Ben Harrison 2011-12-22T23:42:05Z WordPress http://benharrison.cc/blog/feed/atom Ben <![CDATA[Holiday (Pre)Season]]> http://benharrison.cc/blog/?p=301 2011-12-22T23:42:05Z 2011-12-22T23:42:05Z Since the end of the NBA lockout there has been a frenzy of free agent aquisitions, and complicated trade deals taking place. With the season scheduled to start on Christmas day the window of time to recruit players has been narrow and packed with drama. Big names like CP3, and Dwight Howard have been all over the headlines. But I would like to officially announce that in a suprising last minute move I have been drafted to join dribbble.

A big thanks goes out to the very talented Alex Swanson for recruiting me.

]]> 0 Ben <![CDATA[Oh, Hello]]> http://benharrison.cc/blog/?p=296 2011-12-10T22:17:52Z 2011-12-10T22:17:52Z This site hasn’t seen a lot of action lately. It’s been almost a year since my last blog post, and over the past several months I’ve only been soft-launching some design and code changes. So I just recently checked back in on my web traffic statistics. Much to my surprise I’m actually getting quite a bit of passer-by traffic from search engines, particularly with “dashboard design” related search terms.

So to everyone who may be new here, welcome!

And to those of you who may be wondering why I stopped blogging, I’ll just say that I’ve had a very busy and a very good past 12 months. My focus has been on my family, my home, and my job. But I certainly plan on continuing the blog posts and updates as I’m able.

]]> 0 Ben <![CDATA[Personal and Professional Goals for 2011]]> http://benharrison.cc/blog/?p=264 2010-12-31T05:15:54Z 2010-12-31T05:15:54Z With the new year approaching I’ve been looking back at 2010, and thinking about what is in store for 2011. I have some goals in mind for the upcoming new year, but first I’ll recap some of the events of 2010:

First would be the birth of my second daughter, Emma. She is 23 weeks old now, and has certainly made her presence known as one of the members of our family. She has a great personality, loves to have fun, loves her family (especially Elizabeth), and is an absolute pleasure to raise. Stephanie and I are blessed to have such a sweet kid.

Shortly before her birth my wife and I purchased our first home. To say that this process was hectic would be an understatement. We were slammed with epic life-changing events this past summer, so I’ve been eagerly looking forward to the new year for quite a while. I knew that by then a lot of the dust should settle, and life should calm down some.

Other than that I had recently (Q4 2009) taken a new position with a software company. So Stephanie and I spent the year adjusting to everything that is involved with an out-of-state move, a career change, and the other two aforementioned life changers. 2010 was big.

Aside from everything going on in our personal lives I had some professional goals I was working on as well. Some of those included digging in deeper, and learning more about:

  • The .NET framework and Object-Oriented Programming
  • JavaScript and the jQuery library
  • JSON web services and client-side intense web applications

Overall I’m happy with the progress I made in those areas. But, as it goes in this industry, I always find myself learning something new or refining an existing skill. So naturally I have a mental road map of the technologies I am going to be diving even deeper into in the near future. For 2011 some of those will more than likely be:

  • Even more Object-Oriented Programming
  • System Architecture & Design
  • ASP.NET MVC
  • Database Design
  • Unit Testing
  • LINQ
  • Git

There are also aspects of design I’m pretty familiar with, but would like to venture further into:

  • Multiple Display Platforms. Mobile, tablets, display boards, varying desktop resolutions, etc.
  • Flash and AS3.0. At the risk of sounding uncool for not jumping on the anti-flash bandwagon (trust me, I’m fully aware of it’s imperfections) I still stand by it for being a great technology for the appropriate uses. Like this. And this.
  • After Effects.

As far as personal goals for 2011, I’m just hoping to have a much simpler and less eventful year than the last one.

Here’s to a fulfilling and productive 2011!

]]> 1 Ben <![CDATA[Detecting a ‘Click Outside’ with JavaScript]]> http://benharrison.cc/blog/?p=256 2010-12-18T17:04:18Z 2010-12-18T17:04:18Z Attaching events to an object is a fairly straight forward process with JavaScript. It’s common to want to call a certain function when a specific element has been clicked, hovered, etc.

But what about in the case where you want to call a function when the event happens to anything besides your target element? This is useful when hiding a popup menu or dialog. Say you want to close it only when the user clicks off the menu, rather than just mousing out.

I came across a post on Stack Overflow addressing this very same problem. Basically a common solution is to create two click events: one for the body that hides the menu, and one for the element itself that prevents the click event from bubbling up to the body’s onclick event. This allows the element to accept click events, and maintain functionality, even though the body was “clicked”.

Here’s a code example, using jQuery:

$('#menucontainer').click(function(event) {
  $('body').one(function() {
    // Hide the menus
  });

  event.stopPropagation();
});

From that code I also discovered the jQuery one method. It’s a neat way to attach an event that will run no more than once. So in this case it’s perfect because it isn’t necessary to call the function every single time the body is clicked.

]]> 0 Ben <![CDATA[HTML 5 Boilerplate]]> http://benharrison.cc/blog/?p=223 2010-09-11T04:26:40Z 2010-09-11T04:26:40Z HTML5 Boilerplate is a really cool project that was released not too long ago. It can certainly serve as a good starting point for a new project, however I have really just been looking over the code a lot using it as a reference. The boilerplate contains a lot of creative techniques and useful code snippets that I’ve been using in my own projects lately. Here are a few of my favorites:

Load jQuery via CDN with a backup plan

I always prefer loading the jQuery library from Google’s CDN. It’s fast, reliable, and takes a slight burden off my server. Plus there’s a good chance a lot of users will already have it cached from other sites referencing the same URL.

The third line of code below loads your hosted copy of jQuery, if for some reason the CDN fails.

