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Friday, February 5. 2010
Interesting Links from the Web - January 2010 Edition (Part 2)
Twitter can be a real boon for learning new things and finding interesting little projects so long as you manage to follow the right people.
Sticky Footer: Alternative Approach - This takes an alternative approach using only a single conditional statement for IE and supports IE5.5+, with 100% valid CSS and HTML
Design Contract Template - A template for contractual jobs in design, alter to your own use (quite verbose)
15 Tips for Designing Tables - A nice resource on using CSS and JS to markup and add interaction to your tables, a nice new take on it with good examples
A review of Rich Text Editors - Not just your grandma's WYSIWYG Editor...great thorough review
An HTML5 Video Player - Created with JavaScript and HTML5 markup; no Flash here folks!
Microsoft's Translator Widget - This thing is the coolest translator I think I've ever seen. It loads the translated version progressively via AJAX without any new page load -- with a loading bar to boot!
Free SEO Toolkit for IIS - I don't use IIS, but for those that do, this would be an enormous help, watch the video to see (good to watch even if you don't use IIS)
Dygraphs - Interactive, zoomable, plottable, QUICK JavaScript-based graphing library - it might give Highcharts.js a run for its money on line graphs (it's basically all this does, unfortunately)
Vector Social Media Icons - I'm not usually one to be excited enough about icons to tell people about them, but the fact that the author supplied two versions of the icons in vector format is pretty darn cool (32x32 and 16x16; 32x32 never scales well to 16x16 size, and 16x16 size is made especially for that size and doesn't look good stretched out)
Revised Font Stack - Looking for more fonts to use in your CSS without requiring @font-face or sIFR? OS's have updated their default font base, check here to see what more options us web developers might have nowadays
jQTouch - "A jQuery plugin for mobile web development on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and other forward-thinking devices." Check out the demo, it's sick...in the good sense.
Free App A Day.com - For all you iPod Touch and iPhone users, check out this site for some free apps! (Don't say I never gave you anything!)
Sticky Footer: Alternative Approach - This takes an alternative approach using only a single conditional statement for IE and supports IE5.5+, with 100% valid CSS and HTML
Design Contract Template - A template for contractual jobs in design, alter to your own use (quite verbose)
15 Tips for Designing Tables - A nice resource on using CSS and JS to markup and add interaction to your tables, a nice new take on it with good examples
A review of Rich Text Editors - Not just your grandma's WYSIWYG Editor...great thorough review
An HTML5 Video Player - Created with JavaScript and HTML5 markup; no Flash here folks!
Microsoft's Translator Widget - This thing is the coolest translator I think I've ever seen. It loads the translated version progressively via AJAX without any new page load -- with a loading bar to boot!
Free SEO Toolkit for IIS - I don't use IIS, but for those that do, this would be an enormous help, watch the video to see (good to watch even if you don't use IIS)
Dygraphs - Interactive, zoomable, plottable, QUICK JavaScript-based graphing library - it might give Highcharts.js a run for its money on line graphs (it's basically all this does, unfortunately)
Vector Social Media Icons - I'm not usually one to be excited enough about icons to tell people about them, but the fact that the author supplied two versions of the icons in vector format is pretty darn cool (32x32 and 16x16; 32x32 never scales well to 16x16 size, and 16x16 size is made especially for that size and doesn't look good stretched out)
Revised Font Stack - Looking for more fonts to use in your CSS without requiring @font-face or sIFR? OS's have updated their default font base, check here to see what more options us web developers might have nowadays
jQTouch - "A jQuery plugin for mobile web development on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and other forward-thinking devices." Check out the demo, it's sick...in the good sense.
Free App A Day.com - For all you iPod Touch and iPhone users, check out this site for some free apps! (Don't say I never gave you anything!)
Monday, January 25. 2010
Interesting Links from the Web - January 2010 Edition
I've signed up for "Project 52", and I've already missed last week, only the third week in. That being said, the whole point of Project 52 is to get people using their blog, to post more. There is a goal, but the ultimate goal is simply to post more.
A lot of my lack of success is simply trying to come up with real valuable content each and every week. I must realize that it's simply not going to be possible - at least not up to my own standards. That's not to say that I can't still post interesting things, just not necessarily the type of stuff I'd want to write about with gusto and enthusiasm - but still kinda cool. I mean, we learn things on an almost daily (if not hourly) rate as web developers. Why can't I simply zero in on one and discuss it? Or, perhaps mention all the neat things I've found in a particular week if I simply don't have time to write a full article on something I'm working on (which is what happened this past week - I was shipping furniture to my new house in a rental truck from out of state).
Anyhow, here are some interesting links that I've found (mostly from Smashing Magazine's Twitter account) within the past week or so (in no particular order):
- Why Mood Boards Matter: A look in to a quick way of getting a client on board with your end-result design without actually showcasing any direct portion of the site. An interesting approach that I had heard of and seen, but this iteration looks much nicer and more professional (the 2nd example).
- PostageApp: "The easier way to send email from web apps". This service offers a (currently) freely available (beta) API to send emails, also allowing for reporting services and debugging for such tasks. Quite the interesting little project, and could be extremely useful and handy.
