Decided to mix it up a little on the blog today. Instead of tips on coding or deep thoughts on the future of the web, I decided to do a quick walk through on a new and improved feature that the design team has been using pretty regularly. If you have any questions feel free to ask in the comments and I'll do my best to respond.
I've worked with a number of different web services, some define their own XML through DTDs or schema's, some use SOAP, WSDL (Web Services Description Language), or a combination of both. In all cases I prefer working with the XML directly, and if you're working with WSDL, you have to figure out the XML structure for requests/responses. I recently starting using SoapUI-3.5 to help me with this.
Don't get me wrong, I love me some technology (you should see my museum of handheld computers). But when I tried to listen to a live podcast of my favorite tech blog the other day let's just say I'm lucky I didn't bring down our company's intranet.
I had an idea today while coding something for a personal project. Sometimes in JavaScript, you need to pass arguments to a function that you want to use as a callback. Imagine passing a callback to a click event where you want a state variable included. Well, you'd need to create a callback wrapper, until now. Read more →
Following our nomination by Tacoma Mayor Bill Baarsma, and a long period of vetting, SiteCrafting was notified that we had been selected by the ICIC as a recipient of one of the top 100 fastest growing companies in inner-city areas in the US. It turns out Tacoma is considered inner-city eligible (though I've never really thought of it that way). In any case, over 800 companies were nominated and only 100 made the cut for recognition in Boston. We were one of three in Washington State.
The event is put on by Harvard Business School, Bloomberg Business Week, and several other sponsors including Bank of America, Staples Foundation, etc. ICIC was founded in 1994 by Harvard Profession Michael Porter - you can learn more about ICIC here.
The slowest thing you can do in JavaScript is touch the DOM. The most common slowdowns are caused by finding and manipulating elements. This is because of how everything in the DOM relates to each other and what the browser has to do to maintain the element tree. But without the DOM, JavaScript on the web would be useless. So it has become a necessary evil. Frameworks, such as jQuery, have made the problem much easier, but hides a great deal of the performance hits that are caused by DOM access. This blog entry will go through some common slow coding practices and show how to use better selectors to speed up your JavaScript. Read more →
On April 28th I was fortunate enough to be invited to the YWCA annual luncheon at the Hotel Murano Pavilion. As the website sponsor for the Tacoma-Pierce County YWCA, SiteCrafting designed and developed the website for their It's Time for the YWCA campaign. The theme of this year's event was Live Your Joy.
When using Sizzle (the selector engine in jQuery 1.3+, Prototype 1.7+, dojo, and others) and Cufon together, you need to make sure that your selectors are excluding Cufon elements. Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8 both have a bug that cause Sizzle to break for some selectors with VML elements. I'll describe the problem, and some simple fixes, after the break. Read more →
Happy Friday! For all you Unix lovers out there, we have a treat. Do you miss the days of "more" and "man"? Do you often miss the pleasure of knowing right where you are at in a document? Introducing the Man Scroll bookmarklet!
I got my team together this afternoon to give the newly approved Opera Mini for iPhone/iPod touch/iPad a try. Overall we agree it's great to see another browser in this space but they've got an uphill battle if they ever hope to overtake mobile Safari. Check out the rundown of our thoughts after the jump!
SiteCrafting, Inc.
