Finely Crafted Web SitesHere at f3 we’ve been assessing some Javascript accordion and slider libraries for enhancing our work page, so we thought we’d share our general approach to progressive enhancement.
We eventually settled on a combination of jQuery Tools’ Tab and Scrollable libraries, so we’ll use those as examples in this article. At the time of writing jQuery Tools was at version 1.2.5.
Posted by Stephan on 01 Apr 2011. Tagged usability, accessibility, jquery.
There are a huge number of rich text editors available for content management systems, which allow end users to conveniently edit web pages without knowing any markup (HTML). Most of those available are so-called WYSIWYG editors, where content looks similar in the editor to how it will look on the web page when published. These editors vary considerably in features and complexity but most suffer from the following main problems:
This article reviews all editors that are available for Drupal via it’s WYSIWYG module, in order to narrow down on the editors that are best for producing valid markup with good accessibility and ideally no inline styling.
Posted by Stephan on 09 Aug 2010.
This article presents a simple method of creating an hCard directory in the MODx content management system. Each hCard will have an associated vCard available for download.
MODx is a lightweight PHP-based content management system. It has the concept of “snippets”, “chunks” and “template variables” that come together to create a flexible system that’s perfectly suited for developing custom behaviour. This article assumes that the reader is already familiar with these concepts. Please refer to the MODx learning resources if not.
vCards are a basic file format used for storing information about people and organisations, such as their name, telephone number, email address, etc. Generally, they can be easily and automatically imported into applications that have an address book, like a personal organiser or email client, which as a web site owner gives your visitors a one-click import of your details into their address book.
hCard is a Microformat based on vCards. Microformats are a basic method of augmenting the normal markup of a web page with open data for the Semantic Web. As the semantic web becomes more relevant, with the big search engines looking for an increasing amount of open data and a variety of interesting applications emerging, the small effort involved in putting Microformats on your site is well worth it for a presence on the next generation of the web.
Posted by Stephan on 22 Jun 2010. Tagged microformats, semantic web, modx.
This article was originally published on 11/09/2009 by Stephan over at Brighternet. Migrated with permission.
This article presents a method for enhancing a user interface built with Ruby on Rails to show a link to a RESTful operation if Javascript is available or a form button if not.
Posted by Stephan on 18 Jun 2010. Tagged rails, usability, accessibility.
This article was originally published on 12/11/2008 by Stephan over at Brighternet. Migrated with permission.
Capistrano is a tool for automating tasks on remote servers via SSH. It simplifies the process of application deployment and maintenance by allowing you to wrap up a number of repetitive tasks into succinct Capistrano commands (called tasks).
Because Capistrano sprung from the Ruby on Rails community its default operation is designed for Rails applications. However, with a few small changes it can be used to deploy anything.
This article describes how to use Capistrano 2.5.1 to deploy non-Rails web sites, such as static HTML or PHP sites.
Posted by Stephan on 18 Jun 2010. Tagged rails, php, capistrano.