Good Work Guy

Eric Williams, UX Designer, Portland, OR, goodworkguy.com

[goodworkguy-blog]

Using Tags in macOS to Archive Work

I try to make future me happy by tagging work folders with the months I worked on them.

It’s much easier to find past project folders, and it’s helped me visualize my work timeline.

[goodworkguy-blog]

How to Fix Browsers Not Refreshing CSS Files

Our browsers can be unfriendly when we're updating a site, because the CSS doesn't refresh on each change. Clearing the cache doesn't work. This does:

Try adding a query string after your CSS filename in your HTML's head section.

<link href="main.css?v=1" rel="stylesheet">

You'll have to change the query string every time you make a change. Remove this when you move the updates to production. I like to use ?v=1 as a versioning system on websites; it'll make every person download a fresh new copy on redesigns.

Want to automate changing the query string on changes?

Try a JavaScript or PHP random number generator! This is the PHP I'm using on my sites now:

$refresh = rand();

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/main.min.css?v=1<?php if ($_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"] == "localhost") print $refresh ?>" />

This checks if you're using a local or production environment. If you're updating files on localhost (your computer), it'll generate a random integer to add as a query string, which forces CSS refreshes. The if statement makes sure this doesn't happen on production, where you'd want to just update the "v" version.

Is there a better way to do this, world?

[goodworkguy-blog]

How I implement gender form elements in user interfaces

In the past, I added gender fields to my sign up forms without thinking about it. They looked like this:

This approach has always been the wrong one. My top concerns:

This doesn’t respect or reflect people’s gender identities at all.

Is this necessary?

Are people giving us accurate information?

We don’t need to ask people for their gender most of the time. Why am I asking for this if I’m not presenting a different version of my project depending on gender identity? Is the data collection helpful when people can just lie anyway?

If a project really needs these statistics, my recommendation is to use a plain text entry field, and make it optional.