#html

I keep my feet squarely planted in two worlds when it comes to development. One of those is all things front-end, and the other is Ruby (and Rails). With Ruby/Rails, they’re frequently maligned as a not-serious programming language/framework pair…

The internet is an awesome thing, but we’re ruining it. We probably can’t get enough people to stop shipping bloated and broken software, turn off their obtrusive newsletter sign up modals, or stop writing fake reviews for free products, but maybe the…

When it comes to sharing ideas that involve visual elements, source code, and unifying concepts that span disciplines, the friction to include different types of media and information makes technical writing rather tedious, and streamlining that process a bit has helped make it more enjoyable to write.

In our incessant rush to move quickly, everything is ephemeral. Technology moves so quickly that today’s strong favorite is outdated in a matter of years. We slurp up notifications and are fascinated by the next thing before we even fully understand the…

Prior to Sifter, I was a specialist. I needed to keep up with two or three high-level topics in order to stay current and not be left behind. I had a few RSS subscriptions and kept up with a few topics on Twitter. It wasn’t easy, but wasn’t impossible…

I’m in love with this article about meetups to repair broken goods. Working on Sifter and pouring myself into it has bred a fascination with tools, manual labor, and vintage goods. Things used to be built for longevity. Design was simpler and more…

The full stack for a web application can be rather overwhelming, but it’s not quite as bad as you might think. If you look at this list knowing only a small portion of the items, it can be incredibly intimidating. Really, though, it’s an incremental…

One of my favorite topics is the influence of business decisions on interface design. It’s an unfortunate truth that the underlying business structure and decisions will invariably affect the interface. It’s important to recognize this fact and work to…

Since finding so much inspiration from Edward Tufte’s books, I’ve made a point to branch out and read books that aren’t so innately tied to web development. Most recently, is The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander, a great book about…

Even the longest journeys begin with a single step. The redesign of this site is just that—one step. It isn’t meant to be revolutionary or flashy. Instead, it’s meant to enable and focus on the creation of better content.

Use cases, functional specs, interface specs, site maps, you name it. I have yet to come across any of these documents that are usable. I’m as guilty of this as the next person, but if our job as information architects, interaction designers, or…

It’s often difficult to express my ideas on business practices, but this article from January 2006 about The Man Who Said No to Wal-Mart really captures some of the ideas I firmly believe in and support. it’s relatively easy for a business to canibalize…

it’s time for the second installment of Trick Your TextMate. We’re going to explore snippets and learn how you can create your own custom keyboard shortcuts and tab triggers to cut down on those superfluous keystrokes. One of the features of TextMate…

I was recently reminded while working on our panel for SXSW that accessibility isn’t just about screen readers, markup guidelines, or alt tags. Unfortunately, that’s about as far as most of us ever get with accessibility. It’s good that most of us are…

While back-end technology has become more and more abstracted and powerful with frameworks like .Net, Rails, and their Java counterparts, the possibilities with front-end technology have grown increasingly complex. The web needs more front-end…

Things are busy, but it’s finally time to announce something that has been occupying much of my free time for the past week or so. A long time in the making and the brain child of Eris, Refresh Dallas is finally having our first real meeting. The First…

In business, design should enhance and support web site goals rather than be the goal. Design involves so much more than just pretty visuals, and visual design is not the single most important aspect of web development. The same goes for usability,…

I offered up a subset of my Visio wireframe stencils over at YourTotalSite in the recent past, and there seemed to be some pretty good interest in seeing more. While I don’t have any wireframe examples to show the world just yet, I can do the next best…

After writing about the blending of design and programming the other day, it really got me thinking. I really think web design, and almost everything in the world is just one big balancing act. In politics, for every extreme conservative, there’s…