tip trick web dev share like

Protect Your Content from Being Copied in 3 Steps

2012-08-14T13:37:00.001-07:00

This guest post is by Abhishek of Budding Geek.

Content scraping still haunts the entire blogosphere. No matter how hard you try to defend your creation, content thieves will always find a way to steal it!

It really feels terrible to find exact copies of your original work distributed all over the internet, often without any credit or link back to your blog as the source. The most frustrating part is when you find the copied content outranking your own blog in the search engines.

How can someone copy content from your blog?

Copycats can steal your content in a number of ways, but there are two key techniques:

by directly copying text and images from your published post and re-publishing the content on the spammer’s blog (or splog!)
by scraping your RSS feed. The truth is, this form of plagiarism is the most difficult to tackle.

Since plagiarism is impossible to obliterate, we need to safeguard our blogs from these vulnerabilities in such a way that it becomes at least extremely difficult for the content thief to plagiarize our content.

Protect your blog content

There are a few different ways you can protect your blog content.

1. Disable text selection on your blog

This is the first and most essential step to discourage direct copying of your content.

Users of the Blogger platform can disable text selection from their blogs by manually installing some JavaScript code before the closing <head> tag in the HTML of their blog.

WordPress users can add this feature by installing the wpcopyprotect plugin.

2. Watermark your images

It’s important to watermark all the original images you’ve created for use on your blog. A watermark proves that you are the owner of the copyright to all those images. Moreover, watermarks discourage others from using your photos and illustrations on their blog, since they’d have your blog’s name all over theirs!

Although there are many watermarking utilities available on the internet, I generally prefer to use Windows Live Writer’s inbuilt watermark plugin. Note that if you’re using photos from any other outside source on the web (like Flickr or Picasa), it’s up to you to take a notice of their licenses before reusing them—otherwise you might find yourself guilty of ripping someone else’s content!

3. Manage your RSS feeds

A few months ago, I encountered a terrible content scraper who, I think, was using content scraping software and publishing my posts under several different permalinks. Sounds scary, right? This software basically scans your main content and republishes your posts with the main keywords replaced by synonyms. Isn’t that irritating?

These auto-publishing sploggers target the RSS feed of your blog, where they scrape your creation in just a matter of seconds! In order to stop such exploitation you should either allow partial/short RSS feeds (so that the scraping software doesn’t take all of your content) or add a custom feed signature with a copyright notice in the feed footer section of your blog, like this:

Note that, like a waternark on an image, this note won’t prevent your content from being taken—but when it’s reproduced on another site, readers will see that the content is being used illegally.

Users of the Blogger platform can add a custom feed signature by navigating to Other settings for your blog, then in the Site Feed section, add the following feed signature in the post feed footer:

<p> © copyright 2012 – All rights reserved </p>
<a href=”http://www.yourblogaddress.com“>Your Blog</a>

For the WordPress platform, I stumbled upon this excellent free plugin that adds a custom signature in the feed footer.

These tips can definitely help you to reduce plagiarism of your content. But what other techniques have you tried? Share them with us in the comments.

Abhishek is a part time blogger from Delhi who loves to write unique and interesting tech tips on a variety of topics like blogging, making money online, SEO, internet marketing and gadgets. Apart from that he is a die heart android fan and so don’t be surprised if you find loads of android tips on his budding blog!

Source : problogger[dot]net

Streamline Your SEO Efforts With Expired Domains

2012-08-14T07:37:00.001-07:00

This guest post is by Matt Green of Evergreen Internet Marketers.

Have you ever thought or heard about buying aged domains to boost your SEO efforts? Well the results can be staggering. A lot of the top marketers in the industry have been doing this for years and have been dominating their markets! In fact, a recent post here on Problogger.net explained how this technique was used to reposition a business.

Not sure what an aged domain name is? Well it’s an expired domain name that typically has authority, age, page rank, back links, and various other components that make expired domain names very powerful. You should be purchasing expired domain names because most of the work is already done for you.

Instead of working hard building backlinks and doing a ton of off-page SEO, you can find great expired domain names for which these tedious tasks are already done. The advantage of buying expired domains is that these domains can help you boost your rankings in the markets you are already in to drive more leads and subscribers to your blog.

The benefits of expired domains

Buying expired domains has numerous benefits, but these are the main advantages.

Benefit #1. Drive traffic through sub-niches

You can find exact-match domain names so you can target sub-niches that are relevant to the market you’re currently targeting, to help you drive more targeted traffic to your websites. The huge opportunity in finding these domain names is that they’re usually not very competitive and you can take over the sub-niches in as little as a couple weeks. The potential traffic you could be reaching can vary, but this can be a very profitable way to grow your business.

Benefit #2. Cut your workload in half with established backlinks

The second benefit to buying aged domain names is that they already have authority and backlinks. This can really help you out tremendously. It’s very time-consuming to create high quality, relevant back links—exactly what Google and the rest of the search engines require.

Backlinks are a necessity to online success. With expired domain names, someone else has put in all the hard work—and you can pick up right where that person left off. Once you get the domain, you can build more backlinks to rank in the search engines much faster than if you were to buy a brand-new domain where you have to start from scratch.

Benefit #3. Get instant page rank

Another huge benefit to buying expired domain names is that you can find domains that have page rank. This is a huge added benefit because, again, it takes time to establish a domain name and build up its page rank. When you’re buying an aged domain name you can literally buy domains with page rank overnight. This really streamlines the process, so you can build authority and traffic extremely fast!

Benefit #4. Expired domains for the masses

With 100,000 domain names expiring every single day, there is a huge opportunity for you. It’s physically impossible to look at all these domains every day, so the competition isn’t particularly fierce. Typically, you can find a great domain name and buy it for as little as $12. Who else besides me would love to buy an established domain name with lots of backlinks and page rank for just $12? This brings a huge opportunity to website owners.

Benefit #5. Directory listings done for you

Have you ever wanted to get into DMOZ, Yahoo, but thought it’d take ages? Well another huge benefit to buying expired domain names is that you can find domains that are already listed in these directories. This way, you don’t have to spend days and weeks trying to get your website submitted into powerful directories that have a lot of influence for your domain name.

The DMOZ directory can be very hard to get into. You submit your website and wait weeks to have someone review it to see if it is of high enough quality to be included in their index. But you can forget about this task if the expired domain name you buy is already listed in the DMOZ directory.

The Yahoo directory needs to approve your website and on top of that you have to pay Yahoo $299 to join. Why spend the money when you can buy an expired domain name that’s already in the directory for $12?

Expired domain pitfalls

Of course, there are some pitfalls you’ll want to avoid if you’re looking to buy expired domains. Let’s look at them now.

Pitfall #1. Buying domains that lack value

Beginners tend to buy domain names that have no value. You need to do your due diligence and make sure you’re picking the right expired domain names that will enable you to drive consistent, reliable traffic to your website over time.

Pitfall #2. Bidding too soon

When they find a great domain name, sometimes people will bid on it when there’s still more than a day left until the domain auction ends. This can really hurt you, because you’re sure to draw attention to the auction, which can inflate the domain’s price. The best time to bid on a domain auction is within the auction’s last ten minutes.

So many people make this mistake. If they’d just waited for the last ten minutes to place their bid, they’d have won the auction at cost! Bidding too early can drive competitors to the auction listing, which can cause you to pay more than you need to for your target domains.

Pitfall #3. Keep away from the competition

Another pitfall to watch out for is to assess the competition the domain name has. If you pick a domain name that has a keyword that’s very competitive you may want to move on and find a different domain. You want to be picking domains up to rank fast, so you don’t want to find out later that you can’t rank for the keyword because it’s too competitive.

You need to make sure you do some research on the domain name to make sure that the keyword that the domain will be ranking for doesn’t have too much competition. If the domain name has too much competition, it could take you a long time to reach a decent rank with that domain.

Seeking expired domains

Keen to dip your toes in the expired domain waters? The main sources of expired domains are places like GoDaddy, NameJet, Sedo, Snapnames, and Flippa. There are over 100,000 domain names expiring every day so I would recommend using an expired domain name service to help you sift through them all.

There is a ton of potential and opportunity for you to grow your business right away with these expired domains. Have you ever bought an expired domain? Let me know how it went in the comments.

This guest post is by Matt Green of Evergreen Internet Marketers.

Source : problogger[dot]net

60 Mind-blowing Advertisements That Will Boost Your Creativity

2012-08-14T06:09:00.001-07:00

Love it or hate it, advertisements are all around us. Those times when you had to be horrified by those ugly banners in newspapers are gone. The classic ways of advertising are not working anymore. In order for an ad to be successful it has to resemble an “ad” as little as possible. Interaction with customers, experiments, installations etc. are taking over the world of advertisements. That’s why along with creative print advertisements (which are equally awesome), we’ve also collected some videos with next level advertising. Continue reading and check out these 60 mind-blowing advertisements to satisfy your urge for creativity.

