Monthly Archives: April 2011

Flattr to No Longer Require Publishers to Keep an Active Balance

Flattr, the social micropayment service, will no longer be requiring that publishers maintain an active balance and be actively participating in the service in order to accept “Flattrs” from users. This will go into effect starting on May 1st, and should increase the number of blogs using the service.

If you’re someone that’s using Flattr primarily to make micropayments to others then you’ll soon have tons more blogs and websites to flattr.

If you’re using Flattr to both pay and get paid, you now no longer need to worry whether your Flattr button is active. Feel free to add money to your account and flattr others at your own pace.

I’m excited about the change, since few of the sites I read use Flattr, and the money I put into it either goes in one huge chunk to a single publisher or to charity. Hopefully more bloggers will try it out.

Opening the floodgates [Flattr Blog]

How To Create a Stylish Button Entirely with CSS3

Web designers have been making dynamically-sized buttons using the “sliding doors” trick for awhile now, but isn’t that technique so 2003? Wouldn’t it be cooler to construct buttons using only CSS? Line25 has a fresh tutorial on How To Create a Stylish Button Entirely…

Tempo: A Tiny JSON Templating Engine

Tempo is a 4kb JavaScript library that renders JSON into an HTML template. Your script can take something like this… …and populate it with JSON data from the Twitter API, which you could load with a couple lines of jQuery. It works with browser…

BlogBuzz April 23, 2011

WordPress BlackBox Debug Bar Plugin

BlackBox is a handy WordPress plugin that I’m going to have to try out for development. It adds a debug bar along the top of each page, with items that would be invaluable for plugin and theme developers but probably of little interest to…

StatDash: Statistics on Your WordPress Dashboard

Wouldn’t it be neat to have an at-a-glance display of common statistical information on your WordPress Dashboard? The StatDash plugin does exactly that, adding a customizable widget that shows stats from Google Analytics, Feedburner, Twitter and even your earnings from the Envato Marketplaces. You…

BlogBuzz April 16, 2011

Try Ruby: A Clever Interactive Programming Tutorial

Teaching a newbie how to program is a difficult task, whether you’re writing a book, recording a screencast or teaching a class. Similarly, it’s a bit of a hassle for someone who is proficient with one or two languages to pick up a new…

How to Remove the Bookmark Toolbar Icons in Firefox 4

Prior to Firefox 4, the Mac version didn’t display favicons beside items on the Bookmarks Toolbar, unlike its Windows counterpart. I’ve become accustomed to this behavior, as it uses significantly less space. (I tend to use the Bookmarks Toolbar not just for frequently-used links…

Syncing Content With HTML5 Video or Audio

This is one of the coolest Smashing Magazine articles I have seen in awhile: Syncing Content With HTML5 Video. Using the generic HTLM5 video and audio elements and a bit of JavaScript, the timeupdate event in particular, you can synchronize script events to the…