Opera goes WebKit!

Link

Reply

In a sudden and shocking change of events Opera is changing its rendering engine to Webkit (the same engine that Chrome, Safari, BB OS6+ , iOS, and Android use).

I don’t always test for Opera since it often has low usage in our clients’ audience, but in many parts of the world it’s still the most used mobile browser by a considerable margin (eg Asia). Globally it’s #3, keeping up surprisingly well with Android and iPhone’s native browsers.

You can learn more about the most popular browsers with this interactive graph at Statcounter: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-ww-yearly-2012-2012-bar

You can learn more about Opera’s decision here: http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move-to-webkit

Choose Your Own Adventure: Social Media Experiment!

Posted on by
Reply

I wrote my first “Choose Your Own Adventure” style story in Grade 7 (1991ish). I called my series “Select Thy Personal Undertaking” partly to escape any legal issues (but mostly to sound like a funny dork). In the years since I think I’ve written upwards of 7 of these stories, including for my OAC Writer’s Craft final, and once even as a letter of resignation! If you’re any kind of author I highly recommend you undertake this writing challenge, it’s a pretty interesting process to get into, and always enjoyable to read (note to self: Google Kindle versions).

Last week I decided to do one on Facebook. It was easier in that I didn’t have to write all of the arcs and possible outcomes, but it’s a challenge not to have the ability to go back and edit. This means you’re constantly painting yourself into little corners, which I personally find fun. I would write the part, then in the comments offer the options which readers would “like” to vote on. I also accepted comment-based votes.

I thought I would share the resulting story with the world! Continue reading →

SMACSS Conference

Posted on by
1

Yesterday fellow Thrillworker Ryan Bruce and I had the pleasure of attending the online SMACSS conference. Lots of nerdy CSS talk for me to get way too excited about.

I’m very much a right-brained front end dev. While this does allow me to create some crazier (and yeah, maybe impractical) stuff, it does mean I can be weak in some of the more technical approaches. That’s where tools like SMACSS are so invaluable. Continue reading →

Speaking at WordCamp

Posted on by
Reply

Man, time flies. It’s been nearly a week since I spoke at the WordCamp dev conference in Toronto. In some ways it can feel like it’s not a big deal since Toronto is so close, but some people travelled quite a distance to attend and speak.

I’m so grateful for the opportunity to share at this event, and get to give back to a community that has given me so much!  Continue reading →

WordCamp Dev Talk: Breaking the Mould

Posted on by
3

This is the post to compliment my Toronto Developer’s WordCamp 2012 talk! At the bottom you’ll find links to my demo, test theme and theme XML! #WCTO

Remember the good old days of web before Content Management Systems were rampant?! You could make any part of the site look pretty much however you wanted (why you could even have rounded corners in a table with as few as 8 images). You could do this because you had to manually build and style every single lousy thing on the page. Come to think of it, maybe the old days weren’t so good after all…

One of the reasons we as a species invented CMS was so we could stop repeating work, and let robots figure it all out. That’s the great thing about a tool like WordPress; you just plug in the content and WordPress will format it all the same! Every post as far as the eye can see as cookie cuttered as the last… that’s actually supposed to sound like a good thing. Continue reading →