For me, Facebook has run it’s course, so I deleted my account. Sure, it’s a great place to connect with your family and friends and stalk that old crush from high school, but does it really benefit you and your family? One of the reasons that I’ve waited this long is because my mother joined Facebook a while back and I love my mommy! She loves seeing pictures and videos of her grand kids, but is that enough for me to continue to steal time from my children and bring stress and anxiety upon myself? Is Facebook the only channel in which to share your life with family and friends? Does Facebook have a monopoly on social interaction? I don’t think so. I’m on Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, Flickr, Youtube, etc. You can email me at elizeo@interactivebynature dot net and I have my own blog which you’re reading right now.
Everyone that knows me knows that I’m a huge Star Wars fan. I was born in 1975, so I grew up with Star Wars. In 1996, the year after I graduated high school, Taco Bell was giving away Star Wars toys with their kids meals and I was able to collect them all. I have two sets. One still in the original packaging and another opened to play with. I have a box in the attic filled with Star Wars toys and memorabilia and now my two sons are starting their own Star Wars toy collection. They have more than I do now! I guess what I’m trying to say is that the whole Benavidez family are HUGE Star Wars fans!
You can probably guess that when I saw these behind-the-scenes photo’s released yesterday on imgur.com, I was excited to say the least. Without further adieu:
Back in February I attended the HTML5 Denver Users Group presentation – Making Your UI Scream (Not Your Users) by Wesley Hales. From the title of the presentation you can probably guess that his talk was about website performance. Most of what he had to say about performance, I’ve heard before, but one of the things that Wesley brought up was reflow. I’ve built plenty of websites and performance is always at the top of my list, but I never looked too much into reflow. This was my biggest takeaway from Wesley. Now that performance for mobile websites is a huge consideration, I’ve been interested in other micro-optimizations. Maybe another reason that I haven’t taken reflow into consideration before is because I follow one of Wesley’s rules: Don’t let micro-optimizations weigh you down. Finish the project first.
More On Reflow
Reflow is the process in which the browser calculates the positions and geometries of all the elements in the DOM tree for visual presentation. Reflow is a user-blocking browser operation that can effect the UX, and in this day-and-age of immediate gratification, performance is a very important UX consideration. One of the most powerful things about jQuery is it’s ability to easily manipulate the DOM with methods like .show(), .hide() and .attr(), but in order to minimize reflow you should avoid touching the DOM as much as possible.
We want the sex and not the kids. We want the check and not the job. Most of all we want the blessing but don’t answer to God. Got a closet full of clothes and empty bank accounts. If you need a handout, we got nothing; we bounce!
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So, we do whatever, eat whatever, smoke whatever, fuck whoever, wear whatever, shake whatever, sell whatever, it’s now or never.
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If Grandma and Grandpa saw how we behaved, they would probably spin around like yo-yo’s in their grave.
Last Friday I attended a free mobile app training session with Apigee. We used jQuery Mobile combined with PhoneGap to produce a rich native mobile application. The training session was led up by Tim Anglade, Head of Developer Programs & Evangelism at Apigee. Tim has an impressive resume and is completely comfortable speaking in front of a crowd.
jQuery Mobile
The first half of the morning was spent introducing jQuery Mobile followed up by a crash-course in using the mobile web UI framework. Tim also introduced a drag-and-drop WYSIWYG called Codiqa to keep things moving for those unfamiliar with jQuery Mobile. Codiqa is great because you can use it as a prototyping tool and share designs with clients and/or collaborators. Having used jQuery Mobile since it’s first alpha release, I chose to open up TextMate and go to town.
As a single father, I’m starting to realize how difficult it is to date with children. One thing that makes this even more challenging, is that I prefer to date women without children. Call me double-standard, but I know what I want.
I haven’t done a whole lot of dating since the divorce and have only brought 2 women around my boys in an attempt to get serious and take it to the next level. Both of them broke it off with me because of my youngest sons all-of-a-suden manipulative behavior. He would do things like ask my girlfriend to help him hang up pictures in his room, but when she would look to see what the pictures were, they were of me, the boys and my ex-wife all happy together. Another time he randomly walked up to her and handed her a VHS tape and said “Look! It’s my mom and dads wedding video”. His signature move was to go to his room and cry as loud as he could while I had her over.
How do you react when it’s so obvious that he doesn’t want you around? I don’t blame either one of them for bailing on me. Both of them have never dated a man with children before, so I’m sure this left a bad taste in their mouth about dating men with “baggage”. My oldest son seems to be okay with whatever I do. When asked how he feels about me dating, he said “I just want you to be happy dad”.
I read a lot of blogs and often see an embedded tweet and think… how did they do that? Well, I figured it out and I’m going to share this simple process with you. It’s literally just a matter copying a little HTML and pasting it in your blog or web page. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, the embedded tweet looks like this:
This is great because the embedded tweet comes fully equip with Reply, Retweet and Favorite options. It also gives you the option to follow the person that owns the embedded tweet. Any images posted in the tweet will display as well. It’s basically the fully featured tweet that you would see on Twitter or other Twitter applications like TweetDeck.
Last nite I was up super late moving my blog from /blog/wordpress/ to root/. It was quite the process, but I survived. One of my main worries is that Google has indexed all of my posts and some have been bookmarked by visitors. Instead of those users and Google indexed links being SOL, I needed a way to redirect all users using the old links to the new directory, the root/. Instead of doing a 301 Redirect on each post, I came up with the the following solution.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^blog/wordpress/(.*)$ /$1 [R=301,L]
At a high level, when a URL entering my blog contains /blog/wordpress/, it get’s redirected to root/. The $1 takes everything that was after /blog/wordpress/ and adds it to the end of the new URL (root/).
This month I attended a new meetup called DenverJS that focuses on, you probably guessed it, JavaScript. Being a client-side programmer in Denver, I’m really excited about this one! In this post, I want to briefly review the 2013 kickoff session at Galvanize.
What about DenverJS?
Straight from their meetup profile:
Focused on developing the Javascript community along the Front Range! We welcome any and all interested in Javascript and related technologies. We will be weighted towards node.js and server-side topics to balance out the already awesome Denver HTML5 group.
