Author Archives: Chris

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Setting up the Perfect Web Development Environment, Part 1

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Inspired by Elliot Jay Stocks’ recent posts on his iMac plus Air setup, I thought I’d document how to set up a seamless development environment between desktop and laptop. If you intend to set up a similar environment, you’ll need to perform these steps identically on both machines. Part 2 of this series will deal…

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Adaptive Content (with a dash of jQuery)

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Aral Balkan posted the following snippet on Twitter just now: <span>u</span><span class=”hideIf320″>ser e</span><span class=”capIf320″>x</span><span class=”hideIf320″>perience</span> followed by the explanation: … adaptive copy 🙂 (Actual names shortened for the tweet.) Writes “user experience” in widescreen, UX on smaller screen 🙂 It’s an interesting idea, but I think it clutters up the markup with too many non-semantic…

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Your Client Does Not Know More than You

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I read an article on Six Revisions today on the subject of a designer’s perceived arrogance versus the client’s better knowledge of their business. It could have been a good article; it had some very valid points, but it was completely spoiled by setting up the most egregious straw man it’s ever been my misfortune…

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April Fool’s Day, 2011: best of the web

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A collection of some of the best April Fool’s Day pranks I’ve seen this year. Google: Googling “Helvetica” displays everything in Comic Sans Gmail: Gmail Motion beta Fonts.com: Comic Sans Pro Adblock: Adblock Freedom CX Partners: 3D Wireframes Seth Godin: Whitespace Links YouTube: YouTube 1911 Centenary (with sepia-toned video filter) Virgin: Richard Branson buys Pluto,…

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On Responsive Design, Grids and the Golden Canon of Web Page Construction

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Before I start, let’s get some stuff out of the way: I’m no Khoi Vinh. Neither am I an Ethan Marcotte or a Jeremy Keith. I’m not a published writer on the subject of grid theory, or a speaker on the conference circuit. However, this is the Internet, where everybody has an opinion – and…

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Skype Annoyances

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Ok Skype, I finally caved in and installed your poxy app. Thing is though, you also allow calls to non-Skype numbers so I’d really appreciate it if you allowed it to be set as the default application to open href=”tel:” links. Y’know, RFC 3966? Because believe it or not, some people still use those old-fashioned…

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Web Fonts, Anti-Aliasing and @font-face

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@font-face is the new darling of Web designers. With it, we can break out of the traditional web-safe font stacks and explore the full range of typography available to us in print. Of course, @font-face isn’t the first technique available to us, we’ve progressed through a number of others over the past few years so…

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Localhost slowdown: cracking poor performance in TortoiseSVN and Zend Server

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Continuing from my previous post on troubleshooting SVN setup on Windows, I’ve recently encountered (and solved) quite a serious performance hit that’s been affecting my main development machine. Since I spend a lot of time on the move, I do most of my development on my laptop, a Dell Latitude D430. It’s a fantastic little…

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