July 2011
7 posts
Why you should never do little updates for free
“A man with a broken car goes into a garage. The mechanic lifts up the bonnet, looks around and whacks a part of it with a hammer.The car now starts.
‘That’ll be £100,’ he says.
The man looks astonished. ‘£100 - you just hit it with a hammer.’
‘Ah,’ says the mechanic, ‘hitting with the hammer costs £1, you’re paying £99 for my knowing...
What's the maximum size for an email attachment
As of time of writing, gmail sets their attachment limit at 25MB so that would be a fair estimate.
Stating the obvious
If you’re doing something well, but believe that it’s really obvious, because it’s just ‘common sense’, you might find that other people (or even yourself six months down the line) may not quite get it so readily, so immediately.
It’s better to state the obvious.
If you’re an organisation with a series of websites, they should all seem like they come...
TO DO
Every time you type // TO DO into your code, go into your bug tracking software and add a technical debt and estimate how long it will take you to complete.
You will never, never do it otherwise.
data attribute rather than id for testing
Testers require the ability to find a button and click it. Ids are useful for that purpose, but inelegant on a large page with many items. Also all items are equal - you’re targeting an element, rather than a unique instance of a type of item.
A reliable meta information schema for testing is required.
You could use the data attribute for that e.g instead if id=”login-link”, use...
Why infinite scroll is unhelpful
1) The OS scrollbar shows how long the page is and how far down you are. This is now removed
2) The scrollbar allows you to move up and down a page. Now it has become a hyperlink, loading another page.
3) It forces the user to load content, which they may not expect or want to do (e.g. on a slow connection)
4) It prevents users from viewing any page footer.
