Posts Tagged web design
Using Google Chrome, a Web Designer’s Experience, Part 5: The Little Things
written 2 Jul 2010 in the earliest morning
I’ve discussed issues I’ve noticed with Google Chrome that are specifically related to using it for building web sites. There are a few other minor annoyances about Google Chrome that add up to big hassles when you combine the time they waste throughout the day, and these are likely to affect any user, not just those of us with our digital hard hats donned.
RSS Feeds
Chrome doesn’t handle RSS Feeds natively by default. Is that redundant? Can Natives be Defaults? Only if their parents are interested in unusual names. But enough with the hilarious jokes making you laugh too loud in your cubicle, aka, the bus you’re reading this on. While I understand that the majority of users don’t know what RSS is let alone use it, it’s a handy protocol that’s changing the way people consume information and will continue to do so at a growing rate as Grandpa checks into the afterlife and little Suzy’s desk at school is replaced by a giant iPad. With Chrome, you either have to use an extension to read RSS feeds, or open Firefox. I don’t want to use extensions, the whole point of using Google Chrome is to keep it raw and fast, as Firefox as a browser is still better functionality-wise, just not in the performance department.
Gmail Support
Click a myemailaddressis@gmail.com link in a browser and Chrome tries opening up Outlook, Mail, or whatever your default desktop email client is. I don’t use a desktop client, and like everyone else who isn’t still wearing scrunchy socks or remembering how great the 1800s were, I use Gmail for my Internet communication type things. Google makes Gmail, Google makes Chrome, but Google doesn’t let Gmail and Chrome play nicely together. I can only assume it’s because of that one time that they were left alone at the house for the weekend while Mama and Pappa Google went off to the Bahamas and the two of them threw an online bash like nothing Windows ME could have ever imagined. So the only solution to avoid having Mail open up on me every time I want to easily send an email to someone is to copy/paste the address, switch over to a tab running Gmail, and proceed from there like I’m some kind of common task manager.
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Using Google Chrome, a Web Designer’s Experience, Part 4: Bookmark’s Toolbar
Browser testing is essential, and I use a wonderful online browser testing solution from Cross Browser Testing. It has this great feature where you can add a Javascript booklet to your toolbar, visit the page you want to test, click the booklet and it’ll open up a VPN connection to the machine / browser combination of your choice. The process is so incredibly simple that it makes browser testing as easy as Tony Hawk’s video game empire made skateboarding for posers.
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Using Google Chrome, a Web Designer’s Experience, Part 3: Webkit Annoyances
It’s already annoying enough that Mac browsers render fonts all nice and perfectly smooth while Window’s machines still refuse to automatically implement anti-aliasing on fonts. Aside from making fonts (and the @font-face CSS selector that’s now a reality) look bad on every browser available to Windowleans, it comes with the side effect that Mac browsers will often render type that takes up fewer pixels on the screen itself. This can be an issue when the length of your text matters. For example, say you have a background image for your navigation bar. You want to have part of the navigation bar’s background blue while the rest of the bar is red, but you don’t want to use any image replacement technique for rendering the text itself (you might have a dynamic menu bar running off of your CMS so that when the pages on your site are updated, the navigation bar is as well). If your text renders at different sizes on different Operating Systems, you need to provide different CSS to each OS. Annoying, but doable.
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Using Google Chrome, a Web Designer’s Experience, Part 2: Inspect Element
Firebug is like a baby made of candy. If you don’t get that analogy, no one will blame you but best not to bring it up around the hitching post, water cooler or back of the garbage truck, wherever you take your particular daily break. Suffice to say, this little plugin developed for Firefox is like having a twin brother who will go to school for you, do all of your homework, sit in the waiting room until the doctor is ready to see you and let you take his girlfriend home after he did all of the wining and dining.
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Using Google Chrome, a Web Designer’s Experience, Part 1: The History of My Web Browser
I jumped on the Firefox train as quickly as any other up and coming computer nerd Web Designer hopeful way back in the turn of November, 2004. How wonderful were those days? Blogging was cool, Google didn’t have a sidebar and when I went to the bar with my friends, no one sat on their phone showing me how great the latest app that tracked everything you do everywhere you go was the whole time.
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Pittsburgh Web Design: An Evolution
The City of Pittsburgh has changed rather remarkably over the past few years. It’s reputation, as outdated as it was even 10 years ago, for being smoke and black skies, a dying link in the rust belt, has given way to numerous internationally recognized environmental events and the G8. Bike lanes and more and more parks and paths line the streets every month. Young people from around the country are beginning to recognize it’s importance as a cultural hub, somewhere you can go right now and be a part of the change, not just show up when it’s all said and done and reap the benefits. In the arena of Web Design, it’s no different. Just three years ago the city was primarily dominated by both freelancers and big companies alike using outdated methods of building websites, and not just the antiquated means of slapping tables inside of tables, but some who literally used Photoshop’s Save for Web… interface to create sites.
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Essential Plugins for Using WordPress as a CMS
I’m sure there are a hundred and fifty of these articles out there listing 10 Best Plugins to Make WP a CMS and 100 (+3) Best WordPress Plugins for Content Management, etc., but I’m writing this article anyway. Why? You asked, or at least read me writing that you’d asked, so I’ll tell you. There aren’t 10 essential plugins for turning WP into a CMS, it’s pretty much already there, regardless of it’s official status as a blogging platform or not. It manages content, it’s a content management system. That said…
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The Status of Pittsburgh’s Hostel
I’ve always thought of Pittsburgh as a big up-and-coming city, and in recent years it’s been really moving in that direction. Bike lanes are popping up everywhere, there’s a constantly growing local arts scene, our transit system is headed for an overhaul and the rivers are finally beginning to get cleaned up a little. But we’re still without a hostel.
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State of My Portfolio
I don’t get a chance to update my portfolio all that often, though I build a website or two every month on average. I suppose the upside to that is simply that I’m busy enough to not have the time to update my portfolio, even if I definitely have the content.
I’d like to mention a few really nifty sites that I’ve had the fortune of working on recently, though, including one for local produce, one aimed at making life easier for your local farmer, and another aimed at helping Pittsburghers get on their bikes and ride.
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Scrollbars Disappearing in Firefox on a Mac
Today a potential client told me that when she visited my site, the vertical scrollbars weren’t showing up. “Poppycock” I thought, but alas, she was completely right and I was truly humbled while trying to sort out what the issue was. The Internet offered no help, so I was forced to go in and get my hands dirty in Coda.
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