Surprisingly fast page rendering service for checking layouts in MS Internet Explorer. For when firing up Windows in VMWare seems overkill.
del.icio.us | internetexplorer via:heumann webdevelopment
The whole installing kernel extensions bit is a little bold, but for remote web space to show up in the Finder as a mounted drive I’m willing to try it. Particularly if I can then edit remote files as a project with TextMate.
del.icio.us | osx ssh webdevelopment
Election Information and Lazy Coding
October 30th, 2006 at 12:25 am
I was reminded the other week just how close election day is when I received an email from the California Secretary of State’s Office titled “Important New Election Information”. The subject line definitely got my attention so I gave it a click and to my dismay this is what I saw.
Yup, a bunch of empty boxes and not much else! No important new election information – nothing at all! In fairness, this behavior is partially due to Gmail acting with my best interest in mind. Gmail and other email clients don’t automatically load images to protect my privacy (once images are loaded the sender can tell you have opened a message) – and with an additional click this is what I saw, but I wasn’t happy about it.
The source of my dismay lies in the fact that whoever coded up this email for the Secretary of State didn’t put in the effort (or have the knowledge) to do it in a way that would ensure every last voter could get the information they needed on election day. Not everyone has an email client that can handle HTML and images, and worse yet there was no plain-text alternative included. If you couldn’t see the images, you were out of luck.
This is a pretty easy example to pick on, as there are myriad ways you could code this email in both an accessible and visually appealing way. At the bare minimum, including a plain-text version of the email along with the HTML version is trivial. And yet, I don’t think picking on it is unwarranted. The distribution of voting information is too important to be foiled by lazy coding, and the irony that the email closes with the text “a message from the California Secretary of State about the Help America Vote Act” is simply too delicious.
Permalink | Comments Off | accessibility election email webdevelopment
Leaving usernames and passwords in publicly accessible files/versioning repositories is dumb, but still - I’m surprised that Google is indexing inside of zip, tar and tar.gz files.
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“Track your residential or commercial electric usage automatically and achieve your own Personal Kyoto.” Particularly interesting bit: “If you are a software developer interested in bringing Personal Kyoto to your town, get in touch!”
del.icio.us | electricity globalwarming kyoto via:regine visualization webdevelopment
Firefox extension that sounds more like a major work of physics or mathematics, or a crippling disease than a web development tool. But hey.
del.icio.us | extension firefox via:twatson webdevelopment
Attach javascript events to your elements using CSS syntax. Built on Prototype, similar to Behavior.
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Slides and files from a 3 hour AJAX / Javascript tutorial up at OSCON.
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Snippets and commands for Textmate. HTML, CSS, PHP, etc. Not comprehensive, but nice for quick reference.
del.icio.us | osx pdf textmate webdesign webdevelopment
Nice Subversion GUI. A nice GUI complement to TextMate’s built in SVN functions and the command line client.
del.icio.us | osx subversion webdevelopment
People respond to Jeremy Zawodny’s post asking for suggestions on how to improve Y! Groups.
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This may be just the right amount of framework for me. Plus excellent documentation, which is nothing to sneeze at!
del.icio.us | php via:duvander webdevelopment
Checked out notes on Joshua Schachter’s talk. Good stuff. Will have to read the rest later.
del.icio.us | socialweb userexperience web2.0 webdesign webdevelopment
Neato OS X app that lets you elegantly view and live-edit XHTML/CSS pages. Neat being able to clearly see how a page is constructed. Flipping between the html, css and rendered page was a drag!
del.icio.us | osx via:twatson webdesign webdevelopment
“Once again I will say: it’s not the idea, it’s the follow-through. It’s not if you have cool ideas, everyone can have a cool idea, it’s if you follow-through and keep at it. This is what I wish Dropload could have been.”
del.icio.us | idea thinking webdevelopment working
Simple and clear explanation of why it’s a good idea to put apps you compile/configure yourself into /usr/local/[bin | sbin | etc]
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HQ reviews. For the as-of-yet-nascent reviews aggregation spider that someone will write someday.
del.icio.us | hq microformats smallpieceslooselyjoined webdevelopment
Hello
John is currently thinking and designing in San Francisco.
Projects
A simple and forgiving text messaging service for San Francisco Muni arrival times.
DS Buttons are an invitation to play.