Erik Runyon

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.

This was quite a year for web development. It seemed like every week there was a new framework or tool appearing on the scene. Below are what I consider the highs and lows of web development in 2014.

My presentation for HighEdWeb 2014 in Portland was about how to use offline web technologies. The focus was primarily on Web Storage and Appcache, but also touched on Web SQL and IndexedDB.

I like to stand. Not for any specific reason, just in general. If I’m left to my own devices when eating at home, I’ll stand in the kitchen or walk around the house while eating (much to wife’s chagrin). Pretty much anywhere I can get away with standing over sitting, I will. Maybe it’s because for my entire professional career, I’ve had to sit for 8-10 hours every day, that when I wasn’t “at a computer”, I opted to stand. So four years ago when I started reading about the health benefits of standing, I took to it immediately.

Web design goes through trends. Web development goes through trends. It happens. We find something that works, or we see something we like, and it gets copied and propragated around the web. I’ve lamented some practices such as scroll-jacking, and commented about how ineffective carousels can be. I’ve never done the former, the latter… way too many times. But there are recent trends centered around trying to get a visitors information, interaction, or increasing ad impressions that have become downright frustrating. I’m sure I’m not the only one, but I’m to the point that if a site employs one of the following “trends”, I will leave immediately and not come back.