Posts by John Williams
Tales of dysfunction and success
As Dave Perks mentioned, the two of us have been discussing technical and creative mindsets. I've worked in a lot of places where technical and creative staff have pushed each other away, to the point where there's maybe only one point of contact between the two departments.
As a result, the idea people have to allocate resources for tasks they don't understand, and they feel like they lose control of the solution. The implementation people feel like they've lost control of the resources and…
Why We Use Firefox
Like most web professionals we make our web sites using the Firefox browser, then circle back just before release and make sure everything works in other browsers. An unusual choice given that somewhere between 70% and 80% of web users still use Internet Explorer. It makes more sense to work on the platform most people are using, then tweak the result for the minority browser market.
At least, that's what I've heard from non-developers who get frustrated at hearing things like "we're still…
Follow, don’t force, your customers
Book Recycling Center
Fred, publisher of the excellent science fiction zine Kaleidotrope, recently posted on his personal blog about the morality or immorality of buying used books. He says:
The right of resale has existed for a very long time, even before the internet came along to make the process quicker and easier. I buy the argument that the internet has changed bookselling and publishing, often drastically cutting into profits [ ... ] But buying used books is not the problem. It may very…
This page does not validate
This page does not validate.
Occasionally someone I'm showing one of our web sites to will point out that the site has technical errors and doesn't validate as correct HTML.
There are lots of reasons this can happen. It's very easy to make a change to a site which causes the site to fail validation, and few web sites survive the addition of content with validation entirely intact. Sometimes the site doesn't validate because we've chosen to use a technique that validation tools don't understand…
Putting the “Management” in “Content Management System”
We use Wordpress for our own web site CMS.
Does this sound like you?
I want this headline red. It won't turn red! Why won't it turn red? I want this paragraph centered. It won't center! I need a different typeface, but I can't have one! This is so easy to do in Word, why can't I do it here?
If it seems like the CMS is actively working against you, that's because it is. CMSs are intentionally designed to limit your options. But why would anyone do that?
Content Management Systems are not design…
What problem are you solving?
A different kind of Framework
Here, for example, is the first paragraph from the first page of the Cairngorm project, Adobe's favorite framework for Flex:
Cairngorm is the lightweight micro-architecture for Rich…
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