Archive for May, 2008

• 40 Options for Converting PSD to HTML
• Facebook To Open Source Facebook Platform - Now if they made everything open source, you could make some cool topical social networks.
• 11 Free Twitter Clients - Assuming Twitter isn’t having one of their frequent downtimes, these software packages can make Twitter easier and more useful for you.
• Patent troll sending out invoices for image hyperlinks - Some @$#% managed to get a patent on image hyperlinks (you know, <a href=”"><img src=”"/></a>) and is sending invoices to large websites making use of them. When was the patent awarded? 2006.
• 45+ Free Premium WordPress Themes with Magazine or Grid Layouts
• Buy and Sell Blogroll Links, and Fool Google - You can’t fool Google. They’ll just create an account and go through the directory, penalizing the sites in it.
• Does YouTube Have it Bigger Than You? - By default, embedded YouTube videos are smaller than the versions shown on YouTube.com. Is this intentional or accidental? Some may say the latter, but the lack of a “full screen” button on the embedded player certainly is…interesting.
• Should I Publish Free Articles On My Blog?
• It’s time to put MediaDefender out of business - Revision 3, a company that uses P2P technology legitimately, to distribute their videos to their viewers, was attacked with a DDoS from MediaDefender, a company in the employ of the “Big Media.” The FBI is investigating, but I still want to see MediaDefender sued into the ground.

“Above the fold” refers to the section of a webpage immediately visible without scrolling. It’s a carryover from the days of newspapers, where the biggest story would go on the front page, above the fold in the paper.

Back when newspapers ruled the earth (yes, I’m unconsciously trying to make print media sound prehistoric), The Fold was a physical crease in the paper. Nowadays it’s a bit more complicated. You have different screen sizes and resolutions, toolbars that take-up room in the browser, and some people resize their browser window differently… There are a lot of factors. (more…)

What’s with the merger mania? A lot of good websites have been acquired recently, and let’s not forget the infamous Microhoo…

CNET was acquired by CBS, Ars Technica was absorbed by Condé Nast, owner of Reddit, Wired, and Webmonkey, and countless other web companies have met similar fates.

This is worrying. Big corporations are swallowing good websites, and the future is foggy when it comes to what will happen to the sites. When a big media company buys out another company, it often ends in the purchased company no longer being what it once was.

Condé Nast has said that they don’t want to meddle in Ars Technica’s affairs too much, but what about CNET? CBS isn’t likely to sit back and let them continue on as before. Sure, they didn’t ruin Last.fm when they bought them, but I’m unsure whether we’ll see the same treatment with CNET. I hope they don’t ruin the site, but there’s a good chance that won’t be the case. As someone on Digg pointed out, the $1.8 Billion CBS paid for CNET is a bargain for their domains alone. News.com, com.com, mp3.com, download.com, etc. CBS is a big corporation that has shown that they mainly care about money. They could very well sell-off some of the domains, or put them to new use. (One notable example would be puttung News.com to use for non-tech news.) There are plenty of things that they could do to ruin the site (fire the employees that make CNET, well, CNET, bringing in tech-ignorant people as replacements, comes to mind…) (more…)

You can’t make your page render correctly in every browser. It just isn’t possible. Between several versions of the bug-ridden Internet Explorer (why can’t Microsoft just switch to Gecko or WebKit?) and a sprinkling of older browsers, there are too many bases to cover. Internet Explorers 6 and prior are notorious for their bad CSS implementations (IE7 is better, but it still has a ways to go), and if you tweak your CSS to look right in them, chances are you’ll create another problem somewhere else. When does the endless cycle of fixing things end? When you give up and say “it’s just not going to work in all browsers.” Now, you don’t want to give up too soon, since there are still a lot of people on IE6, but you have to know when to call it quits.

And don’t forget about mobile browsers. Sure, their improving, like Apple’s mobile Safari browser on the iPhone, but it’s still a lot easier to use a mobile-specific version of a site than zooming and scrolling around on the tiny screen.

As usual, PHP has a solution. That solution comes in the form of the global variable $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']. It holds a string that contains a bit of information about the browser and platform a user us using. By searching through the string, you can figure out what browser your users are browsing with, and write-in the right code depending on the browser. You can do this in as simple, or as complicated, of a way as you want. (more…)

Web Design From Scratch has a great article that I’ve read a few times in the past, and recommend for anyone who does more than just edit prefab templates for their website. If you make actual designs from scratch (I’m not sure if that was a pun exactly, but it was accidental…), then you should read this.