<!-- Grab Google CDN's jQuery. fall back to local if necessary -->
<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script>!window.jQuery && document.write('<script src="js/jquery-1.4.2.min.js"><\/script>')</script>

Targeting specific Internet Explorer versions

There have always been ways to target specific versions of IE, particularly for loading separate style sheets. This solution is a little different, and I like it because it’s a clean way to apply different rules for different browsers. In your style sheet just add .ie6 in front of any rules that you want applied to.

<!--[if lt IE 7 ]> <body class="ie6"> <![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 7 ]>    <body class="ie7"> <![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 8 ]>    <body class="ie8"> <![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 9 ]>    <body class="ie9"> <![endif]-->
<!--[if (gt IE 9)|!(IE)]><!--> <body> <!--<![endif]-->

Asynchronous Google Analytics

A more optimized version of the Google Analytics code. Details can be found here:
http://mathiasbynens.be/notes/async-analytics-snippet 

<!-- asynchronous google analytics: mathiasbynens.be/notes/async-analytics-snippet
     change the UA-XXXXX-X to be your site's ID -->
<script>
 var _gaq = [['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X'], ['_trackPageview']];
 (function(d, t) {
  var g = d.createElement(t),
      s = d.getElementsByTagName(t)[0];
  g.async = true;
  g.src = '//www.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
  s.parentNode.insertBefore(g, s);
 })(document, 'script');
</script>

Plenty more where that came from

These code samples are just a small part of everything HTML5 Boilerplate provides. I highly recommend downloading it and taking some time to learn from everything it offers.

http://html5boilerplate.com

]]> 0 Ben <![CDATA[Meet Emma Marie Harrison]]> http://benharrison.cc/blog/?p=192 2011-09-21T03:55:08Z 2010-07-22T02:32:05Z Yesterday around 1:30 PM my beautiful wife gave birth to our second daughter, Emma Marie. She has a full head of blonde hair, weighed in at 6lbs 15 oz, and was 19.5″ long. But the most interesting thing to me is how calm her temperament has been. Much to our surprise she has barely cried at all; even immediately after delivery. So far she has been as quiet and easy going as I imagine any baby could be.

Elizabeth, who is 2 and a half now, has been anxiously awaiting the birth of her baby sister. She has understood that a baby has been growing inside mommy’s belly for quite some time now, as we have explained to her countless times. So for months she has known Emma by name, and after finally getting to meet her she has really been enjoying her time holding her, feeding her, giving her hugs, kisses, and gentle strokes to her cheeks. She even had fun counting her fingers and toes.

Stephanie and I are definitely blessed to have the newest addition to our family.

]]> 9 Ben <![CDATA[The Truth About Your Email Address]]> http://benharrison.cc/blog/?p=182 2010-06-03T03:45:14Z 2010-06-03T03:45:14Z What your email address says about your computer skills.

I would add “@your-local-isp.com” to that list; sandwiched between yahoo and aol. Besides typically being an inferior email service compared to the free ones, what makes it so bad is that by relying on it you sacrifice flexibility in being able to switch Internet Service Providers easily.

Besides, it looks unprofessional when businesses use them rather than purchasing their own domain.

]]> 0 Ben <![CDATA[First Presbyterian Church of Orlando]]> http://benharrison.cc/blog/?p=173 2010-05-31T03:18:31Z 2010-05-31T03:17:54Z The other day I was scrolling through a list of 25 Beautiful Church Websites, and I noticed FPCO was included. This was a project that I got to be a (rather small) part of when I was working for Roger West last year. I wish I could take more credit than I really can, but nonetheless it’s exciting to work on something and see the recognition it gets from the design community.

]]> 0 Ben <![CDATA[Rules for Computing Happiness]]> http://benharrison.cc/blog/?p=155 2010-05-10T23:50:17Z 2010-05-10T23:50:17Z Inspired by this list of Rules for Computing Happiness (most of which I completely agree with), I decided to compile my own. This list isn’t exactly complete, as I’m sure I could always add plenty more.

Software

  • Use at least two partitions (or hard drives).
  • Keep the operating system, and programs on the main partition.
  • Store documents, media, and everything else that should survive an O/S reinstall on a separate partition.
  • Automate a backup process for the O/S partition. Ideally this should be on another physical drive, but for software-only crashes it’s still sufficient to store on a separate partition of the same disk.
  • Automate a backup procedure for the documents folder, and any other important media.
  • Backup the documents folder to multiple locations (2nd hard drive, dedicated thumb drive, ftp site, drop box).
  • Backups can never be too redundant.
  • Backup at least once per week.
  • Keep the operating system as lean and efficient as possible.
  • Use portable versions of software as much as possible. Keep them in an “Apps” directory in the dropbox folder.
  • Use a password manager, and use a unique and difficult password for all sites.
  • Never install too many fonts. Use a font manager if necessary.

Hardware

  • Buy the best monitor, keyboard, mouse, desk, and chair you can afford.
  • Buy the best processor you can afford.
  • Purchase everything else with bang-for-the-buck in mind. Then upgrade over time, as needed.
  • Don’t spend more on a graphics card than the cost of a modern video game console.
  • Use an external hard drive for backups and media storage.
  • Use a battery backup.
  • Have multiple hard drives on-hand in case of emergency.

File Formats

  • Use Rich Text Format (.rtf) for word documents.
  • Use DRM free multimedia files, in the most widely supported formats.
  • Use PNG for transparent images as much as possible.
  • Avoid H.264 until licensing issues have been resolved.
]]> 0 Ben <![CDATA[Windows 95 Rocks!]]> http://benharrison.cc/blog/?p=152 2010-06-02T02:50:19Z 2010-05-01T03:46:59Z My favorite throwback video from the Windows 95 CD-ROM:

]]> 0