You can vote once per category, and in every category. Votes are limited by IP and email address. The first round of voting ends November 30th, and the second round will start on December 3rd.

Are you a Twitter addict? Do you really dig Digg? Are you a loyal Netvibes user? Look through the categories and vote for your favorites.

©Matt Harzewski.

Have you ever seen one of those Flash navigational menus where the hover color fades in and out? You know, the ones where you point to an item and it doesn’t just change color abruptly, but fades into the other color?

Well, it’s possible to create that effect without Flash, using straight JavaScript. Using the jQuery framework it’s not too hard at all.

CSS-Tricks.com has a great tutorial up, teaching how to do just that. Color Fading Menu with jQuery.

It’s a neat effect, and though it’s not entirely necessary, it can make your navigation a little more interesting without detracting from it usability or SEO-wise.

©Matt Harzewski.

Now wouldn’t it be useful if you could detect where a user is coming from when they visit your WordPress blog, and display a customized message to them? Perhaps a reminder to subscribe to your RSS feed, or to Stumble your post.

WP Greet Box does just that. After dropping the plugin into your /wp-content/plugins/ directory and activating it, you just have to add a <?php wp_greet_box() ?> template tag where you want the messages to appear in your theme.

Without any configuration, the plugin will display messages when a user visits your site through Google, Digg, Del.icio.us, Twitter, StumbleUpon, or one of a few other sites. Of course, you’ll want to personalize the messages to fit your site better and add new messages for other frequent referrers.

You can enter a website, an icon URL, and set a message to be displayed. HTML is enabled in the message field, so the possbilities are only limited by your creativity. You could put a Digg count widget up when users visit via Digg. Or you could paste in an autoplay YouTube video and RickRoll any Digg users who visit.

There is also a “Visitor Timeout” setting which, on a message by message basis, allows you to define how often (in minutes) a single users will see the message.

This is a neat plugin, and one that seems pretty useful. It’s definitely worth a look. It may help you get more mileage out of social media sites, or maybe convert some more search engine users into subscribers.

©Matt Harzewski.

Darren Rowse has come up with the best response I have seen so far.

A subscriber that never visits is better than a one off visitor who never returns.

I had one blogger recently tell me that he’d removed the option to subscribe to his blog via RSS from his blog because he didn’t want to ‘give away’ his content. He wanted people who read his content to ‘pay’ him by visiting his blog (and earning him money from his advertising) and he saw RSS subscribers as ‘freeloaders’.

My response to him was that I’d rather have a subscriber who rarely visits my actual blog than a one off visitors who never returns because they have no way of keeping in touch.

RSS subscribers are your most loyal readers. When they subscribe they see every single one of your posts (though they may skip reading one here or there if they’re pressed for time, or just not interested). They may visit your blog some days, if they want to leave a comment or browse your archives. The point is: If your blog is good enough your RSS subsscribers will visit the website now and then, and more frequently than most non-subscribers probably.

They read your posts, and that’s the real point of blogging.

©Matt Harzewski.

• How to: CSS Large Background - Web Designer Wall shows how to code a website around a single, large background image, as you can see they’ve done with their own site.
• CSS Speech Bubbles - For comments, quotes, Twitter posts, or whatever you could possibly want to put inside a word bubble.
• CSS Gradient Text Effect - Text styled with a gradient image, yet it’s still plain text.
• The Highly Extensible CSS Interface - Cameron Moll’s famous posts. An interesting read, though not necessarily a tutorial.
• Sliding Doors of CSS - A List Apart’s widely used technique of using layered background images to create a dynamically sized button or tab.
• CSS Sprites: What They Are, Why They’re Cool, and How To Use Them
• How to Create a Block Hover Effect for a List of Links
• Build a Print Stylesheet - If someone prints your page, should they have to waste paper on sidebars, ads, comment forms, or other junk only of interest to online readers?
• Some styles for your pagination
• Getting Around IE’s Lack of Min-Width Support - Min-width, such a useful CSS attribute. Too bad Microsoft didn’t see fit to support it in Internet Explorer…

©Matt Harzewski.

Currently they’re in the nominations phase. That means you have until Sunday to nominate the web company that you think has done an amazing job at providing an innovative and cool service.