Web 2.0 How-To Design Style Guide

Even if you’re not into the whole “Web 2.0″ thing, it’s still worth reading. The “Web 2.0″ style of design is more than just gradients and shiny stuff. The important parts can go into any design, and are often good practices. Such concepts include

• Simplicity
• Big text
• Strong colors
• Simplicity
• Strong logos
• Simple, easy to use navigation
• Simplicity

If you want to make effective and usable designs, the article definitely worth a look.

Twitter… It seems that either you really like the service, or you totally refuse to use it. I fell into the latter category, until a few months ago, when I looked at it closer, and read some posts by some bloggers I read.

A lot of bloggers are using Twitter, and many are extolling in their posts the benefits of using Twitter in conjunction with your blog. It’s a venerable pandemic. Twitter has invaded the blogosphere, and it shows no sign of leaving any time soon.

Daniel Scocco (who is a Twitter user, I might add) has an appropriate reminder for those of you who have become addicted to Twitter: Twitter Less, Blog More!

Now, I’d like to know what your take on Twitter is. Vote in the poll below, it only takes a minute. (If you’re reading this in an RSS reader, you’ll have to click through to the blog to vote).

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jQuery, being one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks on the planet, gets a lot of cool scripts developed for it. LavaLamp is one of those jQuery-dependent scripts that’s useful, and really cool at the same time.

LavaLamp, adding only 700 bytes to your page’s size, adds a little bit of visual flair to your CSS menu without inhibiting usability.

Let me attempt to describe how it looks… The selected link in the navigation (class="selected") is highlighted with your custom CSS styling (it looks best with either a background color, or a rounded-cornered background image), like you’d expect from a menu. When you point at one of the other links in the menu, the background speeds over to the link your pointing at. You really have to see it in action for yourself.

I found the script by chance about a year ago, and am planning to use it in a project I’m working on. It makes for a more interesting menu, without detracting from usability, and it gets rid of that annoying side effect of having a CSS highlight menu where your selected list item keeps it’s styling when you hover over another link.

• The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks & Techniques - SitePoint has a free Photoshop ebook up that sounds interesting (I downloaded it a week ago, but haven’t had a chance to read it yet). In about 19 days their going to start charging for it, so you’d better download it fast if you’re interested.
• ==A Million Little Markups== - You have BBCode, Markdown, Wikitext, and a boatload of other markup tags for various websites. Why don’t they just use HTML? Someone should introduce these developers to the useful PHP function strip_tags(). It can remove all HTML tags from a string, except for a list of allowable tags you pass to it. Simple? You bet. Obvious? Yes.
• 35 (New) WordPress Plugins for an Effective Blogging Experience
• 24 Ways To Contribute To WordPress
• Adobe wants WordPress, but their stuck on Movable Type for the time being. So they put-up an amusing “Powered By” note in their footer.
• Top 25 Free Stock Image Resource Sites
• Smart and funny use of Google Adwords - I’ve seen the ASCII art ads before, but there are some other ones here that are at least as good.

In WP 2.5 the WordPress developers tweaked the WP dashboard, making it a bit more usable, looking sort of like Netvibes or iGoogle. Unfortunately, they haven’t seen fit to provide the ability to customize the dashboard “widgets” yet. So what’s the point? Well, it looks better…

Jason of Pressography.com has provided a solution, since the WordPress devs haven’t yet. The Widgetized Admin Dashboard plugin does just what it’s name says. It removes the WordPress Development News and WordPress Planet boxes, and adds a new sidebar to the Widgets screen called “WordPress Dashboard.” You can then put whatever you want on the Dashboard, and re-order the widgets at will. You could even use your themes’s functions.php file to write your own custom widgets, if WordPress and your plugins don’t provide one you would like.

Webmonkey, around sine 1996, is one of the most well-known and long-running web development sites. Their blog was one of the first blogs I read, and the first one that I subscribed to via RSS. Some changes have been happening lately over at Webmonkey. They’ve been purchased by Condé Nast, the parent company of Wired Magazine, and they’re restructuring their site.

Let’s start with their blog. When it launched, it was known as Monkey Bites. Eventually the blog was moved over to Wired.com, where it ran for awhile before being renamed to “Compiler.” The blog is, once again, known as Monkey Bites, and is now residing at webmonkey.com/blog and it’s integrated more tightly with Webmonkey than ever before.

The WebMonkey site itself is now a wiki. What used to be a repository for tutorials penned by HotWired’s designers and developers is now opening-up and allowing anyone who knows what they’re talking about to submit articles to be included. It looks like WebMonkey is moving forward into the 21st century, making an effort to keep up with today’s technologies, instead of staying a dusty collection of out-of-date tutorials.

Now, let’s move on to the design. (more…)