Personal business card style website

I recently uploaded a very basic business card style website to www.erikphipps.com (which I forgot I even owned!). The idea came to me when a co-worker sent me a link to a one page website for one of the people behind Vimeo (and other websites). I did some research and found a whole bunch of [...]

My first online design portfolio

I’ve been meaning to post my first online design portfolio for some time now. The site was built 6 or so years ago around the time I was transitioning from being a print graphic artist to a full time web designer. It’s chock full of table-based static html websites, club flyers, and random flash goodies. [...]

Test environment for supported browsers using Microsoft’s free virtual pc’s

With the release of IE8 RC1, I’ve realized that my supported browser testing environment is sadly lacking. The best way to create a testing environment with all the supported versions of Internet Explorer is to use the free virtual machines supplied by Microsoft themselves. In order get full use out of the virtual machines, I’ve [...]

Law firm crushes small startup over simple hypertext links

In a case that brings back a feeling of dread in my gut similarly to the judge fancy-pants fiasco, a large law firm has successfully shut down a small start-up who simply posted some run of the mill hypertext links. The lawsuit stated that the start-up was committing trademark infringement. Subsequently, I have infringed five [...]

z-index fixes are sometimes easier than you think

I ran into the dreaded IE7/IE6 z-index rendering bug today. I knew it was going to show its ugly head once I began troubleshooting the UI component I was working on, but little did I expect it to slide itself behind nearly every element it was supposed to cover! I contemplated a jQuery solution but [...]

Build HTML/CSS pages or components from the ground up

When building HTML/CSS pages or components, I usually follow specific steps in order to keep my code clean and concise. The trick is to start with the base foundation and then slowly drill your way down to the very smallest inline element. These steps aren’t set in stone of course, and I often mix things [...]

Plastic food containers are the socks of kitchen items

The title of this post says it all, but I’ll explain further. I was doing dishes while Naomi was struggle to find some plastic food containers to put our lunches in. She continued searching, all-the-while complaining that we had too many miss-matched pieces, and that was when it struck me. She makes the same exact [...]

IE6 sniffer using conditional comments

I needed a fail-proof Internet Explorer 6 JavaScript sniffer and it seemed like everything I Googled warned of possible scenarios where it could possibly not work. Then It struck me that since I only needed to detect one version of Internet Explorer I could make a very simple script using Internet Explorer’s conditional comments. I [...]

Quirks mode buried but not dead

Good old Quirks Mode. It’s like an undead being slumbering in a forgotten sarcophagus waiting for some unsuspecting designer to stumble upon it. A few weeks or so ago, I began a UI project that, over the years, was designed for Internet Explorer’s Quirks Mode rendering engine. I hadn’t worked on markup for Quirks Mode [...]

How to reduce FireBug’s memory usage

I love FireBug but one day it became a memory behemoth! It was consuming over 800k every hour or so of work. I did a little poking around and found that I had inadvertently set network monitoring, console logging and JavaScript debugging to be on by default. After a little digging, I found the tip [...]