March 31, 2011 in Learn
Quick Tip: Use bit.ly for Local Development URLs
Recently I’ve been working on a new Master Class for Think Vitamin Membership on the topic of responsive design. One of the major goals of responsive design is cross-browser compatibility, so as you might expect, I’m teaching a project that…
February 14, 2011 in Learn
Encrypting Cookies in the Browser
Cookies are a convenient, often necessary way to maintain state and data in web applications. Since this is well known, cookies are a target and potential vulnerability you have to be aware of when developing for the web. There are…
February 7, 2011 in Learn
Tips on Learning JavaScript
In his seminal article Style Versus Design Jeffrey Zeldman wrote The web used to look like a phone book . What he should have written is: The web used to look like a phone book sitting in a tacky 70s…
March 22, 2010 in Learn
The Startup Story of Carbonmade
Author Note: Spencer Fry has offered up 5 Carbonmade “Whoo!” Accounts. To be entered to win one, follow instructions at the bottom of this article. Back in 2009, around the time when the global economy broke, a lot of creatives…
February 16, 2010 in Learn
Sitemaps – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Sitemaps are like Marmite (Ed: yeast extract spread that divides opinion, very popular in the UK). You either love them or hate them. OK maybe you don’t ‘love’ them but they do seem to create an obvious divide between those…
September 14, 2009 in Learn
Why You Should Switch from Subversion to Git
You may have heard some hubbub over distributed version control systems recently. You may dismiss it as the next hot thing, the newest flavor of kool-aid currently quenching the collective thirst of the bandwagon jumpers. You, however, have been using…
September 4, 2009 in Learn
How to Create a Valid Non-Javascript Lightbox
I recently came across a solution on CSSPlay for a JavaScript free lightbox that uses invalid markup. So, being a sucker for a challenge, I set myself the task of creating one with valid markup and I eventually succeeded. Here’s…
August 26, 2009 in Learn
Top 10 UX Myths
Al Gore invented the Internet. Drinking alcohol keeps your body warm. You won’t get pregnant if you stand on your head after … well, you get the idea. Myths are those hard-and-fast rules that often start as a plausible idea…
April 10, 2009 in Learn
How to build mobile widgets
If you’re a web developer or designer, there’s a really exciting development happening right now called ‘mobile widgets’. Carsonified is working with Betavine to spread the word about mobile widgets, so we recently spent four days building one in order…
March 2, 2009 in Learn
40 Web Developers to Follow on Twitter
Update: You can now follow this list with just one click. Head over to the @carsonified/top-web-devs list. I’ve been on Twitter since 2006 (@ryancarson) and it’s where I get all my news these days. It’s important to know who to…
December 17, 2008 in Learn
When you fail, it's time to try again
No one is successful 100% of the time. Just look at entreprenuers like Richard Branson (founder of Virgin) and Milton Hershey (founder of Hershey’s Chocolate). They are (were) both extremely succesful and yet they’ve also had some spectacular failures (remember…
March 5, 2008 in Learn
Coding for the mobile web
Introduction Good evening — in this article I will aim to demystify the world of mobile web development, or in other words, developing web sites so that they will provide an acceptable user experience on mobile devices. I’ll run through…