Web Design + Development

I remember back when spam was a bunch of advertising links, or gibberish. It still is today, to an extent, but there is now a new type. How do you tell if the following is spam?

Looks like you are an expert in this field, good post and keep up the good work, my friend recommended me it.

This is the essence of these new spam posts — they read perfectly well, but then you realize that they are not in any way related to the article topic. And then, the poster’s website URL sets off your spam alarm. And they put product names and “get free ___” as their name. The simple blogger would be led to believe that he or she must spend hours manually deleting spam, since it takes a human brain to figure out if the comment really is legitimate and related to the topic. More

I love it when I find a new program that’s better in almost every way than another type of program that you’ve used for years, and that you used to swear by. That just happened to me with WinSCP versus FileZilla. See, FileZilla is great, minus two huge annoyances.

Number uno — WinSCP uploads files immediately upon them changing. In FileZilla, I became accustomed to a cycle of edit, alt+tab to FileZilla, ram the enter key as if I’m playing the bell and hammer, and finally ctrl+R to see the changes in my nearest browser. Sure, maybe FileZilla can be configured to do that too, but guess what, I didn’t find it in the preferences, and I don’t need to hunt for it when WinSCP just does it.

Number dos — I can create a new file on the server and it immediately opens for editing. This seems like a basic feature to me, and you’d think it wouldn’t be that big of a deal. But I hated having to hunt for some small file to upload, rename, and change instead of simply right clicking and choosing New > File. Oh, and there’s a Trac ticket open regarding this issue, that has been seemingly just floating there since 2008.

…is actually pretty fantastic, if you ask me.

If you’re a web guy (or gal) like me, you’ll obviously hate Internet Explorer. Believe it or not, after you read this article, I think you will see IE in a new light. Besides being the only browser that can’t seem to adhere to standards set by, oh, I don’t know, ALL the other browsers out there, lately I’ve realized that we, as web designers, should now give Internet Explorer a little respect. More

Okay, what do I like about the new layout? Well, the navigational items no longer have that awkwardness stemming from their design as tabs. In Pages and other parts of the Facebook site, tabs represent expandability — they’re designed to be reordered and added to/removed from. But sometime last year that went out the door with Profiles. Ever since, the tabs were not the correct navigational element for Profiles.

It seems like the new design is aimed at people who like to spend only 3 seconds glancing at someone’s profile. Why dig for someone’s information, when you could just read it all at the top of the whole deal? Yes, this is much better for our new impatient generation. More