smugblog: Jimmy Thompson

We are getting close to launching one of (if not the) biggest improvements to SmugMug since we have launched. Over nine months (or more according to Don) in the making and finally tonight our Ajaxified style will be launched.

The last week has been tough; hair pulling IE bugs, going to bed at 4am (each night), away from families. But we have had a lot of good times too. I love everyone I get to work with, and our customers are top notch, staying up around the clock checking in with us to see what they could test or help with, truly awesome.

Tons of hurdles overcome, lots learned, and things still left to be done. But I can say I am very proud of the work we did in getting it out. Without YUI I don’t think we would have gotten things done so easily – it has been a HUGE help and I look forward to what they come up with next.

Tomorrow I hope to share a bit more about what makes our interface so great and what is yet to come; but for now … sleep!

Yikes, over a year since my last post? What happened? She happened. She keeps me on my toes and I have learned a lot my first year as a father. There have been other things keeping me busy as well. Lots on my mind after this week that I can share about YUI and the direction of SmugMug’s front end.

I don’t use the word hate too often. I was taught that it was a bad word, and that there was nothing anyone could do to me that should make me hate them. Sure I dislike certain politicians, but I refrain from using the word hate when I talk about them (most of the time).

However, there is one piece of software out there that I hate beyond words (and I don’t feel guilty about since it is not a person). I am finishing up the new design for the homepages on smugmug, along with several other ‘really cool things’™ – until Don noticed a layout bug in Internet Explorer. I pretty much knew what it was and how I would have to fix it and I spent the next hour going through the site verifying that the new CSS worked. It worked perfectly, but another bug had appeared. And this bug was unlike any other bug I had ever seen.

There were two elements on the page; a paragraph and an H3 tag that loaded invisible. They would appear when you resized the window or scrolled down, but would quickly dissapear when you moused over an image. Since the problem was only in two spots (that were not the same), and the page shared a lot of the same general mark up I was puzzled. I thought maybe I missed closing something so I started to remove all unecessary code piece by piece until I got down to just this:




Go ahead and check it out, you will see that the title line will not appear. I did not know what to do at that point, it was so bizarre that I was unsure anyone would know how to fix it, and I wanted to cry since the new homepage had worked out so well up to that point (and the fact that it was again 2am). But one google search later and I found my answer: ‘position: relative’. So I grudgingly added one more line of code devoted to IE in our CSS file and fixed the problem.

The above describes a very typical problem with IE; a hair pulling, 2am, deadline looming, bloody murder type of problem. Some of these problems are well documented and you can avoid or fix them very easily, but there are still others that no one has solutions for. But back to my hatred for IE. How can a company that grosses 1 billion dollars a month not have the resources to fix a product that is in obvious need of help? The reason … they don’t care anymore. They have their strangle hold on the market with business’ that have web apps that will only run in IE (my Allstate Insurance rep showed me another one today), and that means more sales of Windows (plus Office) and more revenue for them – simple greed. Don’t get me wrong, I want smugmug to be successfull too. But there is a huge line between success and greed, and MS crossed it a long time ago. I hate IE because it represents that greed. MS literally killed Netscape to get where they are, and now they don’t care.

True, I am happier now that smugmug dropped support for all verions of IE5 and below – but there appears to be no relief in site since IE7 does not look to be anything more than another glorified security update. Most of the IE devs sound like they are on a time crunch to get the new version out the door and we’ll be lucky if they fix anything at all. But what the hell have they been doing the last 5 years? I do get to take time off at smugmug and have some weeks that are less productive than others, but 5 years of nothing? Oh well, that is it about my hatred for IE. I just wanted to document this important fix so others may find it and they won’t have the same experience I had.

So here it is, 5:00am PST and I am still at smugmug hq. We are completing testing on one of our largest feature releases ever. It has been exciting to work on it, and I hope that everyone enjoys the surprises when they wake up!

So Don talked about grocery stores, bacteria, shopping carts and solutions. I chimed in that Harmons here in Utah already had a solution, but then i found out that Smith’s ALSO has that same solution. California has plenty of perks, but Utah has some too.

Part of the new design for smugmug went up over the weekend, and without any major backlash. I would even dare to say it was successful. Along with it came some new tips over in Web Tricks, be sure to check them out!

Went through Dgrin and added two older posts to the new web-tricks blog.