1. Choose Later

2. The German Crafts: The Craftsmen’s Boobs

3. Prudence Neon Condoms

4. Crossword Bookstores, Audio books

5. Heineken – The Switch

6. Fast vs. Fast

7. The Walrus: Read Something Else

8. Daikin: Poker

9. PETA – Death Bet

me>

10. Mercedes-Benz: Multicontour Seat

11. Visionlab Prescription Glasses: Lease Contract

12. Getty Images: Shark

13. Volkswagen Trucks: Supermarket

14. Go Outside Magazine: Mouse

15. Mercedes Night View Assist: Child

16. booksTALK Audiobooks

17. Austria Solar – Annual Report

18. DNA Project: Cape Town Station Activation

19. Playboy Magazine: Hands

20. Lexus GS: Drive By

21. Patit: Chili

22. Toyota FJ Cruiser 4×4

23. DB Export Dry: The Wine List

24. Ô Fiô Bier Bar: Real date

25. Beijing Sports Radio: Boxing

26. Queen Bee Salon & Spa

27. Fundacion Padre Hurtado: Drunk

28. Lifestyle YOU, Wife Swap Australia

29. FF English School: Sheep, ship, chip

30. Skoda Superb: Domino

31. 3M Privacy Filter: For your eyes only

32. Coopers: Life After Dark

33. Belair Health Club: Truths

34. Kinderhilfe West Afrika Children’s Aid

35. B&B Hotels

36. Amstel Lager: The Boxer

37. Protex Antibacterial Hand Sanitizer

38. Vinyl Exchange

39. 3M Lint Roller

40. New York International Latino Film Festival

41. Adidas Benelux: Ajax Players Gave Their Fans A Surprise They Won’t Forget

42. Quit Smoking

43. Watta Pure Water

44. DirecTV: Questions

45. LEGO® Life of George

46. Close up – Kissdemic

47. Meat Pack: Hijack

48. BarBla: Responsible Sip

49. Twix: Ideologies

50. New Lexus GS Hybrid – 120 Heartbeats

51. MINI: MINI Horn

52. Google Play Test #0923: Balloons

53. Volkswagen: Alarm Clocks

54. Knorr Quick – Ping Pong

55. Red Tomato Pizza: VIP Fridge Magnet

56. Wise Up English School

57. Taco Bell: Discovering Bethel, Alaska

58. Lung Cancer Alliance

59. Kalnapilis: Mouse

60. Arçelik: Autologic Washing Machine

What do you think of these creative advertisements? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.

Source : 1stwebdesigner[dot]com

Google Penguin: what do we have to fear?

2012-08-14T02:42:00.001-07:00

Do you know why your clients’ websites have been losing traffic over the last few months?

It most likely has nothing to do with your design skills, or how people are responding to the website.

On April 24 2012, website owners all over the globe woke up to plummeting traffic levels that sent their businesses into a tailspin.

The long-awaited Google update (aka Penguin) hit the internet on April 24th and as a result, the web and SEO will never be the same. Google finally devised an intuitive algorithm update that addressed linking profiles for websites. Those sites that engaged in even the slightest of questionable activities experienced a downgrade.

Your client’s website

As web designers and developers, your clients’ websites are your responsibility and many will wonder why they lost rankings if they were hit by Penguin. Staying abreast of Google’s updates will give you a broader knowledge of what happens behind the scenes and also help you ease those clients who are apprehensive about your design work.

Because business owners are so concerned with marketing their websites online, many desire web designers who understand search engine optimization techniques. They look for providers who can create a website with search engines in mind, and many are not willing to hire an outside person unless they have a large budget.

By showcasing your grasp of search engine optimization and the latest Google news, you can land more clients and widen your level of expertise.

Search Engine Optimization

Marketing entails many different avenues, one being search engine optimization. SEO is the practice of optimizing your website to rank well in the search engines for specific keywords. One of the biggest determinants of your placement in the search engines is the number of links to your website. The more sites that link to yours, the higher your site will appear in Google for related keywords.

Years ago, acquiring links was easy. Google hadn’t figured out yet how to penalize people who were “gaming” the system. Marketers were stuffing their websites with keywords, buying links, spamming blogs with comments—they would do anything to get a link. It was simply a numbers game—until now.

Penguin changed everything

Google Penguin was an algorithm change that hit the web in late-April of this year. Its purpose was to target sites that engaged in over-optimization techniques that violated Google’s webmaster guidelines as they relate to linking. Basically, if you were doing anything to manipulate rankings, you could have been penalized.

Do you engage in any questionable activities? Here are some widespread practices Google addressed in the Penguin update:

Blog networks: Google took down one of the most prominent blog networks, Build My Rank, several weeks ago. The service allowed paid subscribers to distribute content with links to their sites attached. This content was placed on blogs within the proprietary network.

Before Penguin, this activity was standard practice among many SEOs, Google was aware it was occurring, but it had not created an update to enforce its guidelines. Enter, Penguin. Many of these blog networks are either out of business or changing their guidelines to appease Google.

Note: Google hates it when webmasters manipulate content to get links. Any time you put your own link out there on the web, you are at risk of being hit by Penguin.

External link sites: Penguin looks at the sites linking to yours with scrutiny. The sites must be authoritative, valuable, and relevant to your topic. Low-quality sites linking to you can negatively affect your rankings.

What are low quality sites? Sites built ONLY for links will fall into this category. These sites publish content that varies in topic and none of it provides value to readers. Some of the content is barely useful and even unreadable at times. Other sites contain content that includes outgoing links that are completely unrelated to the site. This may signal they are selling links which is a direct violation of Google’s guidelines.

Broken metal chain on white background via Shutterstock

Comment spam: marketers use their keywords as their names in blog comments to get a link pointing back to their site. After Penguin, Google wised up and this activity may now get you penalized.

Anchor text spam: Penguin targeted websites that had a “spammy” anchor text profile. Websites that had one or more keywords for most of their links may have felt Penguin’s effects.

Search Engine Watch published a study by Microsite Masters that analyzed thousands of websites hit by Penguin in an attempt to discover any similarities

According to the data, websites that had identical anchor text for 65% or more of their keywords suffered downgrades as a result of Google Penguin. The sites with more diversified linking profiles were not negatively affected by Penguin.

For example, if 65% or more of your links contain the keyword “web design sacramento”, you are at risk of a downgrade. However, if your links are more diversified and include unrelated terms like your brand name or “click here”, you have a better chance of escaping negative Penguin effects.

The study does not conclude that 65% is a determining factor for Google’s current algorithm and you shouldn’t use the data to suggest a pure cause and effect relationship. It does show, however, that Google is serious about defending its stance on over-optimization and penalizing any websites that do not follow its guidelines.

Relevance: besides link quality, relevance is also a strong determinant of rankings. If you are a web designer yet you have incoming links from sites that talk about Fiji vacations and rental apartments in Manhattan, you may not survive a Penguin update. The highest performing sites attract links from authoritative sites within their industry.

Bouncing back after penguin

If your site was affected by Penguin, with a little effort, you can recover. Here are some steps:

Many websites received a notice in their Webmaster Tools account about suspect links. Remove any links coming from low-quality and irrelevant sites. Contact the webmasters and ask them to kindly remove your links. If you do not get a response, document and submit your efforts to Google along with your reconsideration request.
Google gives webmasters the opportunity to submit their site if they feel it was unfairly hit by Penguin. If this is you, fill out this form and submit it to Google.
Google is toying with the idea of a “dis-avow” button. Within your webmaster tools account this button would allow you to dis-avow links coming from suspect sites.

3D life ring and on safety barriers at the sea via Shutterstock

How to prevent getting hit

We will never know the exact formula behind Penguin, but by following Google’s guidelines we can tip the scales in favor of Google smiling down on us.

Penguin is all about links, which according to Google should come to websites that create quality content.

But what is quality content? According to Google, the authors of the content should consider these questions before publishing it:

Would you trust the information in this article?
Is the article useful and informative, with content beyond the merely obvious? Does it provide original information, reporting, research, or analysis?
Does it provide more substantial value than other pages in search results?
Would you expect to see this in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
Is your site a recognized authority on the subject?

And here are the questions that suggest poor quality content:

Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
Does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites?
Does this article have an excessive number of ads that interfere with the main content?
Are the articles short or lacking in helpful specifics?

These guidelines originated from Google’s Webmaster Academy, a new online educational portal designed to help webmasters achieve ranking success on the internet.

The information presented at Google’s Webmaster Academy is concise and offers webmasters solid advice about how to optimize their websites for the search engine. It discusses on-page issues, how to ensure Google knows about your site, and also what Google expects from webmasters.

Conclusion

Knowing Google’s algorithms and how the search engine values content will not only help you create better, more-optimized websites, but it will also widen your skillset to help you land more clients.

Have you felt the wrath of the Penguin? Do you stay updated on the latest Google changes, has this helped your clients? Let us know in the comments below.

Thumbnail image is Vintage photo of a Niagara Falls Daredevil via Shutterstock.

