In the middle of 2013, I was hired to lead the engineering team at LearnZillion--a digital curriculum for K-12 Math and English subjects composed of videos, slides, documents, and images. At the time, there were several applications in support of the business: 2 Ruby on Rails web applications: the content authoring platform for a select group of … Continue reading Bucking the Microservices Fad
Thinking that you will adequately learn Google Analytics by clicking around the product, even over years, is a foolish concept. You will only understand a subset of its features and how they work together. You need to do your homework. I cannot improve upon Google Analytics' (GA) own crash course, titled Google Analytics IQ Lessons. … Continue reading Google Analytics Crash Course Notes
One of the privileges I have experienced in my professional life is having worked with Jeremy Keith of Clearleft. I learned a lot from the author and web developer from our interactions and by studying his code. Jeremy is a fan of graceful degradation and ensures that a site will function just fine without JavaScript browser support. However, … Continue reading JavaScript Style Sheets
Way-back-when, I suggested that CSS authors use classes as much as possible. It was a foggy idea at the time, but, thankfully, someone important stumbled-upon the same concept, and codified it. Around the same time, it started to become popular for developers to consolidate CSS and JavaScript into two files for their sites. This technique saves … Continue reading Specificity, Eames. Specificity?!
Every few years I run into an issue with JavaScript-based rich text editors and spellcheckers when they spawn pop-ups. The pop-ups open but don't function. If I open my Firebug console in the pop-up, I see something like: Permission denied for <http://assets2.mysitedomain.com> (document.domain has not been set) to get property Window.tinymce from <http://www.mysitedomain.com> (document.domain has not been set). … Continue reading Document Domain
Ian Lotinsky 