SiteCrafting Blah Blah Blog
Feb. 14, 2008 at 4:29pm
Touch the Vote
Rock it as well, if you must
This time of year you either get hooked or get sick of everything politics. That's right, it's a Presidential election season and the 24-hour news cable channels are firing out tons of info both via your TV and online. Some worthy strides in web development practices have also come about on one news site in particular that may help political junkies get their fix anytime, anywhere.
Read moreComments (0) | Posted in Coding Techniques, Javascript by Kevin Freitas
Nov. 27, 2007 at 7:18am
Office Star Trek: TNG marathon
To nerdly go...
That's what we did a couple Fridays ago here in the office. Brian's wife Julie is an avid Trekker and was excited to plan a Next Generation marathon with us. And we definitely put her complete series DVD collection to good use. From about 5:30pm on we watched episode after favorite episode. After a pile of snacks, some great pizza, sharing Star Trek memories, 7 episodes, it was half past midnight and time to wrap it up.
Thanks to Julie for making the trek (ha!) up and for those killer communicator cookies. We'll definitely have to do it again sometime.
Pics after the break.
Read moreComments (5) | Posted in Getting Out, Odds 'n Ends by Kevin Freitas
Nov. 15, 2007 at 6:50am
DNS propogation explained
There's always plenty of tech-speak flying around among developers in the office. I certainly try to keep such language at a minimum when working with clients but sometimes it just works its way in there. DNS and other domain-related processes can be pretty confusing, period, let alone to someone anxious for their website to go live. So how to explain DNS propogation?
Comments (1) | Posted in Odds 'n Ends, Web Hosting by Kevin Freitas
Oct. 31, 2007 at 2:48pm
Office Halloween costume contest
Fully one-third of the staff at SiteCrafting participated in our office Halloween contest today. Though we dressed up to win today's prize a few of us even wandered about the streets of Tacoma on our way to and from a party at local design and architectural firm BCRA. A software pirate, blogging ninja, head-crab zombie, and "J" blockhead walking down Pacific Ave. certainly drew a bit of attention.
Read moreComments (0) | Posted in Getting Out, Odds 'n Ends by Kevin Freitas
Sep. 24, 2007 at 1:43pm
SiteCrafting outed for being awesome
Current clients not surprised
Dan Voelpel begs the following question in yesterday's Tacoma News Tribune: "If I asked you to name the most underrated business in Tacoma, what would you say?"
First on Voelpel's list was SiteCrafting. The article defined "underrated" by those local firms that are either well-known but who's contributions are deeper than at first glance or others, like us, who fly somewhat under the radar but do great business.
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Comments (2) | Posted in Awards / Recognition, Horn Tooting, Marketing by Kevin Freitas
Sep. 18, 2007 at 4:02pm
Friday office creativity gets out of hand
Maybe next we'll break into song
Who knew a seemingly innocuous internal email would make for some good laughs and groans? I sure didn't when I invited folks from the office to join in a Friday after work pseudo-tradition.
Read moreComments (0) | Posted in Getting Out, Odds 'n Ends by Kevin Freitas
Jun. 20, 2007 at 9:56am
Our clients on the road
With all the different companies and organizations we work with, I'm bound to run into them in the "real world". Seeing people around is one thing. Seeing ads is another pretty common one. Lately, however, the signs of our clients I've been seeing are mobile ones.
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Comments (0) | Posted in Getting Out, Horn Tooting by Kevin Freitas
Jun. 14, 2007 at 5:26pm
The Usual [browser] Suspects
My search for the perfect web app testing environment yielded what I though would be a pretty ingenious setup. Stack up a couple Mac Mini's with a KVM and we could cover everything from XP to Vista and IE 6 to 7. The perfect solution, however, ended up being one Mini cheaper.
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Comments (6) | Posted in Odds 'n Ends by Kevin Freitas
Jun. 13, 2007 at 11:49am
SiteCrafting'er burns it up at Hell's Kitchen
SiteCrafting'er Joe and his band This Shirt Is Pants had a gig last Friday here in Tacoma at Hell's Kitchen. A gaggle of co-workers and friends showed up and had a great time playing some pool and listening to the band.
