Skull Jackpot

Various thoughts of minimal interest to others

Right makes (Opera) wrong

January 23, 2009

In the course of redesigning the new TOPP website, I ran into another odd renderbug which I wanted to document.

The design for the new site includes two drop-down menus (for “About Us” and “Our Work”), and we went with an approach based on the classic Suckerfish menus. Pretty easy to implement, and looked great in our initial design passes. When I went to do some regression testing, I found that Opera was was badly misrendering the menus.

Lessons from a white whale

December 18, 2008

I enjoy squashing renderbugs.

I don’t always enjoy the midway point, when a misrendering issue stubbornly refuses to yield to my ministrations, but that “Eureka” moment where I manage to tease out what’s going on under the hood and come up with a solution – that’s gold.

As a result of the fact that Internet Explorer generally has the most rendering issues, I’ve gotten to be good pals with IE, in it’s various incarnations. When presented with a new renderbug, I sometimes feel like a sitcom parent catching a child with their hand in the cookie jar. “Oh IE you goofball, what mischief have you gotten into this time…”

Inline Info

November 24, 2008

Making forms as usable and compact as possible is a fairly common goal in web design. Screen real estate is often at a premium, and finding ways to orient and provide information to users which doesn’t require additional space can be a great asset.

I decided to write a jQuery plugin to help fill this need.

Click to Clipboard

October 6, 2008

Our team uses Skitch a lot. It’s a pretty invaluable tool for communicating visual information – you can easily annotate screenshots or comps. There’s great communicative value in being able to point at something, and as a remote employee in my past two jobs, I can’t imagine ever collaborating on web work without it.

Skitch does a lot of things well, but one bit of polish which always pops out at new users is the “Click to Clipboard” functionality. Skitch provides lots of ways for you to share your images, and when you click in the appropriate field, the site copies all the data to your computer’s clipboard, and presents a nice confirmation that you’re ready to paste that elsewhere.

Better Blockquotes

September 26, 2008

For the Streetsblog WordPress theme, we wanted to include a widget which would display a featured user comment. The comp had spiffy oversized quotes surrounding the featured text.

I’d seen http://24ways.org/2005/swooshy-curly-quotes-without-images a while back, and decided to improve upon it for the new Streetsblog site. In particular, the floated close quotes in Simon Willison’s approach will often leave a lot of whitespace.