Do you really dig Digg? Are you a WordPress fanatic? Can you not put to words how much you like Flickr? Nominate the web service that you just couldn’t live without.

Note that this is a people’s choice award system, and the most nominated sites will be the ones that make it to the voting. So even if a site you really like seems obvious, you should still nominate it.

©Matt Harzewski.

But really, is it worth it?

Most of you have probably already learned that it’s hard to get Dugg. It doesn’t happen very often, unless you’re one of the few sites that seem to be perpetually on the front page, and you’re better off just focusing on your website, and hoping it will happen some day on it’s own.

Do you want to get Dugg though? Sure, it’s a nice ego boost, and you may get a few subscribers out of it, but studies have shown that Digg traffic is of very low quality. You get people just looking for some quick entertainment. You won’t gain many subscribers, you likely won’t have any comments (or intelligent comments anyway) added, any ads you have will likely be ignored or blocked entirely, and the sudden rush of traffic will fade away in hours. Fun, but it will cost you in bandwidth, with little return, save for some impressive statistics.

Also, Digg is full of jerks. It seems that the place has been devolving into a wasteland full of trolls. Comment threads turn into flame wars pretty quick over there. All of the Apple-bashing especially has been getting on my nerves. Users clinging to outdated myths, sketchy claims, and lame recycled arguments loudly slam Apple, and bury comments with some sense or facts to them. If you don’t like Apple, go into your preferences and turn the “Apple” category off instead of ruining the site for the rest of us.

I just haven’t been very happy with Digg lately. I’ve never seen one of my posts get more than 80 Diggs (not enough to make it out of Upcoming), my inbox gets flooded with “Shouts” that vary wildly in quality, and the quality of the Popular section’s entries just isn’t up to snuff these days. (Not to mention the rampant trolling in the comments!) I spend too much time reading and voting on other people’s submissions when I could be doing something more productive.

What’s your take on the current state of Digg? Is it worth visiting at all anymore? I’m real close to sticking to my RSS feeds for news, and Reddit and StumbleUpon for what Digg used to be for…finding new and interesting stuff.

©Matt Harzewski.

MacBook Air? I bet that got your attention.

Here’s how the contest works: You write a haiku, post it to your Twitter account, and copy/paste the haiku into a comment on the Copyblogger post along with a link to your tweet. Simple enough?

For those who never had to write a haiku in elementary school, a haiku is a short, three-line poem that generally doesn’t rhyme. There’s a certain pattern to it. The first line contains five syllables, the second line has seven, and the third line has five. The Copyblogger post gives a couple examples.

Whether you want to participate or not — come on, it’s a good chance to sharpen your writing skills — it’s still worth dropping by to view the comments, which are filled with haikus, many of which are witty and Mac/blogging/Twitter-related.

You have until November 16th, so you’d better get started.

©Matt Harzewski.

• jQuery
• Scriptaculous
• Tiny MCE
• Thickbox

Want to use jQuery in your theme, for a tabbed box, an AJAX something, or some sort of DHTML effect? You can add it in with a single template tag in your header.

<?php wp_enqueue_script('jquery'); ?>

That was easy, wasn’t it? The wp_enqueue_script function can be used in plugins as well, so plugin authors, pleasestop bundling jQuery and Scriptaculous with your plugins. It’s not necessary.

The function can also be used to add your own scripts to a blog (whether you’re doing so from a them or plugin). The syntax is

<?php wp_enqueue_script('handle', 'src', 'dependencies'); ?>

“Handle” is a unique name you give to the script, “src” is the the script’s URL, and the optional last argument allows you to specify dependencies (i.e. scripts that must be loaded before the current one). For example, to load the jQuery UI Tabs package, which naturally requires jQuery, you would use something like this:

<?php wp_enqueue_script('jquery-ui', 'http://example.org/wp-content/themes/my_theme/jquery/jquery-ui-tabs.js', 'jquery'); ?>

The function will also ensure that the same script will not be loaded twice, if I’m not mistaken. Which means if you include jQuery in your theme, and you install a plugin that tries to load jQuery, it will only be loaded once.

©Matt Harzewski.