Read moreComments (0) | Posted in Getting Out by Kevin Freitas
Mar. 12, 2007 at 10:27am
Cleaner forms through collapsible textareas
More form, less space
Some really large forms can be a bit of an eyesore especially to the people filling them out. One thing that always bothered me was how bulbous most textareas had to be just to make enough room for a user to feel they could type what they needed. So I set out to figure a good way to clean up my forms a bit while still allowing the multi-line input of textareas.
Read moreComments (3) | Posted in Coding Techniques, CSS, XHTML by Kevin Freitas
Feb. 2, 2007 at 10:53am
Query conservationist
The fewer the queries the better
I always enjoy trying to do my work creating web applications using the fewest number of database queries possible. It's kind of a pride thing, I guess. That and I suppose it makes to improve an app's performance and reduce the load on a server. If you're into that kind of thing. ;)
A technique I use subtitutes the temptation of using queries whose results call queries and instead uses only two.
Read moreComments (3) | Posted in Coding Techniques, MySQL, PHP by Kevin Freitas
Jan. 11, 2007 at 9:35am
Flexibility in foul weather
I'm working from home today mostly because Ma Nature dumped about six inches of snow on my house. In an area where an inch will shut down the city, this is a bit more serious. It really pays, however, to have a flexible employer so I don't have to brave the hills around town. The beauty of the web and digital communication is that it allows for these kinds of opportunities whether the weather, saving some fossil fuels, or even emergencies are concerned.
Read moreComments (0) | Posted in Deep Thoughts, Odds 'n Ends by Kevin Freitas
Dec. 15, 2006 at 3:15pm
Service in the storm
With all the storm-induced power problems in the Puget Sound area a few of us were able to make it into the office today. The area is a patch work of service availability -- I know of houses with power and phone but no internet access, some with no power but the phones work, and yet others with power but no phones. A stroke of service my co-worker Ken displayed today was brilliant in its simplicity but it probably meant the world to one of our clients.
Read moreComments (0) | Posted in Deep Thoughts, Horn Tooting, Odds 'n Ends by Kevin Freitas
Dec. 11, 2006 at 4:36pm
Names 1, IDs 0
I never enjoy finding quirks in something so seemingly simple when I'm coding but it certainly happens. The following is a tale of how I ran into trouble with a couple attributes that should be worlds apart.
Read moreComments (1) | Posted in Coding Techniques, Javascript by Kevin Freitas
Oct. 18, 2006 at 10:57pm
IE 7 Out and About
Seems like the cat's out of the bag. Well, IE 7 is now available for download, anyway. Good to see Microsoft update their browser software after five years away from the party. Can't say I'm personally looking forward to this install but even if the only thing better about IE 7 is PNG support, I'm all for it.
Download IE 7 and let us know what you think! You can be sure we'll be doing extensive client testing and will post our thoughts as they solidify.
Comments (4) | Posted in Critiques by Kevin Freitas
Oct. 13, 2006 at 4:56pm
Into the Nested Table Abyss
At least it's clean code!
While I was taking some time to evaluate a 3rd-party application for a customer I took a peak at their site's HTML. I was pretty shocked when I found some very strictly organized code that contained gobs of nested tables. At one count I found a structure that was 10 tables deep! I suppose since enjoying creating clean mark-up and mostly table-less designs for the last few years I've forgotten my roots.
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Comments (2) | Posted in Coding Techniques, CSS, XHTML by Kevin Freitas
Oct. 11, 2006 at 7:29pm
The Three 'M'-igos
Why butter fingers break apps
Happens all the time, right? One minute you're cranking out line after line of quality code then the next it all comes to a screeching halt for no apparent reason. I immediately go into troubleshooting mode. A quick and simple redirect using a header("Location: ...") function should pose no danger of messing up my app -- but today it did.
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Comments (3) | Posted in Coding Techniques, PHP by Kevin Freitas