Written exclusively for WDD by Jenna Scaglione. Jenna is the owner of Lady Content, a unique “content makeover” service. She is a successful writer, internet marketer, and a lover of family, friends and life. She enjoys helping her clients boost their conversions and increase brand awareness on the internet through content writing and social media. Connect with Jenna on Twitter or chat with her on Facebook

Share this story

Tweet Pin It

Designing for search engine optimization How to optimize your blog’s RSS feed CSS3 Best Practices for designers

Source : webdesignerdepot[dot]com

Coding Q&A With Chris Coyier: Responsive Sprites And Media Query Efficiency

2012-08-14T02:01:00.001-07:00

Coding Q&A With Chris Coyier: Responsive Sprites And Media Query Efficiency

By Chris Coyier
August 13th, 2012
CSS
8 Comments

Howdy, folks! Welcome to more Smashing Magazine CSS Q&A. It works like this: you send in questions you have about CSS, and at least once a month we’ll pick out the best questions and answer them so that everyone can benefit from the exchange. Your question could be about a very specific problem you’re having, or it could even be a question about a philosophical approach. We’ll take all kinds.

If you’re interested in exploring more Q&A, there’s a bunch more in my author archive.

Resolution Aware Sprites

Joshua Bullock asks:

Your last round of questions was titled “Box-Sizing And CSS Sprites” which offered some great answers for two separate items, but didn’t take them that one step further for responsive design. Ultimately, my question is this: Is there a preferred/suggested way of handling responsive sprites at all for multiple resolutions and image scaling? Is this even possible?

This is a hot topic lately because of the rise in “retina” displays. But really, this problem has been building up for a while. Us Web designers often work in “pixels”, for instance, setting the width of an image: img { width: 100px; }. But what is 100px? It’s been a long time since that literally referenced a pixel on the screen. These days it’s a rather arbitrary measurement. 100px ends up being around an inch on a physical screen, regardless of its resolution.

Retina displays made a really quick and big jump in resolution. Apple’s 27″ Thunderbolt Cinema display has 109 PPI (pixels per inch) while the 15″ Retina MacBook has 220 PPI (literally twice as dense) meaning there are more pixels on the drastically smaller screen.

If you are drawing a solid red box on the screen, no problem at all! The higher resolution display will simply draw it with more pixels. But what about a little icon that you designed at 16×16 “pixels” in Photoshop? Both a high-resolution display and low-resolution display need to display that icon at the same physical size, but the high-resolution display needs to essentially fake a lot of those pixels. It’s like when you enlarge a photo in Photoshop, it immediately starts looking like crap.

One solution is to make all your original images bigger. Instead of a 16×16 “pixel” image, you can actually make it 32×32 in Photoshop but have CSS size it to 16×16. Then the information is there for the high-resolution display.

Your question was explicitly about sprites. How can we make a sprite image that is twice the size for retina screens without making it a huge pain in the butt? Fortunately, Maykel Loomans recently published a very simple and clever technique for this.

Essentially, you make the sprite exactly (and literally) twice as big, while maintaining its proportions. Then in your “normal” CSS, you load up the “normal” sprite and do all the background-position and sizing stuff to make your sprite work. Then using media queries, you overwrite the background-image with your new retina sprite (when the conditions are correct). You use background-size to shrink the retina sprite, so you don’t have to touch the tedious positioning/sizing stuff. Yay!

span.rss-icon {   /* Size of sprite image is 200px ✕ 200px */   background: url(sprite-1x.png)  72px 181px;   width: 16px;   height: 16px;}@media   (min--moz-device-pixel-ratio: 2),  (-o-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2/1),   (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2),   (min-device-pixel-ratio: 2) {    span.rss-icon {    /* Size of retina sprite image is 400px ✕ 400px */    background-image: url(sprite-2x.png);    /* Bring down size to 1x size */    background-size: 200px 200px;  }}

Here’s a demo of that.

Liquid — Fixed — Liquid

Niels Matthijs asks:

The layout I’m trying to create is L1F2L3, meaning the first and third column are both liquid, while the center column is fixed. I’ve been trying some stuff out, and even though I came close a couple of times, the solution never really pleased me. Do you have anything on this?

The Flexbox method in CSS can hook you up with this solution, and it’s pretty easy:

<div class="grid">  <div class="col fluid">    ...  </div>  <div class="col fixed">    ...  </div>  <div class="col fluid">    ...  </div></div>

.grid {  display: -webkit-flex;  display: flex;}.col {  padding: 30px;}.fluid {  flex: 1;}.fixed {  width: 400px;}

See demo. I’m hesitant to recommend this as a “real world” solution because the spec for flexbox has changed rather dramatically recently. The code above is the newer syntax which is supported only by Chrome 21+ at the time of this writing (see support charts). There is an older syntax (see demo) that has wider browser support, but will probably someday stop working.

If you are in a position where you know that the middle column will be the longest, you could have the parent container have percentage padding on the right and left sides and absolutely position the left and right columns within it (at the width of that percentage). And if you don’t know that, you could always measure the three columns with JavaScript, and set the parent container’s height to the tallest of the three.

The New

Peter Karlstein asks:

What are the most useful CSS tips, techniques, tricks that you’ve learned recently? Can you present a couple of your recent “Aha!” moments with CSS?

Messing around with the latest flexbox stuff (as I did above) was pretty fun, although not really useful quite yet.

In the past few months I’ve moved entirely to using Compass, which has been tremendously useful. Over time I’ve grown tired of the repetitive and finicky things in CSS. But Sass and Compass make authoring CSS fun again for me.

As far as little CSS “tricks”, I’ve had to use this one several times lately. Essentially, if somehow some super long string of text gets into a container with no spaces, it will break out of the container in a super awkward overlapping fashion. This is most common with user-generated content and users pasting in URL’s. I like applying this class to any user-generated text containers:

.prevent-text-breakouts {  -ms-word-break: break-all;      word-break: break-all;      word-break: break-word;  -webkit-hyphens: auto;     -moz-hyphens: auto;          hyphens: auto;}

Before:

After:

Also, Uncle Dave’s Ol’ Padded Box is a good one to have in your toolbox.

Relative Font Sizing

Greg Nelson asks:

Do you think there will one day (hopefuly soon) be a way to set a font-size to be in direct relationship to the width of it’s parent element, or some other truly responsive measure? e.g. <p> font size could be a percentage of the width of a sidebar div it sits inside of, so that as screen width’s change (and width of sidebar changes, if it’s also a percentage of <body> width), the size of the font will change too?

Yep, that’s coming! You’ll be able to set font-size with vw and vh units. Those stand for “viewport width” and “viewport height”. 1vw = 1% of the current browser window’s width. Here’s the CSS spec for that. And here’s a tutorial on using them. This is how it will work:

At the time of writing this, there is only support in Chrome 20+ and IE 10. If you need full browser support now (and don’t mind using a bit of JavaScript), you can use FitText.js (best for headers only).

Media Query Efficiency

Mark Roland asks:

When organizing media queries in a CSS file, is there any advantage or disadvantage to how they are grouped?
For instance, is there a browser performance difference between using several media query blocks (e.g. “@media screen and (max-width: 480px) { }” ) so that element styles are defined together (header, nav, footer, etc.) versus placing all of the element styles for the specific media query into one single media query block?

The former allows for easier development, but costs increased file size. Are there browser rendering costs for redundant media queries?

Technically, probably yes. The worst offense is the extra file-size that it causes. Using one is clearly less text than using multiple. But the fact is if you gzip/deflate content (you probably are), that will eat that repetitive code for breakfast and it won’t even increase file-size too much. As far as CSS parsing time, that stuff happens so fast that you really don’t need to think about it.

So on a practical level: don’t worry about it. If you have some time to spend on making your website faster, losslessly optimizing your images will make a way bigger difference.

If anyone is confused on why Mark is asking this, it’s most likely because of the abilility that Sass and LESS have to “nest” media queries (see). This is a really neat feature that makes working with media queries a lot more clean an intuitive, as you the author. However, the final output results in many duplicated media queries. I know that addressing this issue is on the mind of the lead developer from Sass.

Onward!

Keep up the great questions, folks! Got a good one? Send it in, and we’ll be picking the best ones for the next edition.

Image source of picture on front page.

Tags:CSS

↑ Back to top Share on Twitter

Source : coding[dot]smashingmagazine[dot]com

Great jQuery plugins for fresh websites

2012-08-14T01:51:00.001-07:00

One can only imagine how tough it was to practice web design back when everything seemed so new — during the days of Netscape Navigator and Microsoft FrontPage. Looking back, it seems like such an archaic time in the history of web design. It was almost impossible to design something of supreme and intelligent creativity. Back then, you were seen as creative if you had an awful flashing background or colored scrollbars.

