Asymptomatic

Seething Designer Rant

Many designers (and the people that hire them) don't realize or appreciate what happens on the development side of their web projects. Tweaking things a pixel this way or that for them is a matter of dragging it around in Photoshop until it looks good. They then hand it off to a developer expecting it's done, when in reality we not only need to do the same thing they did (at least in terms of positioning, if not aesthetics), but we have to do it by typing in code that they're typically completely incapable of producing themselves. Regardless of having to reproduce their designs in code, we frequently need at least rudimentary skills with design tools like Photoshop both to open their files and prepare their designs for the web, and the overlap is such that the only things we're really missing are 4 years of design classes (trivial compared to what we're forced by our profession to learn almost daily), and that harder to obtain ineffable sense of what "looks good".

In addition to converting their designs to code, we often need to produce, install, or at least troubleshoot a back end that lets someone create content, make it account in some way for the fact that those content creators are going to screw up the designer's pixel-perfect vision for the site with poorly-formed content, and code it all so that it scales over hundreds of pages that individually vary the one or two designs they've so elegantly produced. And too often, we're left to explain issues to the client of why the site doesn't do anything interactive (because there's no design for it), or why their navigation colors won't appear on top of the image that the client swaps in later (because it doesn't magically change from low-contrast black to high-contrast white), or why search engines will never find that paragraph of text that absolutely must be in that bizzaro font in that weird texture pattern in front of that stock art I've seen lately on your competitor's site.

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Create Thumbnail in PHP

I wanted to get some thumbnail creation code in PHP to use for a little project I was working on, and so I traipsed over to Google and asked for "php thumbnail". I took a peek at the first search result, snagged the code, inserted it in my test app, and went merrily on my way. And that will be the last time I trust Google to find me code.

There are many problems with the code that I got. It's not malicious, but it does many easy things wrong. And the one thing that it's supposed to do well - the thing for which Google found it - it doesn't do correctly.

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So Much More

There is so much stuff going on, I'm not even sure where to begin.

If you missed it, yesterday's April Fools Day activities went off quite well. Thanks a bunch to skippy, moeffju, and chrisjdavis for helping out and playing along.

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