DaveJays Blog

Putting Flash in its Place

MAY 8th 2008 • 1 Comments

One of the common questions that I receive from potential clients is whether or not I do Flash. The answer is always no. It's not because I hate Flash, but because I've never had or seen a use for it. So as a result, I never learned it. So I'd like to explain my philosophy when it comes to Flash on the web. I won't talk about horrible Flash practices such as animating every element on the page as it builds in and use that as an excuse to boycott the technology. Flash done well can be very useful.
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posted in: Design | Development | Internet |

TMI - Too Much Information Unethical?

APR 19th 2008 • 3 Comments

My latest project in the form of goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com/ (or g56ogle.com for short) has brought up an interesting ethical dillema for me. About a week ago I launched the site to serve basically as a re-skinned version of google.com. It gives users the ability to search the web in style. It's powered with Google's Adsense for Search, which allows me to simply throw the code in to handle all the actual searching functionality. When a user enters a search term and hits return they're taken to a results page, and the URL in their browser changes to something like this: "http://www.goo...oogle.com/results/?q=andrew+baron....". The search query is clearly indicated inside the actual URL. Now this might not seem to really matter because there's no way for me to actually see all the queries that people enter.
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posted in: Internet |

Google Design with Style

APR 14th 2008 • 7 Comments

A new project I've gotten myself into came spur of the moment one weekend. It's essentially a redesign of google, giving users the ability to search with style. There have been a few attempts at redesigning google before, like here and here. But let's face it, Google's interface is very usable and clean, and we've all grown very accustomed to it, so there's little to be gained from reorganizing the structure or moving elements around. So I decided to approach it from another perspective and spice it up with graphics and cutting edge CSS techniques.
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posted in: CSS | Design | Internet |

A Great Alternative to CAPTCHAs

MAR 25th 2008 • 1 Comments

CAPTCHAs (which supposedly stands for Completely Automatic Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart - too many T's though) can be a royal pain to work with. the blind and visually impaired have a very hard time with them. I have good eyes and I have a hard time with them sometimes. Add to that, they're annoying. But honestly, they're overkill for a large majority of sites.

I was getting absolutely bombarded with spam comments until I put in an extremely simple check. I have the user type the letter H (any case) in a special field before submitting the comment, if they fail to do so, their comment is simply ignored. It works perfectly, and my spam count has dropped to zero.
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posted in: Development | Internet |