There wasn’t a ton of flexibility really when it came down to the nitty gritty of design. Many of the layouts were the same and mimicked what was seen in magazines and newspapers. I mean just think about it: not too long ago we were able to finally figure out a way to use decorative fonts online. Beforehand, it was all Arial, all Verdana and all Times New Roman — in 2012, can you imagine living that life?

Tables were the norm and those weren’t too flexible. Speaking of flexibility, how did we ever live without responsiveness? If you wanted to design a website a while ago, you pretty much were boxed in to work with what you had. No one complained then, but thank goodness for progressive technology.

Now…

Fast forward to now, and we can pretty much design anything the way we want to, in whatever we want to. These types of things shouldn’t be taken for granted, but as new generations of designers and developers enter this realm, it pretty much is. I mean, just a few months ago, we were finally able to use style sheets to create rounded corners — how quick do we forget?

The advances in web design can be contributed to the ongoing evolution of different coding languages. You can’t have a great web design without some great web development (and vice versa). And you would think, things may have gotten more complicated as far as development goes, but it’s pretty obvious things have gotten easier. Take a look, for example, at HTML4 vs. HTML5.

One of the greatest developments in, well, development and design has been the usage of jQuery. It’s probably one of the easiest JavaScript libraries to learn and code with, as well as do some pretty neat things with. If you’re designing freely and/or desire some really awesome interactions between your design and your audience, you will probably use jQuery.

The plugins

jQuery doesn’t just up the ante of your actual design but it makes for smoother user experiences. When websites should be made to welcome your audience and make it easy for them to move around, this is important. The design is also important if you are using a large amount of creativity with your design. Basically, there should be no limits when it comes to creating websites, and jQuery is extremely helpful in making sure you’re not trapped in boxes. So what can jQuery do for you? Below are some great plugins that allow you to be as creative and fresh in web development as possible.

jQuery grid mobile

Some designers like to open up the program of their choice and design whatever they want to with no qualms. There are others who like having a method to their madness. Web design standards suggest that we should utilize grids to help us design great and effective web sites, especially if you’re designing a blog or news site. A second part to that idea, is that the grid should be flexible and responsive. This plugin allows you to create multiple columns with (and without) responsiveness.

ArcText.js

Just a couple years ago, if you wanted to have some really great fonts and typographic effects on your website, you had to open your desired design program and create a graphic with whatever you wanted on it. It was an ok technique until people realized it wasn’t the most flexible, nor did fare well with search engine optimization. With advances and technology, however, we’ve become able to use decorative fonts online. Not just that, but with this plug in, we are able to add some styling to them that wouldn’t otherwise be available outside of Photoshop.

Fancy Moves

A common trend in modern webdesign is the ability to make things move. It’s almost impossible to visit a website and witness static images — almost everyone utilizes an image slider in some form or fashion. Many of these sliders are automatic and change pictures given a specific time frame. There’s nothing wrong with that, but how can you take such a concept and make it greater for the user experience? This Fancy Movies plugin seems to have that figured out by letting viewers control the slide, not just by clicking the next arrow but through comfortably hitting the arrow keys on their keyboards.

FitText

Typography in design is extremely important. Web designers need the ability to use whatever fonts they want to and then put it together in whatever way they desire. Through things such as Cufon and CSS, that’s possible, but of major importance lately is the responsiveness of a website. If your design can’t be flexible, it’s almost useless and one of the main portions of sites that has to be responsive is the typography. FitText allows your headers and filler text to be great, no matter window size or device used to check your website out.

Hover Zoom

The way in which certain elements react to interactions on a site can impact (negatively and positively) the way in which viewers react to it. One simple interaction that is always being played up, is the hover feature. When you put your mouse over an image or even a link, it’s almost common for that element to do something; and the better the reaction, the better people will respond do it. This plugin is for pictures that, when hovered, zoom in or out and also provides additional information. If correctly utilized this can be extremely effective. Not to mention, the design will fare well.

jRumble

What designers have to realize is, when making websites, we have a lot of power. We can make people see what we want them to see and not see the things we don’t want them to see. Basic design principles, like balance and hierarchy, can help to sway the focus and interest of viewers. There are subtle ways of doing this. jRumble is more passionate about getting one to see and notice things in a more forceful, blatant way. It’s a fun plugin and when used sparingly can be effective for whatever purpose. Just remember not to over do it.

jQSlickWrap

Creating layouts for your text can be a difficult thing. It’s not just about the fonts you choose, but also the way in which you present it that makes it effective. If you are designing a site that plans on having big blocks of text, setting it up improperly may cause your readers to be totally uninterested in whatever you’re saying. Many designers have issues when trying to make images and text interact well with each other. If you aren’t extremely into the blocks of text or you find that you want your text and images to interact more, this may be the plugin for you. No more newspaper-esque readings, but more creative freedom.

jQuery Offset Animation

As previously stated, static websites aren’t as common today as they may have been in previous years. Many things have become contributory in helping to create dynamic websites that move and interact well with their viewers. One thing jQuery had added to that conversation is the ability to create great animations and transitions from element to element. This plugin creates a smooth sliding or sweeping transition to move from one element to the next. It makes for a very enjoyable website.

Scroll-O-Rama

With a name like ‘Scroll-O-Rama’, you might pass this plugin up, but I’d advise you not to. As fun and great as this plugin is, I believe it can be made popular you in the trendy niche of single page websites. As you scroll around single page websites, you kind of expect something to happen. This plugin pretty much allows headings and text to dance as you pass by it. It’s another plugin that’s used mainly for decorative purposes, but if you can sprinkle it about your site and use it in the right places, you could play this plugin for a strength.

jQuery Shadow Plugin

To add a bit of depth to images or elements sometimes, designers like to use drop shadows. There are two popular ways in which designers create shadows and that’s through CSS or creating the shadow in their design program and typically saving it as some sort of transparent file. Most times this works and sometimes there can be some issues but what’s great about this plugin is it allows you to add different shadow types to whatever elements you like without having to design them, and it works cross-browser.

Slitslide

Good transitions in websites make for a fun and tantalizing experience. We’ve already given you a great plugin for element to element transitions, but this plugin is great for page to page transitions. With this Slitslide plugin, the page splits, slides and introduces new pages directly behind it. This is an extremely dynamic tool that adds some excitement and flavor to sites that may need that extra level.

Tipped

Tooltips are an element used for many reasons; to draw attention, add information or whatever you can fit in it. It acts much like a hover effect, where if used properly can be extremely effective. There are a ton of jQuery plugins that cater to the development and use of tooltips. Tipped is a plugin that works and has many features, most of which are customizable by HTML5 and CSS, which makes for an easy and smooth build.

Tubular

We can all agree that a flashing background is not where creativity lies. However, there are other things that can be added to your background to give your website a bit of a spark. You may just be strictly about design and want a well put together pattern, but you might want something a bit more dynamic. Tubular is a plugin that allows you to use YouTube videos to serve as your background. Think of the fun and creative possibilities one could score with this.

jmpress

Some websites or sub-sites are only around to give us a bit of information. There may not be a ton of copy and there may not be a ton of photographs, but it’s important information nonetheless. In many encounters with these volumes and types of information, we are used to putting and presenting them in slideshow type manners. This jQuery plugin is reminiscent of that, while using an infinite background with some great animations.

jQuery Knob

We live in a very visual time, where numbers and information is easier to see than it is to really think about. Some of us even prefer to see our information before we really understand it and can use it. If you have some information to offer, this plugin is great to help visualize numbers. It’s an interactive dial/circle graph of sorts that works and allows viewers to change the information as well.

3d Thumbnail Hover

We already talked about the image hover effect and how it can be great effective for web sites. Well, what if you want a little more pizzazz for your images? This plugin gives you an image hover effect that reveals information with a bit of a 3D twist.

blur.js

Good design can really be the difference between a good and a bad website. Oftentimes, the decision isn’t about the design as a whole but about the little details; that’s why we use tooltips and great headline texts. This plugin adds a bit more detail to your site, if you desire. This plugin creates produces psuedo-transparent blurred elements over other elements. This is a decorative plugin, but can be used to benefit.

Conclusion

There are many ways to enhance your web design to make it fresh and appealing to your visitors. Keep in mind that you want to make something that’s not only creative, but creative and effective. The tools we have now are great and what’s even better is technology is still increasing and better things for website creation await us.

Do you like to use jQuery plugins or do you avoid them? What are some wonderful and fresh jQuery plugins you like to use? Let us know in the commments.

Kendra Gaines is a freelance designer from Virginia, USA. Connect with her.

Share this story

Tweet Pin It

Techniques for creating modal windows Our favorite tweets of the week
May 28 – June 3, 2012 Our favorite tweets of the week
June 4 – June 10, 2012

Source : webdesignerdepot[dot]com

Earn and Create Web Design/Development Video Tutorials Using LabVidz

2012-08-14T01:48:00.009-07:00

Recently I wrote an article about how developers and designers can earn money as a side project, which included writing tutorials, recording video tutorials, writing an eBook, and creating a premium membership website to name a few a few different options.

