Erik Runyon

This is the first in a series prompted by a Sparkbox initiative called “The Shift”. The idea being the first Monday of each month a topic will be announced, and then on the last Friday, everyone taking part in the topic post a link to their article with the hashtag #startYourShift. This months topic: “How to Make the Web Better”.

I’ve never been one for New-Years resolutions, but I do like to make myself a list of items I’d like to accomplish over the next year. This rarely, if ever, centers around the typical weight-loss/exercise resolutions as I prefer to focus my goals around learning and growing professionally.

This week, the guys over at ATP listed off the 2015 tech they’re thankful for. Here’s my list:

HTTP/2, the successor to SPDY is finally gaining traction on both browsers and web servers. For my own benefit (and hopefully yours), I’ll be documenting relevant articles and information here.

This month I had the pleasure of presenting at Frontend Conference Zurich a two-day double-track conference working to establish itself as Switzerland’s leading conference on state-of-the-art frontend and UX technologies. The conference is an excellent platform for Swiss and European researchers, developers and designers to present their projects, latest research and technologies in the fields of Web technologies, Web design and UX/HCI (Human Computer Interaction).

This past Spring I once again taught an Into to Web Development class at the University of Notre Dame. While the class structure didn’t change too much other than updating for the various changes in web development that occured over the past 1.5 years, the way I had students turn in assignments changed quite a bit.

This month I attended my fifth Breaking Development Conference. BDConf is a boutique multi-location conference about the mobile web. It is a gathering of passionate, forward thinking web professionals looking to improve their mobile and Responsive Design skills and to interact with industry leaders in the areas of mobile design and User Experience. Below are the description and relevant links from my presentation.

I had the privilege to present at Front End Design Conference this year. Below are the description and relevant links from the presentation.

Wufoo is a great form service. Not only is the build interface quick and easy to understand, it works well for statically hosted sites such as this. However, unlike the traditional embedded forms we all know, it’s not readibly obvious how to dynamically modify field data such as a username, or some info about the visitors environment. Luckily they provide a couple of different ways to do this.

Twenty-fourteen saw an addition of 89 institutions (see the list below) to the HigherEd RWD directory, bringing the total to 252. So how is higher-ed stacking up to the industry as a whole? According to a HTTP Archive report, the average industry page weight in 2014 increased by 15% to 1.95 MB, with an average of 95 requests. So while the total number requests are lower, the average size for higher-ed sites (desktop) is nearly half a megabyte larger than the rest of the industry.