February 28th, 2008
A stunning parallax effect, very nicely explained in a tutorial. How to recreate Silverback’s Parallax
Continue reading “Quick Link: How to recreate Silverback’s Parallax”. Posted in
Quick Links, XHTML & CSS with 4 comments 
November 01st, 2007
You ever inherited a site done by someone else, and looked and the site and thought “what the hell where they smoking when they did that, and who gave it to the client making it seem like a good idea”? C’mon you web-snobs, I know you have. We’ve all done it. Heck, I’ve done it recently.
Well, I’m going to stop making any judgments about the quality of other people’s work unless I know the circumstances around how it got developed. A day of reflecting on my own work has made me rethink things. Yesterday I was working on a project, plugging away and I thought “hey, I’ve solved this problem before, let me go see what I did”. So I pull out some old code, and next thing I know, I’m looking over some work I did some time ago. I wasn’t super impressed. I found a series of nested if statements at one point, when really it could have been written in one line. Is that the end of the world? No, but it shows inelegance, and a lack of careful planning. If this was someone elses work I would have thought “phfft, they’re lazy”. Anyhow, I was disappointed, so I thought I’d fix it up and upload it for my (former) client....
And then it all came flooding back.
So as you can see… in a lot of the cases the slightly less elegant code was a result of a changing landscape. I don’t think I could possibly build to quality, when the idea of “quality” is a moving target. In that case, a nested if just worked for me. When you’re bound by the triple constraints of cost, quality and speed, then something has to bend. If the client isn’t willing to sacrifice cost or speed, then quality is going to suffer.
So I’m no longer going to look at
$some_dudes_name = 'some name';
echo "The name of that guy was " . $some_dudes_name;
and think “why did they even bother”? Maybe the developer was dumb (that’s always a possibility), or maybe that variable used to hold other information, or maybe they were directed that way, or maybe the dev inherited other code that the client wasn’t willing to let them alter it. Who knows?
Until I know the history and politics around why something was coded the way it was coded… I’m reserving judgment on anyone else’s work.
Oh yeah, and that inelegant client code I found? I never did fix it up.
Continue reading “Judging the work quality of other developers”. Posted in
Education, PHP, XHTML & CSS with 7 comments
October 11th, 2007
<tr><TD><FONT SIZE="5" style="color:red">I am so smrt</FONT></TD></tr>
I mean really… REALLY!?!?! C’mon!
Continue reading “Who lets these people near a computer?”. Posted in
XHTML & CSS with 24 comments
July 07th, 2007
Kevin Yank has an article posted on Sitepoint entitled ”Simply JavaScript: The Three Layers of the Web”. What I love about it, is that he does a masterful job of outlining the separation of content from presentation from behaviour. I was just talking about this the other day, how HTML, CSS and Javascript make up the 3 legged table of the web; each is required if you are trying to build something stable.
These days, everyone seems to understand separating presentation from markup, but I still see <a href="#" onclick="doSomething();"> all over the place. Hopefully, as more and more people keep repeating the message, separating behaviour, the same way we separate presentation, will work its way into our collective folk-knowledge.
If you are a beginning webmaster, spend some serious time reading about these separations - you’ll be a better webmaster for it.
Continue reading “Quick Link: Three Layers of the Web”. Posted in
Javascript, Quick Links, XHTML & CSS with no comments
April 05th, 2007
To know more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information.
Continue reading “What happened to the design?”. Posted in
Education, Noteworthy, XHTML & CSS with 2 comments
February 22nd, 2007
Inspired by Matthew Inman's "How to Make Square Corners with CSS", I hereby set out on a journey to reveal the one true technique to create coloured, non-gradient backgrounds for divs, paragraphs and other XHTML elements. After literally seconds of painful research, I'll show you how to do this technique yourself. Here's a sample of what you can expect to see.
Continue reading “How to Make Coloured, Non-Gradient Backgrounds in CSS”. Posted in
Noteworthy, XHTML & CSS with 4 comments
November 07th, 2006
Well, the time has come to properly do this site. Until now I've been using a Wordpress theme that I hacked together in an afternoon and named Kill All Humans…, but it never quite felt right. There were so many little things here and there, CSS inconsistencies, etc. So what I've decided to do is rebuild my site in Code Igniter, and chronicle the whole process in short (maybe 10 minute) videos.
The first step is re-building the XHTML to be like I want it to be. Below you’ll find the XHTML/CSS building blocks of the new derekallard.com.
Continue reading “Kill All Humans revised”. Posted in
Noteworthy, XHTML & CSS with 4 comments
July 28th, 2006
Staying up to date in the field of web-design is a really tough job. One of the best ways to stay on top of the game is to read… a lot. Here are some of the sites I make frequent visits to:
Continue reading “Daily Reading List”. Posted in
Noteworthy, Personal, XHTML & CSS with no comments
