on the team. Obviously, a grueling schedule like that can’t last forever and now that we’re [...]

Alright, this has gone on long enough, and frankly I?m fed up. I?ve been in New York for over a year in a venerable cheesesteak drought . I aim to do something about it and I want you to help me. We?ll say it?s a mission of discovery to find the best, and ?best? might be a dubious honor, cheese and meats combo in town. Let?s call it a Cheesesteak Crawl. And you?re all invited. The plan is to get enough of us together so that we can have a few people share a cheesesteak (rather than...

Update, 12:49 p.m.: You can try Google Chrome at http://www.google.com/chrome and I hope every Windows user takes it for a spin. It’s only a seven megabyte download, which means it’s really fast to download and try. Update, 12:46 p.m.: Chromium, the site dedicated to open-sourcing Google Chrome is now open at http://www.chromium.org/ According to a press release [...]

For our next part in the inspiration series we point our direction towards the big white screen. For long time opening credits where just a boring obligated part. Luckily people start realizing that more was possible in the late 1950s and it became a form of art. There is one graphic designer that made several credits mini movies a work of art and his name is Saul Bass. He is solely responsible for a turning point in the movie credits world. What follows is a small selection of what I found...