Infinite Web Design

Brad and I have been working together for a while now running Infinite Web Design and we’ve learned a few things about how to and how not to run a small business. The life of an entrepreneur is not for everyone. Hopefully a few of the following tips will help out those of you who are getting started or considering running your own business.
Continue reading Small Business Tips

I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the years studying, debating, and working to understand the creation, distribution, and use of information. I strongly believe in the freedom of information. Freedom of speech, thought, and conscience are not just nifty ideas they are the foundations of a just society and a happy life. Information and knowledge yearn to be free. Ideas have a need to grow and spread or wither and die based on their validity and usefulness.
Continue reading Freedom isn’t always fun

I was at The Bang! on Saturday and my friend Tom was talking about how some of the music just wasn’t danceable. He made one of the more profound comments I’ve heard in a while. The problem, he said, is that “DJs don’t dance”. Simple and true. DJs often play music that is hard to dance to. You’ve seen it when you’re out at a club and a new song comes on. Suddenly the dance floor clears out. A few people try to hang in there but the beat is so bad that their gyrations start to look more and more like a seizure. The song may be a great one. It may be the song everyone sings along with on the road trip. It may be awesome at the start of the Detroit Pistons game. However, the song just doesn’t work when you try to dance to it. If the DJ had to dance to their own music this could be avoided. They’d quickly recognize that the song they were bobbing their head and singing along to failed to move their feet.

The same thing can happen when you don’t use the things you build as a designer. Try filling out the forms you built and you’ll realize that the instructions are not as clear as you thought. Try using the web app for a while before you expect someone else to. We’ve found that this is especially useful when looking at the backend of a site. Try administering the site yourself for a while. Use the form you built to add a lot of content. Do it for days on end. You’ll find what works and what doesn’t then. You’ll find out which steps could be automated with a little more effort or creativity when you have to do them. Just like the DJ who has to dance to his own music you’ll find out what really moves people and what doesn’t.
Continue reading DJs Don’t Dance

I needed a quick list of countries and time zones and I wanted to add it to my database so I could manipulate it easily for a new application we’re developing (details on that coming soon). I looked around but didn’t find what I wanted so after a bit of searching I took a few static select lists and copied them into Excel. I then imported the lists into my database using ColdFusion. In case they help anyone I’ve made the lists available here as CSV files.

Time Zones (.csv, 4 KB)

Countries (.csv, 4 KB)
Continue reading Time Zones and Countries

I spent some time recently trying to track down how to create a database and datasource in ColdFusion without going into the ColdFusion Adminstrator interface and doing in manually. I found plenty of articles and documentation on how this was done in ColdFusion 5 and notes that it had changed but nothing on how. Now that I’ve got it working I’d like to share how I did it in case anyone else is looking for help with this.

Continue reading Dynamic Datasources in ColdFusion MX 7

Let’s try a little word association…

Macromedia – pretty good software, responsive to customers, innovative web products, creative, good company, “gets” the web

Adobe – stiff corporate culture, used to be a good software company, used to be innovative, used to be creative, “gets” print but not the web, used to be…
Continue reading Macromedia and Adobe

Just a few links to sites that I’ve been enjoying lately. 24ways.org is a sort of blog advent calendar. It’s a collaborative effort by a number of talented designer / developers. There is a nice mix of topics and fresh content every day until Christmas. I’ve enjoyed the articles on Ajax and blockquotes. Check it out for yourself, there is a little something for everyone.

Lifehacker is a blog full of tidbits that are of interest to the modern web geek. It’s got a number of contributors that post on topics such as being more productive, new software tools, fun web sites, and more. New content is posted throughout the day Monday through Friday and they seem to take the weekends off. I’ve been reading it for a few months and picked up plenty of helpful ideas to help “hack my life”.

Forever Geek is part of the 9rules Network and keeps me up to date on lots of the latest gadgets and gizmos that come out as well as happenings in the tech world. It’s by geeks for geeks and it tends to be updated frequently so there’s always something new to read about.

(via Lifehacker)

TrayIt! is a Windows application that allows you to minimize an application to your system tray (removing it from your taskbar) and restore it later. The beauty of this is that it finally allows the really obsessive compulsive among us to reorder applications in the taskbar by minimizing them to the system tray and restoring them in the order you want. This allows you to keep applications in just the order you like them… joy of nitpicky joys. (Seriously, having them out of order drives me nuts). Windows really should have quick drag and drop reordering in the taskbar but this is a decent workaround.

Bobby van der Sluis has been making a great many inroads into the world of unobtrusive JavaScript. I recently adapted one of his scripts for use on a project and thought I’d share a couple of simple modifications that I found useful.
Continue reading Unobtrusive Tabbed Content

(via Jonathan Snook) Roger Hudson has posted a nice primer on using tables in HTML to display data. We quotes the W3C specifications and walks through some clear examples on how to properly use tables in HTML. It’s good to see resources like this that explain how to create data tables that are accessible for all users.

Hudson links to a number of resources at the bottom of the page but he leaves out a very useful post by Roger Johansson at 456 Berea Street. I’ve drifted away from posting basic HTML and CSS instructions here of late, hopefully these resources of of some interest.