Entry published June 29, 2008
I hope you’ll forgive this brief diversion from my ongoing attempt to distinguish web developers from web designers, but it’s late, I’ve had a couple beers and I’ve been tinkering a bit with some code. Regularly-scheduled programming will return shortly.
So. The microformats people and the accessibility people are at war with each other, or so it seems (remember to read that article with tongue firmly in cheek). The cause of this tempest in a teapot is a simple enough question: how do you embed both ...
Entry published June 26, 2008
In a thorough and well-thought-out article published on Tuesday, Andy Rutledge listed what he considers to be the essential skills and knowledge for a web designer; this list is notable not only for what it includes — namely, a masterful distillation of just what it is that a web designer should be able to do — but also for what it explicitly excludes:
Note also that nowhere in this list do the words “Photoshop,” “Illustrator,” “Dreamweaver,” or “Fireworks” appear. As I and others have observed plenty of times before, tools do not ...
Any lawful device: 40 years after the Carterfone decision — Link published June 26, 2008 (read comments)
Alice’s NNTP Server — Link published June 25, 2008 (read comments)
The basics of creating a tumblelog with Django — Link published June 24, 2008 (read comments)
jiffy-web — Link published June 23, 2008 (read comments)
Entry published June 23, 2008
Ever since last September when I moved this site off the shared-hosting account which had been handling it from its initial launch, I’ve been using separate services to handle static files — “media” in common Django parlance — instead of using the same web server instance, or a separate instance running on the same physical server as the rest of the site. Specifically, I’m using Amazon S3.
When I first explained this a few months ago, I got a bit of pushback and a few questions, both in comments and ...
ssh-keygen, the web-based SSH Key Generator — Link published June 23, 2008 (read comments)
Entry published June 21, 2008
The following are gleaned from the comments to my recent explanation of why I chose to use HTML 4.01 Strict for my redesign, rather than a flavor of XHTML, an explanation in which I mostly boiled the debate — for my needs, here on this site — down to “XHTML doesn’t offer me any compelling advantage, and it’s more complex to do right than most people know/admit”.
Advance warning: yes, this is snarky and is going to make fun of uninformed comments. Yes, I do think it’s ...
Entry published June 21, 2008
One of the most active threads on reddit’s programming section right now discusses things people look for when reviewing someone else’s code; the article being discussed treats this as a great interview question and points to things like algorithm choices and object-oriented design as good responses. While these are important considerations, I’ve found I tend to make snap judgments long before I get to that level of analysis, and they’re almost always based on one key factor: documentation.
Of course, I have the luxury of mostly ...
Django and Relativity — Link published June 20, 2008 (read comments)
Are you ready to celebrate? — Link published June 19, 2008 (read comments)
The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond — Link published June 18, 2008 (read comments)
Deletionist Morons — Link published June 15, 2008 (read comments)
E-Media Tidbits — Link published June 15, 2008 (read comments)