- Uptime Robot: I currently am using mon.itor.us for my website uptime reporting. However, I originally signed up for the IM chat based alerting, and it only worked for the first two-three weeks. They adjusted the alerting mechanism to only alert via email when it had X number of consecutive bad pings...it might be time to evaluate a competitor, and here's one of them!
- jQuery Sheet: To quote their own description - "jQuery.sheet addresses the web-based spreadsheet or "websheet" in a different, simple, approach - using html, you simply load the sheet from a url, and you save it to a url... Simple. Or write your own approch. jQuery.sheet manages the sheet creation, viewing, and editing processes, you simply build your application around it." Quite interesting, and although I don't currently have a use for it, it's definitely something that I could see being very useful and powerful.
- Project Sikuli: This project is quite different. It appears (from a quick glance) to be a scripting language to help automate tasks. That's nothing new. The new part is the fact that it uses screenshot captures to do the scripting. Yes, that's correct. I honestly can't do it justice to talk about it, so check out the site and watch the video and read up on it if it sounds at all interesting.
- WhiteSmoke Writer 2010: The new version adds "writing review", which according to the quick animated Flash file on their homepage, might even be useful for me. It suggests changes to grammar to make a "negative sentence" neutral, or positive. This is something I sometimes have issues with when it was not intended. If I start a business of my own on the side, it's the last thing I want to do to my clients, so this might be worth a purchase, or at least an evaluation/consideration.
- SupportDetails.com: Although it's such an easy concept and execution (practically anyone could create this service), it's got a nice UI and...hey, I didn't think of it first. SupportDetails.com grabs the details of your current session data and allows you to mail it to someone. Let's say a website visitor is claiming there's this weird bug on your site, but you just can't see it. This could possibly identify the odd combination of software/resolution/settings that could cause the issue. At the very least, it's a simple and neat idea.
...and saved for last just because... The Ultimate PC Chair: I want one for work. Quoted from the linked blog discussing it: "NOTE TO MY BOSS – Dear Mr Boss, I am certain that my productivity would increase by 60,000% if you bought me this chair
DISCLAIMER: There is also a chance that I will be so comfy that I will fall asleep during work hours."
A lot of my lack of success is simply trying to come up with real valuable content each and every week. I must realize that it's simply not going to be possible - at least not up to my own standards. That's not to say that I can't still post interesting things, just not necessarily the type of stuff I'd want to write about with gusto and enthusiasm - but still kinda cool. I mean, we learn things on an almost daily (if not hourly) rate as web developers. Why can't I simply zero in on one and discuss it? Or, perhaps mention all the neat things I've found in a particular week if I simply don't have time to write a full article on something I'm working on (which is what happened this past week - I was shipping furniture to my new house in a rental truck from out of state).
Anyhow, here are some interesting links that I've found (mostly from Smashing Magazine's Twitter account) within the past week or so (in no particular order):
- Why Mood Boards Matter: A look in to a quick way of getting a client on board with your end-result design without actually showcasing any direct portion of the site. An interesting approach that I had heard of and seen, but this iteration looks much nicer and more professional (the 2nd example).
- PostageApp: "The easier way to send email from web apps". This service offers a (currently) freely available (beta) API to send emails, also allowing for reporting services and debugging for such tasks. Quite the interesting little project, and could be extremely useful and handy.
- Uptime Robot: I currently am using mon.itor.us for my website uptime reporting. However, I originally signed up for the IM chat based alerting, and it only worked for the first two-three weeks. They adjusted the alerting mechanism to only alert via email when it had X number of consecutive bad pings...it might be time to evaluate a competitor, and here's one of them!
- jQuery Sheet: To quote their own description - "jQuery.sheet addresses the web-based spreadsheet or "websheet" in a different, simple, approach - using html, you simply load the sheet from a url, and you save it to a url... Simple. Or write your own approch. jQuery.sheet manages the sheet creation, viewing, and editing processes, you simply build your application around it." Quite interesting, and although I don't currently have a use for it, it's definitely something that I could see being very useful and powerful.
- Project Sikuli: This project is quite different. It appears (from a quick glance) to be a scripting language to help automate tasks. That's nothing new. The new part is the fact that it uses screenshot captures to do the scripting. Yes, that's correct. I honestly can't do it justice to talk about it, so check out the site and watch the video and read up on it if it sounds at all interesting.
- WhiteSmoke Writer 2010: The new version adds "writing review", which according to the quick animated Flash file on their homepage, might even be useful for me. It suggests changes to grammar to make a "negative sentence" neutral, or positive. This is something I sometimes have issues with when it was not intended. If I start a business of my own on the side, it's the last thing I want to do to my clients, so this might be worth a purchase, or at least an evaluation/consideration.
- SupportDetails.com: Although it's such an easy concept and execution (practically anyone could create this service), it's got a nice UI and...hey, I didn't think of it first. SupportDetails.com grabs the details of your current session data and allows you to mail it to someone. Let's say a website visitor is claiming there's this weird bug on your site, but you just can't see it. This could possibly identify the odd combination of software/resolution/settings that could cause the issue. At the very least, it's a simple and neat idea.
