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User Experience, or UX, has become a real buzzword amongst internet professionals in the last few years, with every digital agency seeming to have added it to their list of available services, alongside the usual suspects like SEO, E-marketing and design. Everyone’s offering UX but what’s less clear is what this actually means.
Archive for the ‘Technical’ Category
Everyone’s talking about UX
06.09.2010 By: alanofford">alanofford Under: Creative, Technical Comments: none
PHP pages on 1&1 without the file extension (friendly URLs)
28.06.2010 By: ronansprake">ronansprake Under: Technical Comments: 1
I recently stumbled across an odd problem with 1&1′s mod_rewrite, while enabling friendly URLs for PHP files. Searching for solutions made it apparent this is a very common problem specifically with this host’s packages.
Google Font Directory: An alternative to Typekit
21.05.2010 By: ronansprake">ronansprake Under: Industry News, Technical Comments: 1
During Google I/O 2010, Google have made some very cool announcements, including WebM (a license-free codec for audio and video) and a new hosted Font API.
New tool: regular expressions generator
08.04.2010 By: ronansprake">ronansprake Under: Technical, Tools Comments: none
Regular expressions are brilliantly powerful but tend to cause a dull pain between the ears. We can’t offer you a free head massage, so here’s the next best thing: a really handy tool for generating regular expressions, in a load of different languages. Check it out:
IE8: background image jump on click of input type=”submit”
07.04.2010 By: ronansprake">ronansprake Under: Technical Comments: none
I do a lot of styled submit buttons. An awful lot. In fact, I tend to earmark an entire day on any sizeable project for sorting out the button styles. I’m not talking about a bit of padding and border colour, but full-blown background image with rollover (and sometimes hover) styles, for maybe one hundred different submit and anchor elements across a site.
Using background images for anchor elements is bulletproof across all browsers, the same used to be true for submit inputs, before IE8 came along.
Resources for optimising page load speed
01.04.2010 By: ronansprake">ronansprake Under: Technical, Tools Comments: none
As the Yahoo! performance team have been saying for some time, when looking to improve loading times on your website, you should “optimize front-end performance first, that’s where 80% or more of the end-user response time is spent”. Poor hosting and slow back-end content management systems aside, the front-end is where you can make some quick wins and see real improvements in the user experience.
IE9: Microsoft continues to improve Internet Explorer
30.03.2010 By: ronansprake">ronansprake Under: Technical Comments: 1
New browser versions are hotly anticipated in the client-side region of the Soak studio.
Google and the blocking of adverts in Chrome
13.01.2010 By: ronansprake">ronansprake Under: Technical Comments: 1
When the Chrome extensions gallery opened in December last year, I had wondered if ad-blocking extensions would surface. Given that Google currently derives nearly all its revenue from adverts, it would appear to make no sense for them to allow their own adverts to be blocked by Chrome.
Learning HTML5: Getting started
08.01.2010 By: ronansprake">ronansprake Under: Technical Comments: 1
The HTML5 working group doesn’t do PR. This became evident last year in the negative blog posts after Ian Hickson (lead editor) set 2022 as the target date for a final proposed recommendation. Unfortunately, this was misenterpreted as the date HTML5 would be ready for use, which isn’t true at all. Web specifications have a notoriously slow moving approval process, where drafts are proposed and discussed over many years. However, as CSS2.1 has shown, the technology can be used well before final approval is reached.
Styling HTML5 elements in IE
23.12.2009 By: ronansprake">ronansprake Under: Technical Comments: none
A quick tip on how to enable HTML5 elements such as <section> and <header> in Internet Explorer. I’m afraid it does require Javascript:
document.createElement("section")
