ohryan.ca

A Web Developer in Winnipeg

  • Blog First, Tweet Later

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    WordCamp Winnipeg was absolutely amazing! I’ve literally been waiting my career to see this calibre of event in Winnipeg.

    David Pensato gave a really great talk about the future of social blogging. He made the keen observation that, with Facebook, Twitter and the like we are all blogging all the time.

    As an experiment, I am going to challenge myself to write a blog post instead of a Facebook status update, or tweet. I’m already seeing some potential issues with this idea, more on that later.

    Oh yeah, Peter Chester‘s talk on measuring WordPress performance was one of the best tech talks I’ve seen, ever!  Slides are here.

  • The best comment evar!

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    In reply to my August 2008 post “5 Reasons Tim Hortons Sucks” danno604 just wrote:

    Food is Appaulling, bordering on Euthenasia for the Elderly.
    Tim Hortons has horribly poor quality food – loaded with hydrogenated oils, white flour and sugar. The sandwiches and soup are so laden with sodium my tongue is sore.

    I’m mystified why this place is a magnet for old people. Is this some kind of end-of life instinct, like dolphins beaching themselves, to go to Tims?

  • Please don’t customize social media icons

    Please don’t customize social media icons

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    When I put on my front-end developer hat, I’m often the last line of defence between the client and an unfortunate typo, bad idea or missed opportunity. I’m the last pair of eyes to examine a design before it hits the development environment. Designers probably hate me for it, but if I see a design choice that doesn’t make sense to me, I’ll mention it.

    One of the most common design choice that irks me is customized social media icons. Web designers seem to have an inescapable need to redesign Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, whatever.app’s icons to match the overall look and feel of the site. One one hand, I can almost understand the appeal, these logos can stick out like a sore thumb. On the other hand, that’s the entire point!

    Brands like Twitter and Facebook spend massive amounts of time and money tweaking their identity. They spend even more money marketing their brand, getting it in everybody’s face. Facebook’s white ‘F’, Twitter’s blue bird are immediately recognizable. In my humble opinion, if you actually want website’s visitor to notice and use those sharing features I’m supposed to implement, it’s probably a good idea to follow the social network’s brand guidelines. If you want people to share your content or follow the @account, it’s not a great idea to have the social media icons BLEND IN WITH THE REST OF THE SITE!

    I’d love to do an A/B test to examine this theory.