Mobile disaster

When you design a website nowadays you have to effectively make TWO websites. That wouldn't be so bad except for all of the BULLSHIT THAT SAFARI DOESN'T DO! I swear Safari is the new IE.

I don't care how well or responsive you write your code, Safari will always find a way to dash your hopes on the curb like so many teeth.

Pro my ass...

I am SICK of Wordpress plugins that have a PRO version.

What's worse is when they advertise certain features that are ONLY in the the "pro" version but hide that info until AFTER you have installed it. I guess they figure that now you have it and learned how to kinda use it, you will give them your hard earned monies. Let me tell you now, that is what will get me to remove that shit quicker than I install IE on Windows.

I wish Wordpress gave you the option to tell these companies WHY you are uninstalling their plugins. Tho' I suspect getting "I am deleting this plugin because you are all a bunch of money grubbing asshats" all day would grow tiresome.

They might as well just put, "We think you are too stupid to find a plugin that does what you want that is free".

I get that people should be paid for their work and alla that but maybe spread out the useful features huh? I feel like I am flying a discount airline when I download this shit. I shouldn't have to pay to have a seat INSIDE the plane.

Wix on... wix off...

As much as I dislike Wordpress still, even after learning it better (know thy enemy), I still have a slight disdain for sites like Wix, Mobirise, and Squarespace. It's not the fact they are like the Mac computers of the website creation world and made for soccer moms and people with more money than knowledge. No, it's the fact that someone was smart/evil enough to create a self-contained CMS system where, if you want the cool useful features, it costs extra and you can ONLY get it from them.

At least with Wordpress, if you don't want to pay for a theme, you can say "Fuck it, I'll just learn to make my own". The same with the plugins. These other fenced off assholes however keep their ball and make you come to their house. I think what makes it worse is that they charge you a pretty penny for the privilege of having a website that doesn't say "powered by so-and-so" at the bottom.


And for those thinking I am just bitter for not thinking of it first, you can stuff that kind of talk up your own custom backend.

< Ijustcan'teven >< /withthis >

A jock strap offers better support...

If anyone actually reads this damn blog, you will know my hatred of Wordpress.

Well, for the sake of the children, we sat down and had a long talk and now we both understand each other and are willing to work together... you know... for the kids.

However, the more I use custom templates that are for sale, the more I want to punch the authors of these designs in their fucking idiot faces.

Yes I tried turning off all my plugins before I contacted you...

I appreciate they have done half the work for me. Hand coding responsive websites sucks. However, when something goes awry with their coding and I find a bug they somehow missed because they didn't test it properly it kind of annoys me, especially when it's something they SHOULD have found through basic usage.

"That's not that bad" you say? You're right, it's not. HOWEVER, it's when I contact them and let them know their shit is jacked up. They either A: Treat me like a fucking idiot or B: completely ignore most of my post/question where I laid out the exact details of my problem and what I have done and they respond with the equivalent of, "Have you tried turning it off and back on again?"

That's just the emails. Gawd forbid I have to interact with a whole team of guys on a forum. I get the same requests from 4 different people because none of them could be bothered to read the previous posts that laid out all of the details they are asking for.

"It works on our machine. See?" Yeah that's great. You just showed me a photo of a layout that is NOTHING like the photos I posted so your tiny mind wouldn't have to guess at what I am talking about!

I have been on the verge of asking for a refund I don't know how many times because their themes break easily AND their "support" is a joke... but I don't. Why you ask? I clearly hate myself...

But not as much as I hate them.

I don't understa....

The other shoe...

Well Internet Explorer is finally going the way of the Dodo.

What worries me is it will be the same old shit in a new box. With any luck it will be shiny better working poop all tarted up in new clothes but I guess we will all have to wait and see when "Project Trojan", or whatever they are calling it, comes out.

It seems the logo at the top of this blog might have been a bit of a prediction but will soon be redundant.

Coding among thieves...

I kind of feel sorry for anyone starting out in webdesign nowadays.

I remember a time when teaching someone HTML was much easier. You just find a website you like, hijack their code and learn by replacing this or that. Now it's like trying to teach someone a foreign language. CSS and HTML5 has changed so much. The learning curve is insane.

You can't even really rely on ganking code because you need so many scripts and stylesheets it's not worth it. However, because of places like Themeforest there is an abundance of template you can alter. Maybe the best way to teach someone now is to get a basic HTML template and throw them in head first and see what happens.

I'm guessing it will go something like this:

The blue stuff...