...and saved for last just because... The Ultimate PC Chair: I want one for work. Quoted from the linked blog discussing it: "NOTE TO MY BOSS – Dear Mr Boss, I am certain that my productivity would increase by 60,000% if you bought me this chair
DISCLAIMER: There is also a chance that I will be so comfy that I will fall asleep during work hours."
Monday, August 10. 2009
Picture "perfect" HTML to PDF
...and by "perfect", I mean that whatever Safari's "Print Preview" mode would look like, that's what you'll get. This link is mostly for my own personal reminder, but someone else may find it useful too.
With this solution, based on the WebKit rendering engine, you can convert HTML pages to PDF with full CSS(3?) support by using a portion of the WebKit (Safari) rendering engine...oh, and it's open source.
BeeBole's solution to converting HTML to PDF with Full CSS Support
With this solution, based on the WebKit rendering engine, you can convert HTML pages to PDF with full CSS(3?) support by using a portion of the WebKit (Safari) rendering engine...oh, and it's open source.
BeeBole's solution to converting HTML to PDF with Full CSS Support
Thursday, June 11. 2009
Server2Go - Apache, MySQL, SQLite, PHP and Perl all on a CD-ROM
The title's a bit misleading, Server2Go also works on a USB drive as well (and like most portable webservers, runs better on a USB drive). However, that's not why I'm all excited about this.
Recently, our web host's newsletter stated that users with Wordpress-MU installed would no longer be able to run it on a shared webhosting plan, it was just too resource intensive. If it was desirable to continue running it, a private server plan would be required. We were using Wordpress-MU, only had 5 blogs, and it hadn't been touched in about 5 months. BYE BYE MU! However, there was a lot of useful information on 2 of the blogs, and I wanted to give the users an opportunity to save their work.
I had two choices:
1. Use a spider, like HTTrack to copy all of the rendered HTML viewable by random visitors, or...
2. Try to find a solution that would let the author log in, view any unpublished pages/posts, and still get some educational benefit out of using a well-known web-based product. (Note: I was only looking for something that works on Windows.)
There were a couple (2) hits from Google explaining how to do it all manually, and a few products that claimed they could do it (if you bought their product; the free version only worked for USB drives, not CD). Server2Go came up as my last opened tab from my search, and it was what I needed. It was free (I wasn't going to pay if I could do it myself manually - though I may donate), and even looked really slick, and was configurable.
It took me two tries to get Wordpress installed and working with Server2Go. I needed to change "localmirror" to 0 while installing it and change it when done, but I didn't do that...so I had to reinstall it all. Wordpress' export/import feature saved the hassle of moving from Wordpress-MU to a single, standalone install of Wordpress, and after that, it only took maybe 3 minutes to set everything up.
If you need to have a product presented on CD to a client, I'd highly recommend Server2Go. USB drives will always work, but run the risk of accidental editing/deletion. A backup plan is always good! ...this is just yet another tool for the arsenal.
Recently, our web host's newsletter stated that users with Wordpress-MU installed would no longer be able to run it on a shared webhosting plan, it was just too resource intensive. If it was desirable to continue running it, a private server plan would be required. We were using Wordpress-MU, only had 5 blogs, and it hadn't been touched in about 5 months. BYE BYE MU! However, there was a lot of useful information on 2 of the blogs, and I wanted to give the users an opportunity to save their work.
I had two choices:
1. Use a spider, like HTTrack to copy all of the rendered HTML viewable by random visitors, or...
2. Try to find a solution that would let the author log in, view any unpublished pages/posts, and still get some educational benefit out of using a well-known web-based product. (Note: I was only looking for something that works on Windows.)
There were a couple (2) hits from Google explaining how to do it all manually, and a few products that claimed they could do it (if you bought their product; the free version only worked for USB drives, not CD). Server2Go came up as my last opened tab from my search, and it was what I needed. It was free (I wasn't going to pay if I could do it myself manually - though I may donate), and even looked really slick, and was configurable.
It took me two tries to get Wordpress installed and working with Server2Go. I needed to change "localmirror" to 0 while installing it and change it when done, but I didn't do that...so I had to reinstall it all. Wordpress' export/import feature saved the hassle of moving from Wordpress-MU to a single, standalone install of Wordpress, and after that, it only took maybe 3 minutes to set everything up.
If you need to have a product presented on CD to a client, I'd highly recommend Server2Go. USB drives will always work, but run the risk of accidental editing/deletion. A backup plan is always good! ...this is just yet another tool for the arsenal.
Thursday, October 9. 2008
LibraryH3lp - A communication gateway for Instant Messaging
Libraries, and many other institutions, have a difficult time leveraging the ability to allow customers access to communicate with them easily, using one of the most popular online communication tools available: Instant Messaging.
There are many problems, such as:
So what's left out there?
There are many problems, such as:
- Multiple Protocols (AIM, ICQ, YIM, GIM, Jabber, IRC, MSN, etc...)
- Inability to transfer conversations to another staff member more capable of handling a question or issue
- Software compatibility
- Operating System compatibility
- Web-based communication tools for these protocols
So what's left out there?