Archive for the ‘Tools, Tips and Tricks’ Category
Friday, February 18th, 2011
Implementing forms in 2011 is still a challenge, even with a framework like Symfony helping you along. sfForm is great for defining widgets and validators but it sucks at outputting practical markup.
Practical Markup
For me, the ideal markup for a form field looks like:
This gives me a lot of flexiblity for styling. Unfortunately I was never able to find a way to acheive this using formatters, and so I continued on writing very verbose forms. Luckily I grew weary of this and decided to see if I could create a helper to ease the output of forms. The following is what I cam up with: Read more...
Tags: forms, symfony
Posted in Tools, Tips and Tricks, Web Development | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 1st, 2010
As part of my work here at Web Shop I help create and manage a number of Facebook Pages for businesses looking to connect with their clients and fans. Facebook pages offer countless ways to customize your presence on Facebook through countless third party applications such as the FBML (Facebook Markup Language) application and also native applications such as the photos and videos applications. Functionality such as sharing, viewing and tagging photos on Facebook has become so easy, that I for one take it for granted, until today.
Read more...
Posted in Online Marketing, Social Media, Tools, Tips and Tricks | 10 Comments »
Friday, October 8th, 2010
Several of my colleagues at the Web Shop have recently independently stumbled upon a couple of articles that talk about an innovative concept: Designing websites right in the web browser. The topic managed to find its way into several conversations here over the last little while, and I thought I would keep the conversation going, and bring it online to potentially include a larger number of people in the conversation. Read more...
Posted in Tools, Tips and Tricks, Web Design, Web Development | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, September 29th, 2010
Not too long ago, I was finally provided access to ‘New Twitter’, a big step forward in functionality, layout, and organization. I suppose with such a large majority of Twitter users accessing Twitter via 3rd party programs, some inspiration for a new Twitter may stem from the desire to pull users back to the companies native web application interface. Either way, today we’re going to look at the impact that ‘New Twitter’ has on your Twitter wallpaper. Read more...
Tags: Background, Branding, Chris Savoie, design, Interface, New Twitter, Twitter, Wallpaper
Posted in Online Marketing, Tools, Tips and Tricks, Web Design | 15 Comments »
Friday, September 24th, 2010
I thought I’d give an update on how the world is doing with ditching Internet Explorer 6. Between August 2009 and August 2010, IE6 usage has dropped from nearly 18% down to 8%. This is great news! IE6 usage has finally dropped lower than the “other” category of browsers. For more numbers, see here: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-monthly-200908-201008
There’s a few reasons why we’ll see a very rapid decline in IE6 usage this year.
1) IE6 is old. The last time IE6 came included with an operating system was with Windows XP SP2, which was superceded by SP3 which included IE7 and automatic updates turned on by default on April 21, 2008. So if you’ve bought a computer after that, you likely got IE7 installed by default. Read more...
Posted in Tools, Tips and Tricks | No Comments »
Friday, September 17th, 2010
GNU/Linux Distros Are Amazing
On October 20th, which also happens to be my birthday, Canonical made the first release of the Ubuntu distribution– Ubuntu 4.10 – Warty Warthog. A friend who I took some courses with at the University of Winnipeg helped me install it on my computer, and I’ve been using it since, occasionally trying out Debian, but not finding it to offer anything more than Ubuntu to me. For the past 6 years, I’ve been using the GNU/Linux operating system, and it’s been an amazing ride. Being able to use any and all of the programming languages and servers I came across, right on my PC, has had a tremendous impact on my professional development as a software developer. Read more...
Posted in Tools, Tips and Tricks, Web Development | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010
We learn to treat the Google Docs software different than other software, when we don’t wait years for the next improvements to our applications. If you haven’t used a Google Docs application recently, you should find the interfaces much improved. I recently discovered how far the Google Docs presentations application has come — Ironically, Google Docs apps don’t seem to be named separately. Like the aspiration of other Google Docs applications, Google Presentations are Microsoft PowerPoint presentations on an attractive diet. Read more...
Posted in Business, Sales and Marketing, Tools, Tips and Tricks | 1 Comment »
Thursday, August 5th, 2010
As your website grows and expands its content and user base outside the initial scope for the project, it often becomes necessary to consider a re-design or re-organization in order to keep navigation intuitive and get the most from your content, preventing it from getting lost in a hard-to-navigate-to location. Usually a content re-design starts with your sitemap and grows from there, but when you have too many pages sometimes it’s quite difficult to simply re-organize them in your head or even on paper. The Card-Sort method is a great way to fluidly alter sitemap organization on paper to achieve the most intuitive organization for your users when re-designing. It all starts with a stack of index cards, and a big black marker. Read more...
Tags: Canada's Web Shop, Card, Card-Sort, Chris, Chris Savoie, design, Organization, Re-Design, Re-Organization, Savoie, Sitemap, Sort, TheWebShop, Tips, Tricks
Posted in Tools, Tips and Tricks, Web Design, Web Development | No Comments »
Friday, June 11th, 2010
Google Tasks has been available inside Gmail for many months now. But what if you wanted to only load that functionality? More so, you want it loaded on your Firefox sidebar? How do you do it? Well it’s easy. Here’s how:
1) Login to your Google Account (assuming you have a Gmail account)
2) Go here https://mail.google.com/tasks/ig?pli=1
3) Drag that google.com favicon (green check mark icon) to your bookmarks menu bar
4) Once you have that right there, right-click on it and select “Properties”
Read more...
Posted in Tools, Tips and Tricks | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 9th, 2010
Before the invention of movable type and printing, simple grids based on optimal proportions had been used to arrange handwritten text on pages. One such system, known as the “Villiards Diagram,” was in use at least since medieval times. Interior designers arrange rooms based on a grid system, and city planners work on a grid too. It’s a wonder what took web designers and developers so long to show interest in a system that has been essential to the printed word since the ‘30s. Read more...
Tags: 960, design, grid, Illustrator, mockup, PhotoShop, tools, Web, winnipeg
Posted in Tools, Tips and Tricks, Web Design | No Comments »