Today, what I’m going to show you is how to combine those three to form a super website where you can showcase your talents, products, and general awesomeness.

In this post you will learn how to:

leverage your skills to create a product
turn that product into an income generator
- using a unique tool that we’ll provide, something you’ve never seen before
- which will absolutely require zero coding skills on your end
launch your products with a perfect website (absolutely no coding required!)

Why are we doing this? Because we can…and we want to revolutionize the way people leverage their skills to actually earn more on the side, even while having a 9 to 5 job.

The end-game? You could be your own boss in no time!

It’s super easy! What are you waiting for? Show me your war faces!

Videos are cool, that’s why websites like YouTube, Vimeo, and Daily Motion are the first place people go to for entertainment and education. In fact, everyone I know prefer watching video tutorials to reading a thousand-word article.

Why not do the same thing for your products?

Why Create a Video Subscription Website

This is becoming pretty common nowadays, startups introducing their service with a minute-long video with cool animation, explaining what their service is all about, the fun facts about it, and other important details. Humans are visual beings, and we’re impressed by well-presented visuals.

Now, whether you’re a designer or a developer, I’m pretty sure that by now you have amassed hundreds of techniques and have improved your skills significantly over the last year. Why not leverage that and create a product of your own?

Try searching YouTube and you’ll see loads of tutorials ranging from programming to design. Many upload their tutorials on YouTube without knowing how to monetize their content while YouTube is earning quite a lot for their page views. Now, you might say that they’re already there, and in fact these are free tutorials, how can you compete?

It’s all about presentation and better features! And with LabVidz, that won’t be a problem because everything you need is basically there!

Soon we will publish video tutorials, since there are two types of people: those who prefer reading and those who would rather watch a tutorial. Those who prefer to read are mostly our readers while the latter you’ll find on YouTube and other video websites. The goal is the same, but the presentation is where the tug o’ war happens, so why not offer the same thing?

The good thing about this is that they will be relevant for a long time, and maintenance is low once you’re done recording. All you need to do then is to market it, and when it gains traction it is effectively a passive income generator.

Ideas and Videos

I know that you have an idea lingering in your thoughts whenever you lie on your bed at 3am, or when you’re in the shower, or maybe even while riding the bus. We all have moments like this, and 99% of the time we just let them pass and never look back. Then forgotten.

This is why I advocate bringing a pen and a notepad wherever you go, two items that you can whip out wherever you go. A laptop or a tablet will definitely do too, though.

Anyway, the point is if you still have those ideas lurking inside you, now is the time to write them down and see the most viable option.

Who knows, you’ll probably be the next Sacha Greif - a freelance web designer who wrote an e-book and earned (and is still earning) $15,000 through it. But wait, that’s an e-book and we’re talking about videos here!

The concept is pretty much the same. Sacha’s book is all about UI and creating a web application. See where this is headed? The idea is simple: create a web app, document it, format it into a book, sell it. Boom! $15,000.

Now, you’re a designer or a web developer and you’d do the same but you’re not that fond of writing. It’s okay, you can still follow his steps!

Say, you are pretty good with PHP or Adobe Photoshop. Why not create a course on them?

Teamtreehouse.com’s CSS3 Typography Course

Above is Teamtreehouse‘s CSS3 Typography course. I know that by now you know what I’m trying to point out, right? Currently they have several thousands of clients/customers/students, and a lot of those only want a portion of what they offer!

If you know PHP, then create a course out of it with the goal of creating a web application. If you know how to use Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator or other software, then create a course that will help beginners rise up to your level.

By doing this you are already helping people learn new things and you can earn while doing it!

Introducing LabVidz

LabVidz makes it easy for everyone to create and monetize videos. You can try it for free of up to 3 videos and see how amazing and versatile LabVidz is. It’s responsive and has a lot of features from membership management down to managing payments and social sharing.

It’s a responsive video subscription website!

What You Can Do With LabVidz

It’s a given that you’re either a web designer or a web developer with great knowledge of your industry, so why not use that experience and knowledge to your advantage? It would be a waste to just keep it to yourself and not leverage it, right?

With LabVidz, you won’t have to worry about creating an entire website to host your video tutorials!

With Labvidz:

You can create video tutorials and simply upload it on your control panel. It’s a 1-2-3 step, really, so easy even your grandma can create a baking tutorial and upload it without hassle!
You can either use it as a landing page for your product, or an introduction to some service you have. Accepting payments is easy, you won’t even break a sweat!
You can create the next Lynda or TeamTreeHouse where you can offer video courses.

All of this in just minutes!

What LabZip Can Do

Still skeptical? Why not read More than 150,000 reasons why you should launch a video membership site with LabVidz?

And remember, LabVidz and LabZip are 1WD approved!

Source : 1stwebdesigner[dot]com

The top responsive web design problems ... and how to avoid them!

2012-08-14T01:48:00.007-07:00

The top responsive web design problems ... and how to avoid them!

By James Young on August 13, 2012 | 7 comments

Share this article

Tweet
Short url

James Young recently surveyed his fellow designers about the biggest problems they face on responsive sites. Here, he reports on the results – and offers his solutions

I recently created a survey asking fellow designers about the problems they faced when creating fully responsive sites. This article will list the most common problems they reported and offer possible solutions, along with suggestions to consider on your next projects.

The information contained here is based on hundreds of survey responses (if you’d like to add your own answers, the survey itself is still open) along with problems I’ve also come across in my own work at Offroadcode. So without further ado, let's reveal what the most common responsive web design problems are ... and how you can avoid them.

The most common RWD problems

Despite responsive design already having been around more than two years, it’s still in many ways a fledgling methodology. Designers are faced with an ever-changing landscape of devices, code frameworks and scripts – and, of course, the need to work in a new way with clients to manage the process of creating responsive websites.

All of these feature in the most common problems reported by survey respondents, which were:

Problem 1: Explaining RWD to clients

The 'old' process of designing a website was a very linear one, which made it easy for clients to understand. They’d go through a briefing stage, then some sort of wireframing and structural planning stage, then they'd get a set of pixel-perfect visuals to pick apart. Only when were these signed off would the site itself be completed.

As I’m sure many of you have found, this process is simply not up to scratch any more. One of the things many designers are struggling with is how to explain to clients that there isn’t really a 'visuals stage' any more. Responsive design is a much more fluid process and wireframing, sketching and prototyping are typically more powerful tools.

The solution: Demonstrate the power of responsive design

A better way to explain responsive design is to actually show a client what it can do. Don’t just talk about breakpoints and media queries and multi-device functionality – it’s easy to forget how meaningless these terms can be, even if some of them sound very obvious.

A great way to get any concept across is to show it in action. If you’ve got access to a laptop, tablet and a phone in a client meeting, you could demo how a site (perhaps one you’ve already built for another client) displays and behaves in different environments. This is simple and effective, particularly if you compare it to how a non-responsive site works on different devices.

Responsive layouts, responsively wireframed by Adobe's James Mellers

If you can’t show a site on a range of devices, conside demoing one of the many sites that mimic typical responsive breakpoints, such as responsive.is or Responsive Layouts, Responsively Wireframed (pictured above).

Problem 2: The lack of a static design phase

As I mentioned earlier, one of the big problems designers reported was that a change in the 'old' design process is required to make the most of responsive design. Rather than creating static screenshots, designers rely even more than ever on quick sketches, wireframing and making rapid HTML and CSS prototypes by 'designing' in the browser.

The solution: Design more elements and fewer layouts

Before we look at possible solutions, I should point out that processes and workflow can vary. I’m a big fan of using whatever gets results, so if you’re happy with your process, stick with what works for your and your clients.

However, my own personal preference is for making as much use as possible of paper as normal, but using it to test ideas at different sizes. It’s quick and easy if you follow Sam Hardacre’s great suggestion for responsive sketching.

I also recommend designing in the browser and working with HTML as early as possible, then using Fireworks/Photoshop for creating assets rather than full layouts.

Sketch, wireframe and prototype. RWD doesn't mean you shouldn't use paper any more: just use it in a different way

In bigger projects, you may struggle to even wireframe everything. A good idea here is to take a tip from Dan Mall’s case study on the redesign of Crayola.com and create paper/wireframe widgets that you can move around. It gives you a great deal of flexibility and enables clients to provide solid input.

For some useful information on other people's personal workflows, you can also check out Stephen Hay’s responsive design workflow slides or a very detailed overview from Yellow Pencil on its responsiveprocess.com website.

Problem 3: Navigation

In the past, navigation on sites tended to be horizontal along the top of the page, or sometimes down the left of a page. It now needs a more considered approach. The number of responses to the survey that mention navigation reflect just what a tricky problem this is to solve – and not one that has a simple canned solution.

The solution: Use good, consistent design

Choice of navigation strategy is is a wide-reaching decision, and should be based on your site's content and information architecture, along with a number of design considerations. Rather than simply downloading a script or demo, I'd encourage you first to evaluate how it works, why does what it does – and most importantly, how it works for the site you’re building.

