JeffCroft.com

Photo // 02.11.2012 // 9:11 PM // flickr Link // 02.09.2012 // 8:14 AM // 2 Comments

Behind the scenes: Reinventing our Default Profile Pictures

The smart guys at 37signals have redesigned the ddefault avatar for Basecamp in a clever, fun, and unexpected way.

Visit site... Link // 02.08.2012 // 10:59 AM // 0 Comments

Standardizing Incompatibilities

Chris Eppstein says it’s time for something like Sass to be built into browsers. I sort of go back and forth on whether or not I agree. What do you think?

Visit site... Photo // 02.07.2012 // 11:01 PM // flickr Photo // 02.07.2012 // 10:30 PM // flickr Photo // 02.05.2012 // 10:37 AM // flickr Photo // 02.05.2012 // 10:36 AM // flickr Photo // 02.05.2012 // 10:34 AM // flickr Photo // 02.05.2012 // 8:11 AM // flickr Photo // 02.05.2012 // 7:39 AM // flickr Photo // 02.03.2012 // 8:40 PM // flickr Photo // 02.01.2012 // 11:46 PM // flickr Link // 02.01.2012 // 7:26 PM // 1 Comment

* { box-sizing: border-box } FTW

I’ve recently started using border-box a lot, and Paul’s right: FTMFW.

Visit site... Blog entry // 02.01.2012 // 1:58 AM // 5 Comments

A simple responsive grid system with fluid columns and fixed gutters

Tonight, I took a stab at creating a quick-and-dirty responsive grid system with fluid columns and fixed gutters. Here’s what I came up with:

Continue reading... Blog entry // 01.31.2012 // 4:55 PM // 28 Comments

On CSS preprocessors

Over the past couple of years, I’ve become a huge fan of Sass. It’s really the only way I write CSS now, and frankly, if anyone tried to make me write plain ol’ CSS I’d probably knee them straight in the taint.

But CSS preprocessors like Sass and LESS aren’t for everyone. At least not yet. There’s still a lot of resistance to them from the community. In fact, I resisted them for a long time, myself (here’s an old post from Nathan Borror’s blog where I outwardly hated on Sass). When you’re very comfortable with something, like many of us are with CSS, it’s hard to switch to doing it a different way.

Continue reading... Blog entry // 01.31.2012 // 9:11 AM // 15 Comments

How I shut down comment spam on this site

In the past, I’ve only allowed comments on recent blog posts, not older ones. Because I didn’t blog for the longest time, I had no recent blogs posts, which meant I got no comments (or comment spam). When I re-launched JeffCroft.com recently and started writing again, I actually started getting comments again (thanks, guys!). Of course, I also started getting comment spam again. Like, a ton of it. On average, I was getting about 10 comment spam posts per hour.

Frustrated, I went to my standby from the good ‘ol days, Akismet. I quickly found that it wasn’t working for me. It was letting through most of the spam and also preventing a lot of ham from being posted. After a tweet on the matter, Mike Davidson pointed me down a path that has worked beautifully for two weeks now — not a single comment spam post.

Continue reading... Link // 01.31.2012 // 8:17 AM // 0 Comments

Backbone patterns

Nice collection of Backbone.js patterns and best practices.

Visit site... Link // 01.31.2012 // 8:13 AM // 0 Comments

PYBB: Django-based forum software

Nice. A full-featured vBulletin-alike for Python/Django. Although there are some interesting and more modern takes on discussions, sometimes you just need the classic-style forum. Looks well-documented and tested.

Visit site... Link // 01.30.2012 // 7:56 PM // 0 Comments

Categorizr: A modern device detection script

A nice concept, unfortantely implemented in PHP.

Visit site... Link // 01.30.2012 // 7:48 PM // 0 Comments

How to Approach a Responsive Design

Nice post detailing some of the design decisions that went into the recent Boston Globe redesign. More and more, my biggest concern with responsive techniques is maintainence. I’d personally really, really avoid choosing too many breakpoints. Seems like setting yourself up for nightmares down the road.

Visit site... Link // 01.30.2012 // 7:41 PM // 0 Comments

A five year old on well-known brand marks.

