You’d think having the developer toolbar set to disable cache would keep it from caching but that doesn’t seem to do it. You need to go into your browser settings and also disable cookies. You probably don’t want to disable cookies for all domains which might make it impossible to log into a lot of sites like the WordPress backend for instance, you’d click the exceptions button (in Firefox anyway) and add the site you’re developing and click block.

So then you’ll only have problems logging into that specific site’s backend and you’d probably just need to use a different browser for that while you’re in development.

If anyone has a better way I’d like to hear it.

Just read that John Resig, the creator of jQuery, quit Mozilla to work for a company we’d never heard of called Kahn Academy. Can the internet change the way we educate children? Well duh of course it can – with Resig and Kahn working together looks like Kahn Academy might have it all figured out already.

JOBS: Computers are actually pretty simple. We’re sitting here on a bench in this cafe [for this part of the Interview]. Let’s assume that you understood only the most rudimentary of directions and you asked how to find the rest room. I would have to describe it to you in very specific and precise instructions. I might say, “Scoot sideways two meters off the bench. Stand erect. Lift left foot. Bend left knee until it is horizontal. Extend left foot and shift weight 300 centimeters forward …” and on and on. If you could interpret all those instructions 100 times faster than any other person in this cafe, you would appear to be a magician: You could run over and grab a milk shake and bring it back and set it on the table and snap your fingers, and I’d think you made the milk shake appear, because it was so fast relative to my perception. That’s exactly what a computer does. It takes these very, very simple-minded instructions—”Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it’s greater than this other number”—but executes them at a rate of, let’s say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic. That’s a simple explanation, and the point is that people really don’t have to understand how computers work. Most people have no concept of how an automatic transmission works, yet they know how to drive a car. You don’t have to study physics to understand the laws of motion to drive a car. You don’t have to understand any of this stuff to use Macintosh—but you asked [laughs].

This one was driving us nuts for a while. We had two images that were identical in size and resolution, yet one looked pixelated (aliased) on the iPhone while the other was sharp. Looking through the code didn’t help, everything was identical…

Luckily we had saved the original Photoshop files as templates and were able to go back and figure out that when saved for the web, the pixelated one had the progressive box ‘unchecked’ and the sharp one had progressive ‘checked’…

We haven’t found this mentioned anywhere on the Google. If anyone else has experienced this please comment. Also it may be more complicated than this maybe a combination of things, but just changing this checkbox seems to have fixed it for us.

* Disclaimer: The cat image above is a dramatization, we fixed the problem on the iphone before taking screenshots, but this is pretty much how bad it looked…

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Ok, now that the post got published I’m going to go back to trying to upload the photo I took at the Big East Tournament.

Last night mimo (AKA Brent) spoke at the Park Slope Civic Council’s ‘Growing a Business’ initiative at the Montauk Club in Park Slope. Here’s the notes we put together for the event and some thoughts that came afterward.

Your Website

Matt Mullenweg (The creator of WordPress) had this to say about publishing your own content on a website or blog vs using Facebook and Twitter:

Blogging (with WordPress) is the natural evolution of the lighter publishing methods — at some point you’ll have more to say than fits in 140 characters, is too important to put in Facebook’s generic chrome, or you’ve matured to the point where you want more flexibility and control around your words and ideas… Different mediums offer different messages.

The most important part of the quote above (to us) is: (your message) is too important to put in Facebook’s generic chrome … Having a website/blog lets you brand your ideas in a way that you can’t on social media sites, if you don’t spend time/money on that brand, your image is less likely to be taken seriously.

WordPress has become (by far) the most popular Content Management System for making websites. It’s literally a joy for web developers to make templates for this system, you can have any look imaginable, and it’s not a pain to implement it.

How important is Facebook?

We’ve been integrating Facebook ‘like’ buttons and links to Facebook & Twitter pages into all designs for a while now. Facebook has become a part of nearly every business’ marketing strategy and it’s for good reason. Google Trends, a service that shows search volume worldwide, shows that the activity for facebook is MUCH higher than Twitter. The top part of this graph shows the search activity of both:

Business teams and small businesses should make their employees admins on their facebook account so they don’t need to do all the work themselves — instructions for making someone a facebook admin.

I’m not trying to say that you shouldn’t be using Twitter, just that you absolutely need to be using Facebook. Twitter has it’s place and connects you to different people.

Change Your Workflow

You need to find a way to effortlessly integrate social media into your everyday routine.

You have a blog, you have a Facebook account, you have a Twitter account… there’s not really much of a point to have all these things if they’re just going to accumulate digital dust…

A few suggestions:

• If you find yourself taking notes on paper or in text documents in your computer that somehow relate to your business, change over to writing them as blog posts. The benefit of this is that they will be archived automatically so you can search for them later, you’ll also be able to drive more traffic to your site because these posts will have keywords in them that are relevant to your business. Also people might comment on them and you’ll make new connections.
• Look at your Facebook wall EVERY DAY as part of your routine. Find ways to connect with people through your posts. If you’re not finding this easy to do, keep at it or have someone else at your business keep up with it, no excuses.
• You should link up your Blog and your Facebook account so when you publish a blog post it automatically shows up on Facebook.

Someone had a good question last night which was hard to answer and has been sticking with me:

How do you know if you’re posting too much or being annoying to people…

It’s a legitimate concern. If you feel like what you’re writing is going to annoy people you’re probably right. It takes a certain skill to be able to talk about yourself and your business so if you don’t have it you should hire someone to do your PR person, this could even be new junior level employee you already have.

We’ve updated our WordPress shell to take advantage of HTML5, we’re also making it freely available as an open source project which we’re hoping will help others who are making custom WordPress themes and also push us to keep making it better.

Visit the HTML5 WordPress Shell Project Page

For some reason I never think to look for plug-ins for stuff like this, one exists and it’s pretty good. WP-minify. Same with IE6 24 bit transparency, we’ve always done it by hand but there’s a png transparency plugin that makes it easier to manage.

The designer needs to be ever present because, inevitably, at some side meeting, something will be suggested that will totally destroy the form of the logo. Something can be suggested innocently, with the best of intentions, that will scuttle all plans, compromise all standards, and destroy the integrity of the design. The only person who can know this and stop this is the designer.

Paula Scher