At a previous job I had a project where I needed to retrieve data from YouTube and Vimeo. While YouTube always returns data even with an invalid video id, the Vimeo script element returns a 404 Not Found error on an invalid video ID. The jQuery version of JSONP does not support error handling and I needed to tell the user that an error had occured.

JSONP is a method of getting cross domain data using the browser by injecting a script element that points to a cross domain source and passing in the URL query string the name of a callback function. The script element calls the callback function with the passed data as the function argument. You could make a call like:

http://tanny.ica.com/ICA/TKO/test.nsf/jsondoc.js?unid=B933790B1DC265ED8025725800728CC5&callback=dir.showDoc

Which would return:

dir.showDoc({
    "firstname":"Adam",
    "middleinitial":"",
    "lastname":"Aaron",
    "fullname":Adam Aaron/ROCKALL,
    "shortname":"AAaron",
    "unid":"B933790B1DC265ED8025725800728CC5"
});

Continue Reading "JSONP with Error Checking..."

Welcome to Sky, a design I've been working on and off on since May 2013. I was let go last week because of cost cutting from my job and decided that I needed to get serious about completing the design since I view my web site as my business card. I'm using the original sky graphic from the first version of my web site, artifacts and all as a tribute to my original design.

After looking at Jeffrey Zeldman's efforts on his design where he went to a single column, I thought I'd try that too. In my case though the font size and width increase for large monitors, tablets, and phones. That's if the media queries work correctly. Since the design is single column I decided not to do a specific design for mobile devices, other than increasing the font size. That means that there isn't a meta element for mobile. We'll see how that works out. I also decided to not do a print style sheet for the first time since 2003. I hope the website is readable and easy to use with a unified experience on all devices.

One of the items I struggled with was search, since I believe search is important for a website. I didn't want a large search field in the header. In this case I'm using the focus pseudo class to expand the search field. Otherwise the search field looks like a flat button.

When creating a comment you now have the ability to use strike through and block quotes in addition to bold, italic, and create a URL.

I have a couple of javascript articles in the queue and hope to publish them soon.