About Me
I'm Jeff Fal, and I'm an information architect and front-end developer working in Denver. I have been working on the Web since 1998 and am interested in learning at least a little about most Web technologies. I'm most experienced with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Flex. Soft Werewolf is my place to play.
Category Archives: Development
Memory management with Objective-C
The most daunting thing about learning Objective-C after living in the world of high level scripting languages is the memory management. From the beginning, I figured it would be a hassle, but I didn’t think it would be complicated. Turns out, it’s not even though there’s a lot written out there on the Web that [...]
Introducing Dungeonism
Blog went dark for a while. Hmmm… I guess I was concentrating too hard on my new project Dungeonism. It’s a dungeon crawling game for iPhone. I’ve been coding it since January, and I estimate it’s 50% done, but that might be optimistic. The gameplay is certainly 50% done, but after that, I have a [...]
Tagged dungeon crawling, dungeonism, games, ios, iPhone 1 Comment
Adobe Edge experiment: Eddie the Brick
Adobe has seen the future — or at least a potential future — and they have prepared accordingly. If Flash meets an untimely end, Adobe Edge will rise to take its place. Even if Flash sticks around, Adobe Edge is a cool little tool that lets you add HTML/CSS/JS animation to a page in a [...]
Tagged adobe, adobe edge, animation, eddie the brick, edge, html, javascript Leave a comment
Scrapy helps me scrape
Between a recent Edward Tufte talk in Denver and the Kindle release of Flowing Data’s new book, my distraction of choice lately has been data visualization. In particular, I’ve been on the hunt for data about my city. I had an idea for a chart displaying a map of houses in Denver color-coded by year [...]
Tagged data, denver, python, scrapy Leave a comment
Splitter: A split-testing plugin for WordPress
I built a new little WordPress plugin called Splitter, and I’m using it to run A/B tests on Truth (plus lies). Its purpose is to show different users slightly different page layouts and report back to Google Analytics who was looking at what. It works by randomly setting a cookie for new visitors and then [...]
Tagged javascript, split testing, wordpress Leave a comment
More on server-side image resizing
This is a follow-up about my modest plugin to use Timthumb to grab dynamically resized images for WordPress. When we last checked in, my plugin called “ImgSize” was triggered whenever a thumbnail image was requested, and it provided a Timthumb-resized version. Shortly after this, I added the functionality to the plugin to do the same [...]
Tagged images, resizing, timthumb, wordpress Leave a comment
Columns with the Same Height
If the people always want one thing, it’s columns that are the same height. Am I right, people? It’s one of those annoying things that are really easy with table-based layout, but weirdly tricky when using proper CSS methods. In my time, I’ve made plenty of faux columns (columns that aren’t even but are in [...]
Tagged columns, css, layout Leave a comment
Server-side Image Resizing
Over at my blog for random images and news Truth (plus lies), I made a change not so long ago after realizing what’s probably true for most blogs these days — that the home page is not the front page. In other words, most visitors don’t come to a site through the home page. Far [...]
Tagged images, php, smart image resizer, thumbnails, timthumb, wordpress 1 Comment
Box2DJS Platformer
Here’s an experiment I’ve been working on: it’s a platformer demo made in JavaScript. It uses the Box2DJS physics engine, and it’s iOS compatible. It’s meant to become a version of a Macromedia Director game I made long ago (and can’t seem to find a copy of) called “Guy”, which was played with a mouse. [...]
Tagged Development, games, html5, ipad, iPhone, javascript, touch events, web applications Leave a comment
My rookie’s confusion with Objective-C properties