The following articles may be useful here:

Responsive navigation in action: the Starbucks website

And remember: test how your navigation works on as many devices as possible, and in as many cases as possible. It’s amazing how often I come across sites where the navigation just doesn’t work in any sensible way. Don’t be responsible for creating one of them.

Problem 4: Images

Much like navigation, the set of options available for handling images in responsive designs is incredibly fragmented. As yet, the W3C community group hasn't backed a specification, so we’re left with what amounts to a personal choice of a wide range of scripts to fill in for this missing functionality, and deliver appropriate assets to devices.

To further complicate things, designers must also consider the next generation of devices with high-pixel-density displays such as the new iPad and Macbook Pro, along with a range of non-Apple hardware. Like code, images and icons should be as flexible as possible to ensure that graphics on high-pixel-density devices don't look blurry because they’ve been scaled up poorly.

The solution: Scripts, SVG and icon fonts

While there may not be an 'official' solution for responsive images, there are some really great solutions out there that are good to use right now, and give us positive results without resorting to too many hacks or code workarounds.

Oak Studios' Symbolset semantic icon fonts adapt well to differing screen sizes.

Here is a selection of techniques and resources to consider on your projects to cover adaptive images and differing pixel-density displays and devices:

Problem 5: Tables

A number of survey responses mentioned data tables as being problematic, particularly when they had to contain complex information or simply a large number of rows and columns. Squashing all of this information into a small-screen device in a usable way remains a challenge that I’m not sure has been adequately solved. However, some promising steps are being taken.

The solution: Take your pick of the different options

Chris Coyier has blogged reviewing a number of well-thought-out suggestions for tables. Having worked for several years with travel websites, which often involve large, detailed flight timetables, I have to say that none of the solutions outlined by Chris quite met those requirements. However, for most use cases, I’m confident there’s an option for your site that would at least provide a good foundation on which to build.

A couple of particularly strong responsive table options are:

Responsive Tables, from Zurb
Responsive Tables, from David Bushell
Break a table out of its container (creator unknown)

I have seen a couple of solutions where hiding "less important data" is suggested. While I appreciate the experimental nature of the tables, I would personally recommend against the practice of hiding content from users depending on their viewing device.

Problem 6: Converting old fixed-width sites

One of the biggest issues reported in the survey was the problem of how to update the code base of an old fixed-width site to make it responsive – and indeed, whether you should. As I mentioned above, the responsive design process is often quite different to the old fixed-layout design process, and code is engineered in a less flexible way.

The question of what to do when faced with updating an old site is whether to reverse engineer existing templates and stylesheets, or to opt for a greenfield rebuild.

The solution: Aim for a greenfield rebuild

Almost without exception, those surveyed said either that they’d opted for a greenfield rebuild of templates and stylesheets, or that they only reverse engineered code because there were other factors involved and they had no choice.

Typically, older fixed-size websites didn’t need to take into account mobile-first design, and the sometimes different ways in which content must be structured. While it’s possible to reverse engineer code to make it responsive, on bigger sites it’s almost certainly going to be easier (and actually quicker) to rebuild than to work backwards.

Problem 7: What to serve users of old versions of IE

I’m sure you’ve all been waiting to for me to mention Internet Explorer in a negative light. I can indeed confirm that when working with older versions of the browser (IE8 and earlier), the main issue you’ll encounter is the lack of support for CSS media queries. This means that if you’re working with a mobile-first technique such as 320 and Up, your media queries won’t kick in and your layout won’t display properly on desktop browsers, so you’ll effectively end up with a small-screen layout on a big screen.

The solution: Polyfill or gracefully let go

The bad news is that, despite the wishful thinking of the design world (and to be fair, actual progress from Microsoft), you do still need to consider older versions of Internet Explorer (particularly 8) when you plan a site. The good news is we have some strong options for supporting older versions of IE while pushing forward creating great responsive sites.

If you’re keen to maintain your layout as much as possible in older IEs, consider conditionally including the respond.js polyfill from Scott Jehl in your pages. For a fuller explanation of options, I recommend reading Techniques For Gracefully Degrading Media Queries, by Lewis Nyman.

If you’re looking to phase out support for older versions of the browser while keeping content accessible, it may be worth considering … doing nothing. If you’ve built your site mobile-first and you don’t include a script like respond.js, your old IE users will effectively see your mobile view.

This may not be a perfect experience on a bigger monitor but at least the content remains accessible. Failing that, you could consider a simple conditional IE stylesheet and add in some rudimentary styling (fixed widths) because a simple linear view may not be best for a lot of users.

In my opinion, what to serve users of old versions of Internet Explorer comes down to the requirements of your client. I just ask that you don’t discount versions of IE earlier than 9 without at least considering the people using them.

Problem 8: Testing time and cost

One of the most common answers in the survey was the issue of testing: how to test, what devices to test with, and the potentially huge cost of building a test suite of devices.

For many designers, especially freelancers and very small businesses, it’s difficult to build up a test suite much beyond the devices you own personally. This came across loud and clear in the survey. Many people are making do with browser inspection and window dragging, along with testing on a personal handset and maybe a tablet. Obviously, this isn’t ideal. Building even a modest collection of devices is now a necessary business expense.

Testing time is also an issue. Although the time needed to test a site has certainly risen, I do feel that some of this is offset by better prototyping, designing in the browser and less reliance on static, fixed-size visuals.

The solution: Share devices and keep resizing

It’s great to see bigger agencies such as Clearleft sharing their huge range of test devices with anyone who wants to visit their offices. While this is not yet commonplace, I’m confident local creative communities can do their bit to get organised and at least discuss this sort of initiative.

Clearleft shares its range of test devices with anyone who visits its studio. Other agencies, do likewise!

If you’re interested in seeing what other fellow designers have in their testing toolkits, I recommend taking a look at Stu Robson’s My Test Suite site. Brad Frost has also written a useful guide to how to test on real devices without breaking the bank.

There’s no substitute for testing on real devices but if you can’t afford to put together a large device collection, you can at least make sure the bigger parts of your site work as expected by using one of the many responsive testing tools, bookmarklets and frames. It all helps!

Fill out the survey yourself!

Thanks for staying with me, and thank you to everyone who has filled in the survey. (Don’t forget to fill it in if you haven’t!) I’d love to hear of any other problems people are having in transitioning to responsive design, and what steps you’re taking overcome them.

Main image: dConstruct archive, by Jeremy Keith. See the original here.

Comment: 1

Excellent article! Especially problems 6 + 7 are giving me a real headache at the moment :S

Report abuse

Comment: 2

Hey James,

I’m Mat Marquis, chair of the Responsive Images Community Group you mentioned under images. I just wanted to clarify two points:

“As yet, the W3C community group hasn't backed a specification […]”

Since the publication of the HTML5 Doctor article linked in that section, the RICG has published a draft specification for the picture element. There will be a final draft posted within the next few weeks, slated for inclusion as a part of HTML5.

As a solution for right now we highly recommend Scott Jehl’s Picturefill, which closely mimics the proposed syntax of the picture element.

Report abuse

Comment: 3

Great article.

For us the biggest problems are responsive images and none of the solutions are brilliant. We rolled our own in the end but it still involved loading 2 images on larger devices (starting with the 320px version).

Tables are also a big problem, but I don't see a solution really. It's not even a responsive problem, it's simply that a mobile phone requires something other than a table to show the data effectively.

When it comes to testing we found that testing on real devices is the only really effective way. We built a testing station which others are welcome to pop in and use if necessary (although we are out in the sticks).

http://www.64digital.co.uk/blog/66/the-64-digital-super-dooper-device-testing-station

Report abuse

Comment: 4

For any freelancer's who want to test on actual devices, try heading to a Best Buy (or other electronic store). They usually have a bunch of devices hooked up with internet connections (at least the ones near me do).

You don't get the convenience of owning the devices but if there's one close you could easily run in every week or month for an hour.

Easy and free.

Report abuse

Comment: 5

Great article, with some great advice. A little surprised that the subject of responsive javascript isn't mentioned though, as this to me is a RWD problem pretty much every designer / developer is going to hit for anything but the simplest of websites. It would be great to see some tips on how folk can make their JS just as responsive as their HTML.

Other than that, there are some great tips here, so well worth the read.

Matt

Report abuse

Comment: 6

mattbrailsford - what do you mean by responsive javascript? What common problems do you encounter?

We're using breakpoints.js to determine which media query has fired and sometimes running different JS accordingly. Have't run into any difficulties yet.

Report abuse

Comment: 7

Thanks for sharing the brilliant tips! I would surely consider abiding by these tips in my next venture.

Report abuse

Source : netmagazine[dot]com

How to Install PlayOnLinux on Fedora 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17

2012-08-14T01:48:00.005-07:00

I tried to install safari on my fedora machine for testing purpose. That time I got to know about plyonlinux package.

Create new file using following command.
[root@localhost digcms]# vim /etc/yum.repos.d/playonlinux.repo

Put following in that file and save it.

