photo: copenhagen subway
An amusing hacks-conference lightning talk-turned-blog post on web development: “Graceful Hacks” – UX, IA and interaction design tips for hack days. Martin Belam’s talk at The Guardian’s July 2009 Hack Day must have been both funny and useful:
Funny: “However, I am given to understand that this is now deprecated and has gone out of fashion.”
Useful: “the Yahoo! Design [...]
It turns out that there are a lot of differences between Google’s regular web crawler and the Google News crawler. And though very few of us will find our content included in Google News, it still seems like a good idea to make our content conform to their technical requirements. Here are a few of [...]
Josh Bush’s Masked Input Plugin and Paulo P. Marinas’ AlphaNumeric are both jQuery plugins to prevent input of invalid data in web forms.
The cool browsers support radius corners, but Safari supports CSS transformations that allow developers to scale, skew, and rotate objects on the page like we’re used to doing in PostScript. And better than that, we can animate those transformations over time — all without any JavaScript.
Fire up Safari or Chrome and mouse over the examples here. [...]
Good work deserves compensation, but commercial themes are still unusual in the world of WordPress. The new themes directory has well over 200 free themes listed, and the old directory had thousands of them. Still, I like Thesis and f8. Actually, I like a bunch of themes from Graph Paper Press (get them all [...]
For the past year or so I’ve been wanting to design a non-bloggy theme for this site — a beautiful theme with a magazine-like front page showing the most recent post in a handful of categories. But I’m further from it now than last year, so it’s time to move on.
Which isn’t to say that [...]
We’ve become accustomed to link rot and broken images in nearly all corners of the web, but is there a way to keep things a bit cleaner?
K.T. Lam of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology came up with this sweet trick using jQuery and readyState to find and replace broken images:
jQuery(’span#gbs_’+info.bib_key).parents(’ul’).find(’img.bookjacket[@readyState*="uninitialized"]‘).replaceWith(’<img src="’+info.thumbnail_url+’" alt="’+strTitle+’" height="140" [...]
I’m a fan of the Sandbox WordPress theme because it does so much to separate application logic from design, and a few small changes to the CSS can make huge changes to the look of the site. I think that’s the idea behind Yahoo! Developer Network’s Grids CSS library. That is, well structured HTML allows [...]
A member of the Web4lib mail list asked:
How do I create a semantic web site?
I know I have to use either RDF or OWL but do I use either of these to create a mark up language which I then use to create the web site or, with the semantic web do we move away [...]
.transparent_class {
opacity: 0.5; /* the standards compliant attribute that all browsers should recognize, but… */
filter:alpha(opacity=50); /* for IE */
-khtml-opacity: 0.5; /* for old Safari (1.x) */
-moz-opacity:0.5; /* for old skool Netscape Navigator */
}
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