Erik Runyon

Today Luke Wroblewski asked: “What % of page views or visitors click on the Twitter or Facebook button on a page? Who’s willing to share some data?”. I shared some initial stats in the conversation, but I figured I’d pull some actual percentages to share with the dear reader.

A photo from BDConf San Diego (July 2013) has popped up here and there on the web in the months following, most recently in An Event Apart Flickr set. Quite often, as in this case, it is lacking context around what’s actually being depicted. The photo shows a responsive website printed out at the width of an iPhone. The reason it’s notable is because the result is a rather long website. However, this depiction of the site doesn’t actually get served to mobile devices.

About a year and a half ago I started researching the web development offerings at Notre Dame and found that there wasn’t a basic web development course. There were courses covering web design, javascript, mobile application development, and others, but nothing that covered the basics of getting into semantic HTML, CSS, and RWD. Taking a bit of a chance, I reached out to several departments to see if any of them would be interested in a new course. I received a fairly quick response from the Computer Applications Program and we quickly put together a plan to offer a course titled “Introduction to Web Development”.

It’s been fairly well documented that the average size of webpages has been growing by leaps and bounds, with images making up the majority of the size. Based on my own stats for 160+ HigherEd responsive sites, images account for 73% of the total download. And when you’re dealing with a long-form page like www.ND.edu, images can account for even more (92% to be exact). In a situation like this, finding ways to cut down on the number of images, or deferring the loading of images, can result in a huge impact on not just the download size, but load-time as well.

As a developer, I’m always interested in finding new tools. Often this comes from chatting with other developers and finding out what they use and why. In the spirit of this, below are the tools I use a daily basis in case it helps someone else find somethig useful.

If you’ve been doing web development for a while, you’ve no doubt worked with Flash. It was amazing in its heyday, allowing us to do things we couldn’t do with vanilla html/css/javascript. But like many technologies in the web, it was abused and used it ways it shouldn’t have, or were just plain obnoxious (Flash splash pages anyone?). But it wasn’t until the iPhone shipped without Flash support that most of us started to doubt its longevity.

In a recent discussion on Twitter, I was asked which podcasts I listen to. Since the list wouldn’t fit into a 140 character tweet, I figured I’d post the list here in case it would help others find new shows.

I’m a big fan of the AppleTV, so when Google announced the Chromecast for $35, I was immediately intrigued. The first thing you need to know is that it will not replace your AppleTV (if you have one). It has nowhere near the features of Apple’s $99 hobby device, but that doesn’t mean it’s not interesting.

This year I had the opportunity to present at Breaking Development. I’ve attended twice previously and always come away with more ideas and inspiration than I can feasibly find time to implement.

Carousels continue to be a hot topic. The numbers I posted back in January resulted in quite a bit of discussion. Out of curiosity, I decided to revisit the data now that I have more data to pull from. The following numbers are from January 1 through June 30, 2013. We’ll be looking at the same five sites which include ND.edu and four un-named Notre Dame sites.