[playonlinux]name=PlayOnLinux Official repositorybaseurl=http://rpm.playonlinux.com/fedora/yum/baseenable=1gpgcheck=0gpgkey=http://rpm.playonlinux.com/public.gpg

After run yum update command.

[root@localhost digcms]# yum update

Then install playonlinux package.

[root@localhost digcms]# yum install playonlinux

URL for playonlinux site.

http://www.playonlinux.com/en/

Now you can run any program with playonlinux on fedora. After starting for program following screen will appear. click on install button.

After clicking on install button following screen will appear

Then you can install any program and run from your linux box.

I found this application very nice for testing purpose.

Incoming search terms:

Source : digcms[dot]com

Get Started Writing iOS Apps With RubyMotion

2012-08-14T01:48:00.003-07:00

Get Started Writing iOS Apps With RubyMotion

By Clay Allsopp
August 2nd, 2012
Apps, IOS
3 Comments

Everyone is trying to craft the next beautiful iOS app, but building on Apple’s platform has traditionally required experience in a niche programming language, Objective-C. However, with the release of RubyMotion, anyone can make a completely native iOS app using the power of Ruby.

Developers have tried to get around the Objective-C hurdle by making HTML and JavaScript hybrid apps using tools like PhoneGap and Trigger, but the result can be a substandard user experience. Plus, mobile-centric Web development is yet another narrow skill set that potential developers have to learn. RubyMotion is intended to be an alternative solution that produces apps identical to those created in Objective-C, except using a more accessible and popular language.

How does that work? Unlike normal interpreted Ruby, RubyMotion is compiled to machine code and runs incredibly fast. This allows full access to the existing iOS SDK and APIs while preserving the flexibility and plain fun of Ruby. RubyMotion also includes interactive debugging and testing tools that don’t exist in the traditional Xcode and Objective-C workflow.

The hope is that coding in Ruby and using the RubyMotion toolchain will make developing iOS apps easier for new developers, as well as help existing iOS developers be even more productive. I’ve been working on iOS apps since the original SDK, but I still jumped at the chance to write real native apps in the same language that I was already using for my back ends.

If you’ve hit stumbling blocks learning native iOS development or are just curious about what Ruby on iOS looks like, you should read on. We’ll try out RubyMotion by making an app that grabs some data from the Internet and updates the screen’s content accordingly.

But first, we have to install it.

Set Up

RubyMotion is a commercial product from HipByte, a company founded by the developers responsible for MacRuby. Parts of the RubyMotion tools are open source, but the actual Ruby compiler (where the magic happens) is not. Even though it’s only a few months old, a strong community has already developed around RubyMotion; I’m involved in maintaining some cool projects but am in no way affiliated with HipByte.

You can purchase a lifetime license to RubyMotion for $200 on the RubyMotion website. The license comes with a graphical installer that sets up everything on your Mac, no commands necessary. If you run into trouble, support is available on @RubyMotion’s Twitter account and the mailing list.

RubyMotion also requires you to install Xcode from the Mac App Store to get some developer libraries and tools. However, RubyMotion’s tools work in the command shell, and you’re free to use any editor or IDE you want. Supplementary packages are available for most editors that could speed up your development.

Having some experience with RubyGems and Rake also helps because RubyMotion uses these tools. RubyGems should come installed on your Mac, and you can use it to install Rake by running gem install rake in the terminal. If you have never seen those words before, no worries; we’ll still cover them like fresh topics.

Create A Project

In contrast to the normal iOS toolchain, RubyMotion works in the command line. You can still use Xcode’s Interface Builder to construct your interfaces, but complete Xcode integration is unsupported at this time. So, fire up the terminal and let’s get started.

RubyMotion uses two commands extensively: rake and motion. The motion command creates RubyMotion projects and manages the RubyMotion tools; if you’re coming from a Rails background, it’s sort of like the rails command. If you enter motion in the shell, you’ll see a brief instruction page:

$ motionUsage:  motion [-h, --help]  motion [-v, --version]  motion <command> [<args…>]Commands:  create       Create a new project  activate     Activate the software license  update       Update the software  support      Create a support ticket

We’re interested in motion create <Project Name>. This will create the folder <Project Name> in the current directory and fill it with the essential files and folders that you’ll need for a RubyMotion project.

Run motion create Smashing to create your first project. You should see some output like this:

$ motion create Smashing    Create Smashing    Create Smashing/.gitignore    Create Smashing/Rakefile    Create Smashing/app    Create Smashing/app/app_delegate.rb    Create Smashing/resources    Create Smashing/spec    Create Smashing/spec/main_spec.rb

Run cd ./Smashing to enter the project’s directory. You’ll be running all subsequent commands from this location, so keeping it open in a dedicated tab or window is a good idea.

Let’s walk through what this command created:

./Rakefile
This is the file that the rake command uses to determine what commands are available. RubyMotion also uses it for settings such as your app’s name, resources and source-code location.
./app
This is the directory that contains all of your code. RubyMotion will recursively dig through this folder and load any *.rb files that it finds. You can specify additional directories outside of ./app in Rakefile.
./app/app_delegate.rb
This is your only piece of code right now. It contains your app’s delegate. We’ll go into more detail soon, but know that every RubyMotion project needs a delegate.
./resources
Files in this directory will be copied into your app. It’s a good place to store images, data and icons.
./spec
This is the directory for your app’s automated tests. RubyMotion ships with a port of the Ruby testing framework Bacon, which you can use to write both unit and functional or UI tests. Any *.rb files in this directory will be executed as tests when you invoke the rake spec command.
./spec/main_spec.rb
This is the default test, created as an example.

Compared to larger frameworks such as Rails, this isn’t a lot of configuration. The only files we really care about today are Rakefile and app_delegate.rb, so let’s dive into those.

Run The App

The Rakefile is the first file loaded when you build your app. Its job is to configure your app’s properties and load any additional files that your project might need. By default, it looks something like this:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-$:.unshift("/Library/RubyMotion/lib")require 'motion/project'Motion::Project::App.setup do |app|  # Use 'rake config' to see complete project settings.  app.name = 'Smashing'end

You’ve probably only seen $.unshift if you’re familiar with Ruby. It takes its argument — in this case, /Library/RubyMotion/lib — and adds it to require’s search path. This is necessary before require 'motion/project', because that file is actually located in the RubyMotion lib directory. Without the unshift, no RubyMotion code would be found.

The motion/project directory is what actually allows us to write RubyMotion apps. It does a lot of stuff behind the scenes, but most obviously it includes the Motion::Project module that we use immediately afterwards. The App.setup block is where we can edit our app’s name, files, identifier and many other options. As the generated comment suggests, you can run rake config to see all possible properties. By default, it uses the Smashing project name that we passed in motion create.

When you run rake, it will load the Rakefile. Requiring motion/project actually creates a bunch of rake “tasks.” These tasks allow you to pass arguments to rake to invoke particular actions. You can see a complete list of included tasks by running rake --tasks in your project’s directory:

$ rake --tasks    rake archive              # Create archives for everything    rake archive:development  # Create an .ipa archive for development    rake archive:release      # Create an .ipa for release (AppStore)    rake build                # Build everything    rake build:device         # Build the device version    rake build:simulator      # Build the simulator version    rake clean                # Clear build objects    rake config               # Show project config    rake ctags                # Generate ctags    rake default              # Build the project, then run the simulator    rake device               # Deploy on the device    rake simulator            # Run the simulator    rake spec                 # Run the test/spec suite    rake static               # Create a .a static library

Looks like rake does quite a bit, doesn’t it? Most importantly, if you just run rake, it will build and run your app in the Simulator.

Run rake and observe RubyMotion compiling your project’s files (just app_delegate.rb for now). When it’s done building, it will open your (so far empty) app in the iOS Simulator:

Additionally, you’ll see an irb-esque prompt appear in the shell. This allows you to interact with the app in real time without any additional compilation, which is useful for debugging and rapid interface development. Try running some basic commands with it:

$ rake  …(main)> "a string"=> "a string"(main)> h = {hello: "motion"}=> {:hello=>"motion"}(main)> h=> {:hello=>"motion"}

Our app is off to a great start: we’ve installed RubyMotion, created a new project, learned what all the files do, and gotten a (very bare) app running. Next, we’ll make our creation actually display something on the screen.

Little Boxes

We’re going to build an app that displays a colored box on the screen. Sounds pretty simple, right?

Then we’ll spice it up with random color changes using the Colr API. It’s going to use a mix of Apple-developed APIs and some cutting-edge work from the RubyMotion community, so when it’s done you’ll have gotten a well-rounded experience with RubyMotion development. We will end up with something like this:

If you want to follow along, the source for this example is available on GitHub.

