An issue randomly started occurring on a few site that I had started development on last month. I was getting crashes in IE8 with the following error “Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.” Followed by “This tab has been recovered.” when the site came back up.

The Solution

This one was not fun to diagnose, I initially thought it was something with the HTML5,  Chrome Frame or Modernizr. I was wrong, it was a bug with jQuery.

It is an issue with jQuery version 1.6.2 (which was the latest version at time of development). Luckily they fixed the issue, so the fix on your end is simple… Update to the latest version of jQuery.

Here’s the support ticket from their change log.

JW Player for WordPress is a great little solution to locally house and present your videos. However, I recently had an issue where my playlist for JW Player would not display. I could see that it was loading and pulling in the list of videos, but even with my Advanced Settings being correct it still wouldn’t show.

With some help from LongTail Video Support (thank you!) I found a solution.

It turns out that sometimes the config attributes for the playlist are not carried over. So, you can force them in your [jwplayer] shortcode attributes.

Here’s some sample code to show you what I’m talking about.

Original:

[jwplayer playlistid="123"]

Updated:

[jwplayer playlistid="123" playlist.position="bottom" playlist.size="250"]

The key attributes being “playlist.position” and “playlist.size” I hope this helps!

If you do any front-end development locally (and test in Google Chrome) you may have run into a problem using the .load() function or other AJAX requests. The functions are just unable to return any data, It boils down to a permissions issue with Chrome pointing to local files.

You can resolve this by uploading your files to a live production server, but that is a pain, especially if you’re still in development.

There’s a very simple solution:

1. Close Chrome completely
2. Launch Chrome from Terminal with the “–allow-file-access-from-files” argument

open /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app --args --allow-file-access-from-files

This will allow that session of Chrome to access local files. Note: Once you close and reopen the application you’ll no longer have access to local files again.

Early last year I took my freelancing full-time. This was a big move; I’m not the: “let’s play some golf together, see you at the after-party, and let’s take this show to the moon!” type entrepreneur. Like many creative people, I’m an introvert. I dwell in my own thoughts too long, constantly play scenarios in my mind, and enjoy a nap after long networking events.

A freelancer is not just a designer or developer, you have a few new roles now like sales, accounting and customer service. Introverts have to work a bit differently than our outgoing counterparts. So here are some helpful tips for freelancing and keeping the business going.

Okay, so I redesign my site more than I blog on it. Designing something for yourself is tough, but I’m really happy with this one. I hope you enjoy.

Let me know if you need anything!

In case you didn’t know I switched jobs. I am now a full-time freelancer and owner of Emerge Web Studio. I’m into my second week now and things are going great, I’ve had a ton of great phone calls and meetings. Waking up for work has become really exciting. With all that being said, I look forward to showing you all the great things I’m doing.

Now it’s time to sell you…
Emerge specializes in attractive website design for businesses, developers and agencies. I know the web really well, so as a standard my sites are always easy to update, optimized for search, and ready to promote your business (as long as it’s not shady).

There’s no reason to read any further, use HTML5 Boilerplate instead!

It is finally time to start switching to HTML5 for projects moving forward. If you’ve been following the progress you already know that xHTML will eventually be outdated and browsers will, eventually, support HTML5 functionality. So it doesn’t make sense to continue with xHTML; plus, now our clients to use HTML5 functionality as it becomes available without too many headaches.

Below basic doctype template I’m starting out with, please feel free to give me feedback.

Does anyone else enjoy a good laugh? I do, I do a lot. Laughter can get me through the day sometimes. I have some hilarious co-workers. There is joy wrapped up in laughing together, a deeper connection beyond agreeing that body sounds are funny.

While remembering Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Martin Luther King day is not a challenge, remembering his teachings through our lives on the other 364 days of the year becomes more difficult. It is easy to think that we’ve come far enough. It is easy to think that we’ve accomplished what needs to be accomplished.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is a man whom I don’t know enough about, but from reflecting on his writings I am inspired. He spoke honestly about social and political injustice. He was a voice for peace, but a peace without conformity or complacency. He lived the life he preached, and the results of that are marked with the blood of his assassination in 1968.

Fresh new redesign! The last design was probably not as thought out as it needed to be. It placed a heavy emphasis on my blog, and let’s be real, i’m not blogging every day. This one is supposed to put more emphasis on my work, and still a little on the blog…

Thanks for checking it out, hope you enjoy!