I was having a conversation with another web-head and his phone auto corrected "code" to "cook". So now I want to start a trend in the web design community when someone asks what you design in you say "I cook HTML5" or I cook in PHP" (just don't get the H confused with a C)

Let's all sound like meth dealers who are speaking in...

wait for it...

Code!!

Go the fuck to Ipsum

So for those of you who don't know about this, the next time you have to throw in some filler text you might want to use this website.

My stack doth overflow...

I want to take some special time and bag on Stack Overflow a bit. If you don't know what that is post ANY question about coding and you will likely happen upon their website (or one associated with it)

Before I go any further let me preface this with the fact that in the past they have been helpful for javascript stuff I was lost on. However the last couple times I had some issues I got some real snotty elitist vibes from the people on there and just deleted my questions because fuck them.

I guess after you voluntarily sit on a website long enough answering questions without pay you get bitter, jaded and spiteful for some reason. Also the whole "reward system" in place is a bit of a pain in the ass. It's too subjective. If some ass hat doesn't "get" the question they will penalize you in some way or another.

I wish there was just a service with a live chat you could message someone at any hour of the day with a question and they would give you the most direct honest answer they could.


Me: "Hey I want to not show some HTML5 video on a mobile device without making a separate site for mobile"
Bob: "Oh that's easy. Try using a media query"

Me: "Oh wow that's great. Why was that so hard to find online?"
Bob: "You were probably looking on Stack Exchange"
Me: "....yah...."
Bob: "Those guys are assholes"
Me: "Let me paypal you some beer money"

Is that so hard?

De(word)pressing

Why must web design be such a fickle whore?

It's interesting to me the things we sacrifice/ trade off for the sake of "ease". I have had to begrudgingly learn more and more about my nemesis Wordpress (keep your enemies closer or something like that). While their design style has become more the norm I still feel stilted by it.

I miss the days when it was "easy" to teach someone to update their website. Now it's more of a foreign language than it ever was. I guess that is what gave the rise to CMS. A nice box to put all of the controls in so people could feel like they had power over something that is so remarkably difficult in a number of ways.

It can be frustrating to make something only to realize it would be/have been much easier to just give in and make someone pony up 40-60$ for a template someone else got the headaches over.

I think I need to go to sleep...

Validate my love...

I'm always amused when I see web designers online bitching about how code does or does not "validate".

Listen up bucko, until W3C starts handing out fines or arresting people for having shoddy code I am gonna do what works you hear me? Much like myself, it might not be pretty but it gets the job done.

Invalid response

I am glad I am not alone in thinking responsive design can be a waste of time.

I have designed websites for people using a responsive design template that, when viewed on a mobile device, looks nothing like the desktop version and when they finally see it as it was intended go "wow that looks really good". Thus I tend to turn off the responsive design BS.

Your mother's a tracer...

The other day I was trying to tell someone about a website I "re-designed" but realized I didn't really design it so much as play Mad Libs with it as it was a Wordpress template they asked me to use.

This WP phenomenon now makes everyone a website "designer" but in reality it doesn't. You don't design anything. it's technically already designed for you. You just fill in the blanks. It makes you a website tracer and I'm NOT ok with that.

Font of Knowledge

A little something positive for once. If you don't know about Google web fonts I highly suggest you look into it. It's a nice way to break free of any scripts to deal with server side fonts and scripts.

It's also nice not to be tied to a handful of default fonts or images to have nice looking text (that don't show up for SEO stuff). They will also display on mobile devices which is cool because apparently Safari can't be bothered to have more than one font in it's memory bank lest it fry it's tiny little browser brain.

Two things...

PNG Optimizer OF THE GAWDS!!

This is probably related...

We are not alone...

I am thinking of detecting a browser on the pages I design and redirecting people to This Site.

hIEpster

I figured it out tonight. Internet Explorer is the original hipster browser.

"I'm not gonna render <BR> tags like everyone else. I'm gonna go over here and do my own thing. I was fucking up your code before it was cool."

IE can bite my beefroot. I hope it chokes on it's own neckbeard.

Funky towel, towels got the font.

I don't want this blog to turn into nothing but ranting about IE but... goddamn it.

It's the only browser I know that causes all of your content to shift elsewhere because of some random </font> tag that it REFUSES to ignore.

It's like javascript. "Sorry, You can't do that because you have one too many spaces in your line of code." JUST BE SMARTER THAN ME DAMN YOU!

Is that too much to ask?