Author Archives: Jay Buys

Finding your edge

By Jay Buys October 29, 2012

If you’d have told me a year ago that I’d be writing a blog post based on something I heard in a yoga class I’d have called you crazy but a few months ago Visceral dev guru Kevin Freiberger convinced me to try a class and it’s been a great experience.  (Note: If you live in San Diego and you haven’t been to MOSAIC, you’re seriously missing out.) Read Full Post

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Solve Together, Execute Apart

By Jay Buys June 6, 2012

I just finished reading “Design is a Job” by Mike Monteiro. It’s a veritable how-to guide for running a design business and must-read for anyone in this industry. While I won’t review the entire book (trust me, just go buy it), one point of Monteiro’s was a particular favorite; Solve Together, Execute Apart. Read Full Post

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Mobile App/Game Development with Corona SDK

By Jay Buys March 13, 2012

By far the most talked about technology right now is mobile.  According to recent reports by the Pew Research Center, nearly half of American adults now own a smartphone. We’ve blogged before about creating sites with jQuery Mobile and the recent trend toward responsive design, but what about native games and apps? Read Full Post

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Responsive Web Design Book Review

By Jay Buys August 3, 2011

Every once in a while a book comes along that changes how we think about designing and building websites. Nearly a decade ago that book was "Designing with Web Standards" by Jeffrey Zeldman. It taught us to shun table-based layouts and push ahead with semantic markup, to embrace standards and shun hacks.

Today I think that book is "Responsive Web Design" by Ethan Marcotte. Read Full Post

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Content Management Face Off

By Jay Buys June 3, 2011

What’s the best Content Management System for our website?

It’s a question we hear a lot these days.  Pretty much every web project that crosses our desks has one thing in common; a Content Management System (CMS).  The days of hard-coded websites are over.  As websites have grown more dynamic, interactive, and social, the requirement for their continual update has become a necessity. Content strategy is growing as a defined discipline and helping organizations to formalize an approach to publishing their content. As such, the number of CMS options has exploded. Read Full Post

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Quick Tip – Text Re-sizing in Visual Studio 2010

By Jay Buys November 12, 2010

This is probably old news by now but I just happened to stumble onto one of the new features of Visual Studio 2010 by accident and thought I’d share. Read Full Post

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Beanstalk – Online Version Control

By Jay Buys October 18, 2010

Version control is something that every developer is (or should be) concerned with since it offers many advantages for a development team. It allows multiple developers to work on a project simultaneously, it maintains an archive of previous versions, and it can act as an auxiliary backup system.

One of the challenges for a small shop however, can be setup, deployment, and maintenance of a server to house the version control system.  For my own small company, another challenge is that our developers reside in separate locations, thousands of miles away. Read Full Post

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Book Review: HTML5 for Web Designers

By Jay Buys August 1, 2010

As developers we’re constantly tasked with keeping up with coding techniques, learning new technologies, and sorting out the “wow, that’s awesome” from the “not actually useful because of IE6, etc”. With HTML5 being the latest game-changing industry buzzword we’re once again forced to dig through all the clutter. Thankfully, Jeremy Keith has done the digging for us.

I blogged about Jeremy’s DOM Scripting book a couple of years ago and when I read that book I thought that he’d done the seemingly impossible. He took a convoluted and confusing subject and made it simple and accessible.  With this new book, Jeremy has done the same for HTML5. Read Full Post

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Sitefinity Add to Calendar Control for Events Module

By Jay Buys October 11, 2009

Sitefinity CMS recently opened a Marketplace section of their website where community members can contribute various resources such as controls, modules, or themes. Since I’ve been using Sitefinity a lot lately I thought I’d submit a control that I wrote for one of my latest projects. Read Full Post

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Right Aligned CSS Background Images / IE Word Wrap Bug

By Jay Buys September 8, 2009

I recently built a design that called for various navigation elements to have bullets aligned to the right of each link. It seemed simple enough but turned out to be harder than I’d imagined.
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