[ http://www.youtube.com/embed/N4t3-__3MA0?fs=1 Visit site... Blog entry // 01.30.2012 // 12:21 PM // 7 Comments

This ain’t your Mama’s Internets

Sometimes I feel like our community (that of standards-oriented web professionals) prefers to talk about what we do in the most simplistic way possible — the way we built websites many years ago. In fact, most of us don’t actually build websites like this at all, and those on the cutting edge of modern web development have a process that looks almost nothing like what we talk about.

I took the time to outline the workflows at play:

Continue reading... Photo // 01.29.2012 // 12:37 AM // flickr Photo // 01.29.2012 // 12:34 AM // flickr Photo // 01.28.2012 // 11:30 PM // flickr Photo // 01.28.2012 // 10:21 PM // flickr Photo // 01.28.2012 // 7:51 PM // flickr Photo // 01.28.2012 // 7:07 PM // flickr Link // 01.27.2012 // 4:49 PM // 0 Comments

Kohi Vinh: Rambling Thoughts on Tumblr, WordPress, Posterous, Pinterest and Blogging

Khoi talks about the state of blogging in 2012 and the distinction between the “writing kind of blogging” and the more “curating links and photos and things” kind of blogging.

Visit site... Photo // 01.26.2012 // 4:54 PM // flickr Link // 01.26.2012 // 12:59 PM // 0 Comments

Finding the largest tables on MySQL Server

Came in handy for me today.

Visit site... Blog entry // 01.25.2012 // 4:42 PM // 11 Comments

Identifying the same content on multiple services

As the social web has grown, we find ourselves, more and more, cross-posting content to different service. For example, when I post a photo to Instagram, I often cross-post it to Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, and Flickr. In the process of developing this latest version of JeffCroft.com (which pulls in my content from several social networks), I found myself wishing there were a way to identify the same content in multiple places.

Each place that photo goes adds some metadata to it. I wanted to collect all of this metadata and display the photo as one item on JeffCroft.com that, for example, included both how many Flickr comments the photo got and how many Instragram likes it got — and include links to this piece of content on all the networks it exists on.

Continue reading... Link // 01.25.2012 // 12:24 PM // 0 Comments

Dillinger: the last Markdown editor, ever.

I write all my blog posts in Markdown and may consider using this to do so. But beyond that, this is just a really great (and open source!) example of how modern web apps are written. Built on node.js, you can run it remotely at this URL, or install your own, local copy.

Visit site... Link // 01.25.2012 // 10:20 AM // 0 Comments

Shit White Guys Say…to Asian Girls

Visit site... Blog entry // 01.25.2012 // 10:12 AM // 14 Comments

The tools I use: Mac

I’d love to have something meaty and heady to write about today, but I’ve got nothing. So, because some folks have asked for it, and because Kenny did it, how about a simple list of the tools I use on my Mac everyday and couldn’t live without? I consider myself a bit of a software minimalist—I don’t use a lot of the geeky tools many web pros do. I try to only have what I think I really need. Note that this only includes native Mac software, not web apps I use regularly. Here goes:

Continue reading... Blog entry // 01.23.2012 // 2:03 PM // 12 Comments

What it means to be “responsive”

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been tagged with a reputation of being somehow an opponent to the technique Ethan Marcotte coined “Responsive Web Design” in his seminal A List Apart article of the same name. Ethan defines Responsive Web Design as a technique that incorporates fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries to deliver experiences that accommodate today’s multi-device world, and he has vigorously defended his brand name against any suggestions that there are other ways (besides fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries) to achieve the same effective result.

Continue reading... Link // 01.22.2012 // 5:03 AM // 0 Comments

SOPA and The New Gatekeepers

I’m with Mike, here: what’s interesting about SOPA and PIPA to me is not so much the bills, but the fact that our governments are set up in a way that such bills could even ever get drafted. It’s patently absurd.

Visit site... Link // 01.22.2012 // 3:58 AM // 0 Comments

Ben Ward on browsers today

“If I mark up a column heading in my code, why won’t the browser allow me to sort the table? To this day, I’m still not sure that there’s a good answer to that.” Some damn good thoughts about browsers from Ben Ward.

Visit site... Photo // 01.21.2012 // 1:47 PM // flickr Photo // 01.20.2012 // 7:07 PM // flickr