I gave a presentation recently at Web414 that promoted the idea that frameworks were the future of web development. The presentation didn’t go well (It started its slide downhill when I realized too late there would be no way to show my slides. I switched to a more interactive, discussion-oriented presentation, which of course I hadn’t properly prepared for, which in turn only contributed to a further slide.) Still, it served to clarify a little more my thinking on the subject. (Half the reason to make presentations at your local user’s group is to help you view a subject from a different perspective; think of them as “code reviews for your mind.”)
The fundamental point I was making, that the future of web development lies with web application frameworks and not in traditional CMS’s, relies on two rather finely drawn (I cheerfully admit) lines.
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Lee Brimelow made this wonderful post ridiculing the iPad’s lack of flash. Only one problem with it.
It’s a lie.
And that’s a problem. Apparently, he made those wonderful claims of his without ever once checking the reality of them. Most of those sites that supposedly don’t show anything, actually do. As this set of screen captures shows.
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I’ve been dipping my toes into the Radiant CMS lately (a side-effect of my love affair with Ruby on Rails) and have run into several interesting moments. On the assumption I’m not alone in that, I thought I’d share some of my favorite recipes for deploying a Radiant app to an Apache-Phusion Passenger combination.
As I look at my deploy.rb file I’m reminded of the old Tom Lehrer ditty, “Lobachevsky”:
I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky.
In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics:
Plagiarize!
Plagiarize,
Let no one else’s work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don’t shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize -
Only be sure always to call it please ‘research’.
So here is the result of my ‘research’ (where I remember where I got the code from, I will also quote the source; where I don’t remember, I apologize in advance):
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One of the first things our layout will have to deal with is window size. Designs too wide for the window frustrate users as they scroll left and right, but designs too narrow can also be frustrating, as they string boxes out vertically, when they would fit on screen. What to do, what to do?
Some designer’s deal with this by choosing to submit to the lesser evil. The frustration of having to scroll horizontally is higher than the frustration of having to scroll vertically, so they fix the width of their design. They choose a width that will fit within the vast majority (75-80%) of their visitors’ windows. What width they choose depends upon their intended audience: if they make it too narrow, the frustration of those with wider windows grows, and if they make it too wide, the number frustrated horizontal scrollers improves.
There’s no perfect number, so they try to balance them as best they can. So, how would someone practicing Reactive Layout approach this problem?
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Media Week writes about a new trend in online ads. The first question that occurs to me is: why?
The complaint is that people aren’t seeing the ads on web pages, so the proposed solution is “don’t let them see the web page until after they see the ad.” My first reaction: Your only synapse just died of loneliness, didn’t it?
Why should you expect web ads to be different from print ads? Few if any of us consciously look at print ads, either.
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