BlogmyQuery – BMQ

Using the em unit to specify the width of a website layout is one of several ways of adding a bit of flexibility to your design. If you’re not familiar with em-based – or elastic – layouts, I wrote a bit more about how they work a few years ago in Fixed or fluid width? Elastic!.

The reason I’m bringing up em-based layouts is that I want to highlight two things that are often overlooked. One is setting a maximum width for the overall layout, the other is using percentages to specify the widths of child elements like columns.

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Posted in CSS.

If you use FeedBurner to handle your RSS/Atom/whatever feed, make sure to subscribe to it so you can verify that your posts show up properly. Also follow the links to your posts to check the URLs – they may be a bit mangled by FeedBurner without you knowing it.

It’s probably been like that for a long, long time, but I only recently noticed that FeedBurner added a bunch of querystring parameters (utm_source, utm_medium, and utm_campaign) that I wasn’t aware of to the post URLs in my feed. So instead of http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201011/bye_bye_flash/ URLs would look something like this:

http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201011/bye_bye_flash/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+456bereastreet+%28456+Berea+Street%29

Ouch.

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Posted in Search Engine Optimisation, Usability.

Jobs from Authentic Jobs

• Design Lead at TripIt (San Francisco, CA, US)
• Front-end Web Developer at MOG Inc. (San Francisco, CA, US)
• Information Architect at Modea (Town of Blacksburg, VA, US)

After complaining that Safari for iOS needs a text size preference and text reflow I decided to take a look at what other options are available. Many people don’t realise it, but you don’t have to use Safari for browsing the Web from your iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch.

I had a look around the App Store, searched the Web for a few reviews, and ended up testing two browsers that feel like worthy alternatives to Safari: iCab Mobile and Atomic Web Browser.

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Posted in Accessibility, Browsers, iOS.

One of the features I miss most in Safari for iOS is the ability to increase text size. Sure, zooming in increases text size, but all too often it also makes the lines of text too long to fit on the screen of my iPod Touch. Having to swipe left and right for each line of text makes reading zoomed text on a small iOS device very annoying very quickly.

It would seem that this could easily be fixed by Apple by giving users a text size preference or an easily accessible control to increase/decrease text size. Most importantly, the text would need to reflow after a text size change to allow word wrapping and adjust line length to the viewport width.

Why this is not already possible beats me, but maybe there is a technical reason. Regardless I think it’s one of the most obvious usability problems with browsing the Web on an iPhone or iPod Touch and needs to be fixed.

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Posted in Browsers, iOS.

A quick WordPress tip regarding Custom Post Types: when giving a custom post type a name, make sure that its length is 20 characters or less, or weird things will happen.

I recently ran into this and spent way too much time trying to figure out why things weren’t working as expected. For some reason the “Publish� button on the “Add New� page for my custom post type was replaced by a “Submit for Review� button. Huh?

At first I thought the problem was related to permissions, but it turned out to be the length of the name I’d given my custom post type.

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Posted in WordPress.