THE PENDING DRAFT

When your avatar takes on a life of its own

March 2, 2015

Looks like some people won’t stop at nothing to make a few bucks. Chelsea Otakan experienced it first hand when her portrait showed up on different websites, complete with testimonials she never wrote and sometimes even a completely made up biography.

The search turned up 203 results and none of the results on the first page were actually me. There were dozens of fake testimonials bearing my likeness

Maybe you should take that next testimonial you read with a grain of salt.

Loved that last sentence.

Perhaps if you can’t get your customers to say good things you can put on your website, you need to make a better product.

My avatar took on a life of its own

Datedropper

February 21, 2015

Last week this jQuery Plugin popped up a lot on different channels. First: Yes, it looks pretty! But quick and easy? Not really.

I could imagine something like this could work for simple select fields, where you have just a handful of options to choose from. Maybe for the order quantity in a checkout process or something like that. But for a date-picker it doesn’t cut it.

Datedropper jQuery Plugin

claudiorimann.com

February 17, 2015

claudiorimann-com

My portfolio right now gives me kind of an embarrassing feeling every time i look at it. Not because of the work that is actually in there, but the page itself. It was built around three years ago, and as you know three years is a lot of time in our area. I learned a ton in the meantime and i would do so many things different today. Maybe thats a good sign, “if you’re not embarrassed by your past work, you stopped learning” or so they say, right?

I’m hard at work to completely rebuild the site from scratch, but until that is finished i wanted to have some place to link to from various projects and i also wanted to have something in english. So, a couple of days ago i sat down and quickly coded something up which is online now. Oh and yes, the idea is completely stolen from florianziegler.de.

claudiorimann.com

Lazy Load XT

February 16, 2015

If you work with a lot of images, performance issues can quickly add up and become pretty complicated to tackle. Lazy Loading is one popular technique how we can approach this and with Lazy Load XT there seems to be a new solution which also supports things like srcset, horizontal scrolling or video elements.

Images make up over 60% of an average page’s size, according to HTTP Archive. Images on a web page would be rendered once they are available. Without lazy loading, this could lead to a lot of data traffic that is not immediately necessary (such as images outside of the viewport) and longer waiting times.

Just recently i implemented jQuery Lazy Loading on a portfolio page and we were able to bring the pagesize down to some kilobytes (until first render) from what was around 4MB and even over 16MB on retina screens. The site was built some years ago, so srcset or <picture> elements weren’t an option and we used retina.js which was quite fast, but loads the small version and then the retina version on top. Not ideal, i know.

So, lazy loading was a great help in reducing all that, but when implementing it i struggled not only with some possible negative SEO implications (which i’m still trying to fully understand) but also it was very hard to combine retina.js with the jQuery Lazy Loading.

Lazy Load XT is a new script which uses jQuery, Zepto.js or DomTastic to deliver lazy loading functionality and it includes srcset support as well as many other of the things i missed. Also, i like the modular way it is built which let’s you choose which plugins or extensions you need and thus let you save some more kb’s from your bottom line.

Redefining Lazy Loading With Lazy Load XT

Pragmatic Redesign for GitLab

February 12, 2015

I use git and GitLab for pretty much everything i’m working on, from the smallest experiments to large client projects, everything gets pushed to a remote repository on our server. The last update for GitLab brought some small UI changes which i really liked. They’ve done some great work with this and it’s one of those improvements where you look at it and recognize that something has changed, but couldn’t tell what it is. Like when someone you know has slightly changed their haircut and you notice that she/he looks a bit different, a bit better, but you don’t see what exactly has changed. I like those kinds of iterative, small redesigns. And i fully agree with their statement about the importance of having a clear plan and a set of goals before you start redesigning anything.

Changes to the interface are always stressful. So you shouldn’t even start to redesign without a list of issues you intent to solve. This way, your users get compensated for the changes with improved usability.

Well done GitLab!

Pragmatic Redesign for GitLab

Measuring Responsive Breakpoint Usage

February 10, 2015

Designing websites for a modern web means dealing with a whole lot of different setups, devices and resolutions and the best way to handle this is to build things as device agnostic as possible when planning our breakpoints. Wouldn’t it be nice, if tools like Google Analytics would let us track not only devices, but also the usage of our actual breakpoints? Well, turns out that’s possible with a clever use of matchMedia(), as Philip Walton from Google explains in his article.

If your site is built on device-less principles, but its usage is measured against device-only metrics, you’re going to get a mismatch—potentially a big one.

I’m looking forward to implement and play around with this somewhere.

Measuring Your Site’s Responsive Breakpoint Usage

Paul Graham on “How Not to Die” as a startup

February 9, 2015

I really enjoyed reading this post by Paul Graham about “How Not to Die” as a startup. It’s the transcript of a talk he gave to a group of founders at a Y Combinators dinner in 2007 and he talked about all kinds of things startups are going through. And even though he described it as a “grim” talk himself, i found it to be more of a motivational piece than anything else.

I’m pretty sure he’s right when he says that a big portion of success is basically just “don’t give up”. Paired maybe with a bit of luck and a whole lot of flexibility and iteration. An idea alone almost never directly became a big hit without any form of transformation and the startups that made it are almost never the one’s that had the best and most original idea to begin with, but the one’s that tried harder and kept iterating instead of giving up.

Let me mention some things not to do. The number one thing not to do is other things. If you find yourself saying a sentence that ends with “but we’re going to keep working on the startup,” you are in big trouble. Bob’s going to grad school, but we’re going to keep working on the startup. We’re moving back to Minnesota, but we’re going to keep working on the startup. We’re taking on some consulting projects, but we’re going to keep working on the startup. You may as well just translate these to “we’re giving up on the startup, but we’re not willing to admit that to ourselves,” because that’s what it means most of the time. A startup is so hard that working on it can’t be preceded by “but.”

And also this next quote resonated with me and resembled some of the things i meant when i wrote about our goal to solving almost no one’s problem.

I like Paul Buchheit’s suggestion of trying to make something that at least someone really loves. As long as you’ve made something that a few users are ecstatic about, you’re on the right track. […]

So when you release something and it seems like no one cares, look more closely. Are there zero users who really love you, or is there at least some little group that does? It’s quite possible there will be zero. In that case, tweak your product and try again. Every one of you is working on a space that contains at least one winning permutation somewhere in it. If you just keep trying, you’ll find it.

In that sense: Let’s keep on trying, and have a good week!

Paul Graham – How Not to Die

IE8 Linter

February 7, 2015

A little tool to lint websites for IE8 compatibility, with warnings for possible pitfalls and suggested fixes.

I hope i will never have to support IE8 again. But if, this could come in handy.

GitHub – ie8linter

Crowdsourced Code Snippet Libraries

February 6, 2015

Pippin Williamson uses a GitHub repository as an open code snippets library which features all kinds of ways to customize the default behavior of Easy Digital Downloads. I really like that idea and think it’s well worth the effort. We should probably do something similar for picu as soon as it’s available, too.

– It’s a resource for the support team.
– It’s a source of examples for people wanting to customize behavior.
– It provides live testing (similar to add-on plugins) for potential features to add to core.

How a Crowdsourced Code Snippet Library Can Boost Your Open Source Project