Erik L. Arneson — Writer and Software Developer

Now Working with CommerceCollective!

2015-05-26T15:02:27+00:00

I am now working with my good friends at CommerceCollective! CommerceCollective is a web presence management company located here in Portland, Oregon, and they are great at SEO and social media stuff. They also are really talented web designers. If you’re looking for a full website solution, from design down to the nuts and bolts, we are the place to go.

I’ll be supplementing their services with full-stack web development, IT consulting, and a little bit of copy writing. Read more about our team here!

Don't Modify the Clipboard with JavaScript

2015-03-02T16:42:53+00:00

Recently, I was reading an article about a newly published book that I’m interested in. However, the article didn’t include a link to the book, so I copied the title by highlighting it with the mouse and hitting ‘Ctrl-C’, and opened a new browser tab to do a search. However, upon pasting, I saw the book title along with an annoying addition: “To read more, visit our website at [redacted].”

This sort of website behavior is not okay.

I’ve seen the behavior on a number of websites, and it is among my least favorite trends in web development. The user is probably using his clipboard for one of two reasons. First, the website has a UX problem, and it has neglected to link to something important. Second, the user needs the text either for a quote, or to look up an unrelated term. For instance, this sentence has the word “bucolic” in it, and that’s an uncommon word that you might want to look up.

But you can’t easily, because I’ve included JavaScript on this page that modifies your copy buffer. Do you see how annoying that is? Please don’t go mucking about in your users’ copy buffers.

If you want to see what happens when you try to copy and paste on this page, highlight some text on the page and hit ‘Ctrl-C’ (or ‘Cmd-C’ for OS X users). Then go to the handy text area below and paste with ‘Ctrl-V’.

That’s really obnoxious, isn’t it?

This post was updated in 2022 to use Jekyll to load custom JavaScript instead of a custom WordPress plugin.

The image for this post comes from Flickr user Shimelle Laine.

Pansophie Online Color Test

2015-02-23T16:46:52+00:00

Pansophie Personality and Color is focused on mapping personalities to colors. Alexandra Hall wanted an online testing platform with flexible questions, testing mechanisms, and report generation. I built a full-featured web application to meet Pansophie PC’s requirements. This was one of my early Zend Framework projects, but it ended up with some neat features.

A private administrative interface
Seamless jQuery-backed test interface with few pageloads
Custom PDF reports, generated on the fly
A customer database with contact information
API endpoints for test generation
Integration with 3rd party e-commerce system

Pansopie PC isn’t currently doing business.

When to Develop Apps From Scratch

2015-02-03T20:56:10+00:00

I haven’t had time to write anything interesting for the blog this week, so instead check out Sebastian Green’s article, “A transparent box: the case for developing from scratch,” which has been published over at Developer Drive.

Mr Green makes some great arguments for developing from scratch. Good software takes good planning, no matter what.

Web Page Size is Vital

2015-01-19T20:05:17+00:00

When I first learned how to program a computer, optimization was a big deal. Figuring out how to squeeze every bit of performance out of a subroutine was difficult but rewarding. Articles were frequently written about how to best go about optimizing source code.

In the late 1990s, I began working on my first web applications. Bandwidth was expensive, so we worked on ways to make our websites more compact. We compressed web pages and figured out ways to strip out whitespace. However, today websites have quite a bit going on in the front of the house. There’s a lot of JavaScript and CSS that gets passed to the browser, and as a result, web applications are transmitting more data than ever.

Tammy Everts writes a blog called Web Performance Today, where she follows trends in web application development. It is essential for web developers to pay attention to the amount of data they send to users and how that affects application performance.

https://twitter.com/tameverts/status/555780016563564544

Ms Everts has shown over and over that web pages are growing. She points out that the average web page has grown 186% since 2010, and it shows no sign of stopping. I believe that every responsible web developer owes it to himself ((Or herself.)) to follow Ms Everts’ blog.

Please, fellow web developers, pay attention to how big your web pages are getting. Let’s reverse this trend.

Bootstrap and WordPress

2014-12-09T16:44:32+00:00

I’ve used Twitter Bootstrap many times in web applications. It really makes building an application interface fast and easy, primarily because I don’t have to worry much about design. Bootstrap makes things a lot easier for a developer who doesn’t do good design work.

Speaking of design work, this website is not very pretty at the moment. I want to make it look better, so I’ve been looking at different WordPress themes. A theme based on Bootstrap seemed like a good idea. That way, the appearance of my website would match the applications I’ve built for my clients. Nice, right? I came across WordPress Bootstrap from 320 Press and thought it might look good.

I decided to pursue other themes, however. My initial concern was that the website didn’t look any better with WordPress Bootstrap, but I also realized that perhaps Bootstrap wasn’t such a good fit for WordPress. Fränk Klein makes some great arguments against a Bootstrap-backed WordPress theme in his article, Why Bootstrap is a Bad Fit for WordPress Themes.