Launched: IHG Instagram Sweepstakes

Posted on by jibran Posted in Development, Portfolio

IHG SweepstakesOver the course of June and early July I spent five weeks helping the development team at Possible Seattle crank out an awesome Instagram driven sweepstakes site for IHG. I was responsible for the gallery section, which is driven mostly by JavaScript, AJAX and jQuery. It was a challenge to devise a solution that worked for both mobile and desktop. From scrolling to searching to filtering to pagination—I had my hands full and learned a ton along the way.

So go ahead click around and check it out.
http://discover.ihg.com/

Posted in: Development, Portfolio  |   |  Leave a comment

I Want A Way to Estimate Without Estimating

Posted on by jibran Posted in Uncategorized

It’s not a difficult concept to understand. I do work. But first I must provide an estimate, a number for that work. A f***ing number. To represent the length of time it will take me to do the aforementioned work. It’s too small of a box. I don’t know the future. And I don’t want to know. It’s much funner that way. The unknown.

So if one wanted to not work like that, in an unconfined by numbers approach, one would have to think a little differently. You put the importance on creating something amazing. Rather than creating something in the allotted time. A number created out of thin air. Well, not only thin air, maybe a few experiences might back that up, but still it’s a box.

So the potentiality of this happening is contingent on one thing happening. Change your thinking. It’s not that I’ll create you something in the allotted time, it’s that I’ll create you something amazing.

Posted in: Uncategorized  |  Tagged with: , ,  |  Leave a comment

Launched: Get Your Shit Together

Posted on by jibran Posted in Development, Portfolio

Get Your Shit TogetherGood Evening. I am pleased to announce the launch of a new site for one of my clients. Get Your Shit Together is a site dedicated to helping people get their finances, wills, living wills and other life details in order in the event that a loved one passes. The site gives you a checklist of what you need to take care before a tragedy strikes, so that you can focus on what matters and not the red tape.

So without further adieu, please Get Your Shit Together.

Updated: The New York Times did an article featuring my client and her story. Read it here.

Update: And now there is a boing boing article about her site. Check it out here.

Well, shit, instead of updating this post every time a new press article comes out we created a press page just for that, right here.

Posted in: Development, Portfolio  |  Tagged with:  |  Leave a comment

W3C Link Checker and Robots.txt Exclusion

Posted on by jibran Posted in Development

I was ready. I had just finished updating the last few links (and some content) on my clients website and I was ready to check for broken links. I opened the trusty link checker over at W3C Schools and got the following error:

Error: 403 Forbidden by robots.txt

This particular site is a WordPress site and I use the Google XML Sitemap plugin to handle all that stuff, which, in this case defaults to using WordPress to generate the robots.txt. I could, in the WordPress settings, allow search engines access but this was the staging server and I couldn’t allow robots to start searching and indexing it.

What I needed was an exception to allow the W3C Link Checker to search the site.

To solve this problem I first copied the exact text from the dynamically generated robots.txt file. I did this by navigating to the file at the root: http://yourclientsdomain/robots.txt. Next, I created a temporary robots.txt file in the root of the site. In it I pasted the exact text from the first step. Then from the W3C Link Checker documentation I added a robots exclusion rule for only their site. Like so:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /

User-Agent: W3C-checklink
Disallow:

This allows the link checker access to the site, but continues to block all other robots. Once finished I renamed the robots.txt file in the root to robots_backup.txt. I wanted to keep it for the time being. I will be link checking again once we go live. Eventually I will delete it. Happy coding.

Posted in: Development  |  Tagged with: , ,  |  Leave a comment

WordPress JetPack Site Stats: Fully Ignore Logged-In Users

Posted on by jibran Posted in Development

Recently, I noticed that WordPress JetPack Site Stats were reporting unusually high numbers on one of my blogs.

I know it was likely that the extra counts came from me making many updates to the site. But why now? And why since I had the correct settings set to ignore logged in users? Like so:

Jetpack -> Configure WordPress.com Stats -> Uncheck 'Count the page views of registered users who are logged in.'

