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All journal entries tagged with ‘#javascript’

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Read-only web apps

Your app should work in a read-only mode without JavaScript. 

Per usual, Jeremy distills things down to simple and unobjectionable points. So many of the arguments against progressive enhancement seem to follow the the thinking from when we collectively believed that sites should look the exact same in every browser.

Progressive enhancement isn’t either/or. It’s a helpful spectrum where the more functionality that can be accessible without JavaScript the better, but just because it may not be pragmatic to have everything accessible without JavaScript all the time, there’s plenty of ways to ensure information can still be accessible without massive engineering efforts.

Thinking Smaller and Locally

This is a personal one, so bear with me. I’m sharing mainly because I can’t imagine giving myself this kind of space ten years ago. So I’m hoping that painting the picture could help other folks who may be in a similar space. Losing a limb kind of…

Prioritizing Visual Stability on the Web

With any web site or application, speed is important, but it doesn’t live in a vacuum. If you get someone the content sooner, but it’s moving around so much that they can’t read it or interact with it, is it really worth getting it to them a little faster?

Visitors, Developers, or Machines

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…

Swimming Upstream Less

When you spend eight straight years designing, developing, and supporting a product by yourself, you gain perspective. You truly feel the consequences of your decisions as they ripple through the years. When you work on a team and are able to…

The Web We've Made

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…

Quitting Analytics

Some time ago, I removed all the tracking from my personal site, and I haven’t missed it. What started as a whimsical idea that was part performance-based, part referrer spam overload, and part backlash against Google evolved into a realization that…

Openness and Longevity

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…

What to work on?

I face a dilemma, and I believe it’s a common one. Where should I spend my side project time? We all have ideas and passions. We all want financial stability and/or independence. But we have limited free time for side projects. So how do you decide…

The Journey of Selling Sifter

After I had been working on Sifter for about six years, I had a minor ankle surgery that unfortunately led to many more surgeries. While I was pleasantly surprised how well recurring-revenue software supported me through the ups and downs of surgeries…

A Seemingly Impossible Decision

In the back of my mind through all of my foot and ankle troubles, amputation was never off the table. Now, after almost a year and a half of ankle surgeries and physical therapy, we’re actively discussing it. It’s not a foregone conclusion, but it’s…

Acceptance

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…

What does it take?

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…

The Tracker Status Bar

Last time, I went into my vision of a simpler bug and issue tracking life-cycle. This time, I want to focus on one of the manifestations of a simpler process—the status bar. As I mentioned before, status and responsibility are the two most significant…

For the People by the People

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…

Could You? Should You?

One of my favorite quotes based on the proliferation of superfluous AJAX and DOM Scripting is simple, but oh so appropriate. It’s from the original Jurassic Park way back in 1993. …your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they…

Trick Your TextMate: Snippets

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…

Accessiblity for the Masses

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…

The Time is Now for Front-End Architects

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…

Design for Design's Sake

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,…