If you’re new to Web development, I highly recommend learning how to use a few different browser’s developer tools. I came from a background of mostly Java, and learning javascript can be tricky since it is used is such a different way. I used Chrome’s developer tools to learn how javascript behaves. I think it… Read More
What’s the difference between this HTML snippet: <a href=”http://www.google.com/search?q=html&foo=0″>foo=0</a> and this? <a href=”http://www.google.com/search?q=html©=0″>copy=0</a> Both of them look like simple Google searches (though they could have been anything; Google is just an example). One of them appends an extra “&foo=0″ to the end of the URL; the other appends “©=0″ instead. Only the second snippet is… Read More
Yesterday one of my co-workers spent hours reproducing and tracking down a bug that turned out to be a stray comma. Unfortunately, Microsoft Internet Explorer doesn’t support trailing commas in JavaScript arrays and object literals. Code like this won’t parse: var chord = ["do", "mi", "so",]; var json = { truth:”beauty”, beauty:true, }; Those final… Read More
I recently heard that some loyal Redfin customers were using Google to do address searches. That’s a shame, since Redfin does a pretty decent job of searching for addresses, MLS IDs, cities, etc. I wanted to see if I could help those power users get to Redfin search results with fewer clicks. Naturally, I wanted… Read More
One of the main goals of our latest release was to improve the overall performance of the user interface, so we’re starting an intermittent series today on the dev blog talking about what we learned along the way. Firstly, we had to recognize (channeling Steve Souders of YSlow and High Performance Web Sites fame) that… Read More
I arrived at work today with a perplexing tech support e-mail in my inbox. A customer was claiming that although Redfin had never worked well in Firefox, last week we totally broke it. Needless to say, we were all a little surprised (and more than a little worried) over here, since we use Firefox all… Read More
UPDATED: As of January 31, 2008, Redfin supports Safari 3 without any of the trickery described below. We’ll leave the post here for the curious, but in the meantime, there’s no reason to go through these steps on our account. Last January, we ported Redfin from a proprietary map platform to Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, a… Read More
As was mentioned a few places on the web today, we’re proud to announce that Redfin has contributed to a project that will open source TurboGrid, the excellent JavaScript grid control made by the TurboAjax group. We’ve been really trying to hammer on our map page performance for the last few weeks, and it became… Read More
Writing rich date/time features in a web app can be a pain. Apps (such as schedulers) that do math on times (e.g. ordering times) should pay attention to time zones for those times, but it’s difficult to know which time zone should be used to display the times to the user. Asking the user to… Read More