How to check the speed of your site.

How do you know how fast your site is? Well thankfully it’s not that hard. I use four websites to keep baselines on page speeds and optimization http://www.webpagetest.org/ http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ http://gtmetrix.com/ https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ I use more than one because pagespeed readings can vary between one and the next. And this way I have a range of what (read more)

What I love about Susy (responsive grids)

Responsive grids are everywhere in mobile first design. They make layout “semantic” and easier than otherwise. But most of them are a bit bulky and unwieldy and don’t really separate style (CSS) from form (HTML) as much as I’d like. But Susy goes one step further than other grid systems, and lets you do all (read more)

Speed up your SASS with Compass Mixins

 One of the great things about SASS is mixins. They are lovely.  But building them can take as much time as just typing out the things they’re supposed to speed up.  So wouldn’t it be nice if someone came along and gathered all the most common ones in one place, so you could import them (read more)

Top 5 reasons to switch to SASS.

I remember there was a time when CSS didn’t exist and all HTML tags were in CAPS.  But times change for the better and CSS came and now CSS3. By separating style from form design was much easier to implement.  SASS is basically a tool that makes CSS quicker and easier to implement. I’ve been (read more)

Web 3.0 Why Separate Style, Content, Form and Function?

Let me explain what those mean in regard to the web, and then give you the top three reasons to care about dividing the labors. Style, content, form and function is one way to clarify what goes into web design. Style is your colors, your curves, your sassiness and aesthetic. It’s the (static) visual fun (read more)

Designing for Distraction: Engagement

Today, I present the second part of a two-part article on Designing for Distraction (click for slides). Yesterday, we looked at who the distracted are, what distracts them, and how to design for them. Today we’ll talk about Designing for Engagement (or Readers-First Design). For Engagement When we design to eliminate distractions, we design for (read more)

The Prancing Pony

One class finished for the semester… check out my final website! Responsive website for The Prancing Pony Style Tile: https://www.thenewe.com/advweb2/finalpart2/  

Increase WP Upload Size Max

    So I was having a problem with uploading a large video to a wordpress site, and I came across this site: http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-increase-the-maximum-file-upload-size-in-wordpress/ And let me share my experience and what worked, as I did finally get it to work. Like in all things I started with number 1 of the three ways. Which was to adjust (read more)

Dreamhost Hosting Special!

Dreamhost is who I use for hosting and most of my Domain registrations. They’re great and I love their constant improvements (they recently upgraded to SSDs for their Virtual Private Servers without increasing costs). They have a great special right now for their shared hosting. I used their shared hosting for quite awhile and it (read more)

GIT $home directory using Powershell

So I’ve been trying to get GIT to start in “D:\Google Drive\Grad school\Adv web 2” and for the life of me I couldn’t get it to work. I also wanted to change my $home variable so I can quickly move around. There are some great sites with some answers if you’re using pure Git Bash: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7017143/git-bash-how-to-default-to-other-directory-instead-of-home-directory (read more)