Knowing that my refreshes were likely the issue I continued along this line of questioning and found out the issue.

When logging into WordPress admin the ‘Remember me’ checkbox must be checked. This ensures that your cookie is set, which ensures that the above setting actually does what it says.

A disclaimer below the setting would be helpful I do believe, yes. Something like:

Unchecking this box to ignore page views of logged in users will only work if you checked the 'Remember me' box upon logging in.

I’m sure there’s a better way to word that. Mayhap I’ll take another stab at it later.

Posted in: Development  |  Tagged with: ,  |  Leave a comment

One Big Problem with Google Drive

Posted on by jibran Posted in Uncategorized

It’s simple. Google Drive is a great product but does not allow you to share files and folders with non-Google emails. The recipient is notified of insufficient privileges or that he/she needs to create an account. This is obviously a business decision aimed to recruit more users but to me greatly hinders the service.

If you have an opinion one way or another please add it to the discussion at the link below. My main goal is to get Google’s official position on the matter.

https://productforums.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/drive/DamCXlJUmgg

Thank you.

Posted in: Uncategorized  |  Tagged with: ,  |  Leave a comment

Launched: Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Launch Website

Posted on by jibran Posted in Portfolio

I am pleased to announce that after six weeks of non-stop fun at Zaaz Seattle, we have launched the new Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Launch website. I landed this contract in early August and it has been a steady grind to cram as many features as possible into a very tight timeline. The last two days have been a riot, working late hours, collaborating and solving many problems, listening to very loud hip hop, jazz and dubstep and eating lots of good sushi. That’s right, this site was powered by dubstep and sushi.

So go forth and poke around. It’s a solid website built with mobile first in mind and scales beautifully to many devices: Windows Phones, Windows Tablets, Android Phones, iPhones, iPads and of course all of your modern desktop browsers. It also comes in 14 different languages. I’m most proud of the language picker in the footer. It took some serious tinkering and wrangling to get it to work right in the many different devices we needed to support. Go check it out.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Launch Website

Posted in: Portfolio  |  Tagged with: , , ,  |  Leave a comment

Today I Had to Override Default Styling on an iOS HTML Input

Posted on by jibran Posted in Code Samples, Development

On contract to help develop the new Visual Studio 2012 launch site, today I had to override the default styling on an iOS textbox. With both an iPhone and iPad in hand I discovered the following post on SO.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2918707/turn-off-iphone-safari-input-element-rounding

It’s simple. Since Safari is a webkit browser you simply need to apply the following styles.

input { -webkit-appearance: none; border-radius: 0; }

There are a couple caveats but read up at the link above for more info.

Posted in: Code Samples, Development  |  Tagged with: ,  |  Leave a comment

Launched: Pella Professional

Posted on by jibran Posted in Development, Portfolio

Pella Professional (screenshot)Good day. I’m excited to share with you that after many long Seattle winter months, we have finally launched the Pella Professional website. My post is a few days late as it went live last Thursday, Apr 26 2012, but meh… whatever. I began this contract in the fall, in November 2011, cranking out data models, code and millions of miles of content XML. A big thanks to the rock star development team at Zaaz for this work.

So go ahead, click around, gawk, talk and share it if you like: Pella Professional.

Posted in: Development, Portfolio  |   |  Leave a comment

Changing Perspective on Text in Illustrator 5

Posted on by jibran Posted in Video Production

This is more for me, in case I forget, but if it helps you out, I’ll turn around and pick a bail of cotton.

  • Create outline of text in question (Command-Shift-O).
  • Select Free Transform Tool (Shortcut Key E).
  • Grab hold of a corner (double click or double tap) then press Command, Command-Alt or Command-Alt-Shift.
  • This puts the text in perspective mode. Adjust as necessary.

Enjoi.
-J

Posted in: Video Production  |   |  Leave a comment