When you first launch your IE6 machine to debug and it’s nearly perfect.

It’s the first time it happens to me and god was I happy. I guess I just had a glimpse of the day IE will be better.

Let me say first off, that I’m am more than happy with the response I had for my pretty comments jQuery plugin. More than 1500 people visited my blog last month and more are coming just for that bit of code. Really, I am impressed, never tought I’d get such response.

I have been on vacation for 2 weeks, I’ll be back at work and in fully working shape next week. That means I should get more active. I’m currently working on another jQuery plugin that takes the standard browser drop downs (we all know they can’t really be styled with css) and give you the ability to customize them. The script is started, pretty advanced, I only have some issues with accessibility and needs to test it some more to make sure it doesn’t break anything in the forms when you use it. The name? Pretty dropdown You can see I am very inspired
Thanks again for all the positive feedback!

Blogged with Flock

It has been a little while now since I started thinking about where I was a year ago and where I am now in term of productivity. I made various improvements and think I can still improve.

Over the next weeks, I’ll try to post my various tricks and tips as of how you can boost your productivity in making good use of the slice tool, how to indent your CSS properly, how to optimize you class names in your CSS and more if they come to my mind. You are all welcome to share your own productivity tips, always help to work a bit faster and more efficiently!

I’ll even start with the Tip #1!

Make good use of your development software. I personally use textmate, this program is full of keyboard shortcuts, snippets, macros to help you boost your productivity. As every software if you only knows it surface, you won’t be able to fully use the built-in functions. I won’t go into much details as of how you can make textmate work better for you, simply because there are already a bunch of useful tutorials just for it. But one thing for sure, the more I learn about that software, the more I love it and the faster I get.

Tip #1 done! Number 2 will come, how to properly indent your CSS.

Blogged with Flock

You heard right, internet explorer will be updated to remove the “functionality” where you needed to click on activeX object before being able to use them.

If you don’t recall, in April 2006, we made a change to how Internet Explorer handled embedded controls used on some webpages. Some sites required users to “click to activate” before they could interact with the control. Microsoft has now licensed the technologies from Eolas Technologies inc, removing the “click to activate” requirement in Internet Explorer.

Even if it was easy to work around it. It is still cool for the end user, because not all the sites had the fix applied.

To bad this update fixes only a minor issue…and not the major issue the browser is.

Blogged with Flock

I’ve been in some situations where I need to support a company doing the back end on some templates I produced. The problem is that those companies often have little knowledge of web standards, XHTML/CSS and such, and my templates….well they’re standard based.

Got me to think about how recognized is a web integrator in the industry. Most companies don’t seem to recognize this as a full time job, some of them sees it as a programmer job, others sees it as a designer job. In a company where your specialty is developing back end you sure don’t care much about the front end. But it IS important. The whole user experience depends on how the information is presented to the user, how the website reacts and how the site “feels”.

What’s the point of having a whole flow where you define wire frames, use cases, technical specs of a website and provide HTML templates on which all you have to do is plug your code when in the end it’s in big part dumped cause of “technical difficulties”. Having this knowledge in house can save you tons of work, time and money. Not only that, but the overall product will probably be a whole lot better.

Because you’re behind the scene, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t care about what’s happening up front!

Blogged with Flock

That’s it! Googled started testing digg style voting for their search engine result.

For those who don’t know what digg style voting is:

News stories and websites are submitted by users, and then promoted to the front page through a user-based ranking system. This differs from the hierarchical editorial system that many other news sites employ.

So basically, users submit news or links, people vote on it, then the stories with the most vote get featured on the homepage. This way the “most interesting” stories are the one your are the most likely to see.

Now how good is it for google, well since right it’ll be based by user for now (it’ll only take your vote into consideration) it should improve your search results greatly. Lets say a site as more pertinent result for you and you vote it on several occasion, this site is them much more likely to come up on top on any of your searches.

Now, I guess the way we develop site will have to evolve a bit, because now not only the content will be of great importance, but the whole experience will be since you want users to rank you higher in google.

Interesting subject to follow!

The Email Standards Project is an organization that works with the various email clients developer to improve web standards support and accessibility in email.

If you ever had to develop an HTML template, you know how hard it is for it to render properly in all the webmails and desktop based email clients. The main problem is that most of those clients don’t support HTML all at the same extent, some are pretty good at it, others plainly suck. The website provide a very useful documentation on which client support what.

The project is still very young but we’ll wait to see the mail clients developer response on this project, lets hope they also want to make our life easier

The new design!

Ok…i’ll be honest, it’s a template. I might eventually move to my own design, but I didn’t have much time to spend on personal things lately.So my blog design is the last of my worries.

I’ll try to post often enough, one quick note. I’m working on a personal projet right now involving jQuery and pixel perfection

Stay tuned!