Articles in Tech
A blog for technical miscellanea. Not every technical topic I want to talk about is about Django, and I don't want to make people reading my personal blog wade through technical discussions.
Jumpy Web Pages and AJAX
Posted on April 28th, 2011 by
Stephen DeGrace
Topics:
AJAX,
Web Design
Go to www.cbc.ca/news - one of the things you will notice is that after the page loads, AJAX elements are continuously loading which causes bits of the page to jump around. This can result in you clicking on a link you didn't intend as the page jumps around under your cursor if you are not content to wait for all the AJAX to load, and in attempts to scroll the page being very choppy and unpleasant. I'm only using CBC as an example - a lot of AJAX heavy pages do this. I submit that this is an example of bad use of AJAX and bad design overall, as it irritates the user and makes a worse user experience. Proposed rule: When using AJAX to load content into a web page, reserve room for that content in the page's CSS and do not allow it to shove bits of the page around as it loads unless you have a damn good reason to.
reCAPTCHA Works Really Well
Posted on December 12th, 2009 by
Stephen DeGrace
Just a quick note... recently I installed AWStats via Webfaction (which by the way is really awesome hosting, especially for Python) for my infiniterecursion.ca domain. One interesting observation coming from this (aside from the fact that the majority of my visitors use Firefox, and I seem to have a surprising number of visitors using Macs), is that the top page viewed on my site is the guestbook, and the top visitor is an IP registered in Russia. The second most popular hit, with over 350 hits in less than a week, is the URL to post a comment.
jQuery Confirm Dialog Plugin
Posted on November 11th, 2009 by
Stephen DeGrace
This is a jQuery plugin to mimic the functionality of the standard Javascript window.confirm(message) function provided by the BOM in all browsers, except that it's prettier. You can download the package here. It requires jQuery, as well as the jQuery UI dialog component, and the draggable component as well if you want the dialog to be draggable.
I Started A New "Tech" Blog
Posted on November 6th, 2009 by
Stephen DeGrace
I started a new blog on my site to talk about technical issues. The idea is that not everything I want to talk about that is technical in nature really belongs in the Django blog, and I don't really want to weigh down my personal blog with these discussions, either. I'm planning to make my first foray my releasing a little jQuery plugin I wrote for creating confirm dialogs with the jQuery UI dialog.