Open up app_delegate.rb in your favorite code editor. It’s pretty barren, implementing only one function, application:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions::

class AppDelegate  def application(application, didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:launchOptions)    true  endend

Note that we refer to RubyMotion functions by a combination of their usual Ruby name (application) and their named parameters (didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:), all separated by colons. Named parameters were added to RubyMotion to preserve the existing Objective-C APIs, and the extra symbols are required parts of the method name (i.e. you can’t just call delegate.application(@app, options)). Without those extra parameters, we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between def application(application, didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:launchOptions) and def application(application, handleOpenURL:url).

Moving on, RubyMotion looks for a class named AppDelegate and makes it the application’s delegate object. This special object receives callbacks for different events in the lifecycle of the app, such as for starting up, shutting down and receiving push notifications. The application:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions: function is called once the system has finished its own process of starting the app and is ready for us to take control. In most cases, this function should return true and allow everything to start.

We’re going to add some “views” to our app. Each view is a subclass of UIView, and everything you see on the screen is a descendent of that class. The root view of every app is an instance of UIWindow, a special type of UIView. Views are added as subviews to one another; when you move a view, you also move all of its subviews.

Each view has a frame property, which describes its position and dimensions. The position of a view is actually defined relative to its superview. For example, adding a box at (10, 10) as a subview to a view located at (20, 20) in the window means that our new box will really appear at (30, 30).

Edit your AppDelegate to include our new views:

class AppDelegate  def application(application, didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:launchOptions)    # UIScreen describes the display the app is running on.    app_frame = UIScreen.mainScreen.applicationFrame    @window = UIWindow.alloc.initWithFrame(app_frame)    # This is the special method of UIWindow which lets them exist outside of a parent view    @window.makeKeyAndVisible    # This is our blue box    # CGRectMake == CGRectMake(x, y, width, height)    @box = UIView.alloc.initWithFrame CGRectMake(0, 0, 100, 100)    @box.backgroundColor = UIColor.blueColor    @window.addSubview(@box)    # UIButtonTypeRoundedRect is the standard button style on iOS    @button = UIButton.buttonWithType(UIButtonTypeRoundedRect)    # A button has multiple "control states", like disabled, highlighted, and normal    @button.setTitle("Change Color", forState:UIControlStateNormal)    # Sizes the button to fit its title    @button.sizeToFit    # Position the button below our box.    @button.frame = CGRectMake(0, @box.frame.size.height + 20, @button.frame.size.width, @button.frame.size.height)    @window.addSubview(@button)    true  endend

We’ve created our window and made it the “key” window, which means that it’s the window receiving user input. We then added our blue @box and @button as subviews to the window.

Now, this is not the only way to add views to our window. We could have added our views using the Interface Builder, a tool included with Xcode for creating iOS UIs with a drag-and-drop interface. RubyMotion does support Interface Builder, but you really shouldn’t dive into it without understanding what happens behind the scenes.

The other method is to use something called a UIViewController and then to populate its view property with our boxes. This is actually the correct way because it conforms your app to the model-view-controller design pattern that the SDK follows. You simply tell the window to load the controller, and everything will get handled appropriately. So, why didn’t we do it this way? Because it requires more information overhead, and in this example we’re trying to be as concise as possible; in production code, you will definitely need to use a controller when you start managing more than one or two views.

Moving on, rake our improved delegate and check out the result, which is starting to look better:

Now we need to make @button actually do something besides turn blue when we press it. Buttons can take targets for certain events such as taps. We can add a target and callback (known as an action in iOS SDK parlance) in our AppDelegate like this:

    …    @window.addSubview(@button)    @button.addTarget(self, action:"button_tapped", forControlEvents:UIControlEventTouchUpInside)    true  end  def button_tapped    puts "I'm tapped!"  endend

UIControlEventTouchUpInside is one of many UIControlEvents that a button can respond to. It sounds complicated, but in plain English it refers to a “touch” that lifts “up” and is still “inside” of the button’s rectangle. When that occurs, button_tapped will be called. The puts prints a string to the terminal when we run the app in the simulator.

Give it a rake and confirm for yourself that our message prints out:

$ rake     Build ./build/iPhoneSimulator-5.1-Development   Compile ./app/app_delegate.rb      Link ./build/iPhoneSimulator-5.1-Development/Smashing.app/Smashing    Create ./build/iPhoneSimulator-5.1-Development/Smashing.dSYM  Simulate ./build/iPhoneSimulator-5.1-Development/Smashing.app(main)> I'm tapped!

We’ve thrown some views onto our previously barren app and added some very basic interactivity. Time to hook it up to the good ol’ information superhighway.

HTTP

Now that we’ve got a box and a button on the screen, let’s grab some data from the Internet. To make our networking code painless, we’ll use BubbleWrap, a popular RubyMotion library filled with many idiomatic Ruby wrappers. It’ll also handle JSON de-serialization, so it’s the only external component we need.

To install BubbleWrap, run gem install bubble-wrap. In our Rakefile, we need to require bubble-wrap:

…require 'motion/project'require 'bubble-wrap'…

This makes the BubbleWrap::HTTP and BubbleWrap::JSON libraries available to us. The default BubbleWrap set-up also includes helpers for UIColor, which we’ll use to convert a hexadecimal color code like #f8f8f8 into a UIColor object.

Now on to the dirty work. The Colr API has an endpoint that returns information about a random color in JSON. We’re going to query that, get the hex representation of that color, and set our box’s backgroundColor to that value. In AppDelegate, let’s add the code to make this HTTP call in our button callback:

  def button_tapped    BubbleWrap::HTTP.get("http://www.colr.org/json/color/random") do |response|      color_hex = BubbleWrap::JSON.parse(response.body.to_str)["colors"][0]["hex"]      # ensure that color_hex is a String when we run .to_color      @box.backgroundColor = String.new(color_hex).to_color      @button.setTitle(color_hex, forState: UIControlStateNormal)    end  end

This seemingly more complex task takes fewer lines of code than setting up our views. Run rake and check out the fruits of our labor:

We can make one more small change to start adding that signature iOS polish. Right now, the user doesn’t get any feedback while the HTTP request is loading, aside from the tiny network activity indicator in the top bar. We can improve that experience by changing the button title while that’s going on. It’s also a good idea to be fault tolerant and show an error if the Colr API returns some bad data. Let’s make those changes:

def application(application, didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:launchOptions)  …  @button.setTitle("Change Color", forState:UIControlStateNormal)  @button.setTitle("Loading…", forState:UIControlStateDisabled)  @button.setTitleColor(UIColor.lightGrayColor, forState:UIControlStateDisabled)  …enddef button_tapped  @button.enabled = false  BubbleWrap::HTTP.get("http://www.colr.org/json/color/random") do |response|    color_hex = BubbleWrap::JSON.parse(response.body.to_str)["colors"][0]["hex"]    # check if bad data as returned    if color_hex and color_hex.length > 0      @box.backgroundColor = String.new(color_hex).to_color      @button.setTitle(color_hex, forState: UIControlStateNormal)    else      @button.setTitle("Error :(", forState: UIControlStateNormal)    end    @button.enabled = true  endend

Let’s rake one last time to see our better UX in action. Not too shabby for our first app, right? You can look at the source for this example on GitHub.

“An Object In Motion…”

We’ve created an iOS app with dynamic data and a solid user experience in under 40 lines of clean Ruby. Making this app in Objective-C is definitely possible, but we would have lost the readability and brevity that Ruby affords. We also could have done it using a hybrid Web and native app; however, once you venture out of the basic UI building blocks and into a feature-complete iOS app, perfectly replicating a native experience becomes incredibly difficult.

Is RubyMotion right for your next iOS project? If you don’t have much experience in Objective-C but want to try app development, Ruby definitely has a gentler learning curving. Or if you’re already using Ruby somewhere else in your stack, you might reap the benefits of code portability. What about porting an existing app? Well, RubyMotion allows for middle ground: you can export your Ruby code as a static library to use in an Objective-C app, or you can use existing Objective-C code in a RubyMotion app.

This is not to say that RubyMotion is perfect. Its biggest flaw is debuggability: when you hit a nasty bug originating in the RubyMotion compiler, you can’t do a whole lot to trace or fix it. Because RubyMotion is currently closed source, we’ll have to wait for these issues to be remedied by HipByte. But if you don’t do anything tricky or “magical” with your code, then this shouldn’t be a problem. Unfortunately, I run into these issues fairly often because those “fun” bits are what make Ruby so compelling to me.

Fundamentally, RubyMotion hasn’t completely done away the original Objective-C API; you’ll still need to learn the iOS SDK to make really great iOS apps. That in itself tends to make up 80% of the hard work of developing any mobile app. And if you need to whip something up for multiple platforms, RubyMotion definitely won’t make your life any easier; it’s still very nascent and has some maturing to do. But efforts to Ruby-fy Apple’s APIs using RubyMotion are yielding interesting new directions for iOS development. On a platform defined by constraints and restrictions, having more choice is never a bad thing.

Is Web Design 95% Typography?One More Time: Typography Is The Foundation Of Web Design

2012-08-14T01:48:00.001-07:00

Is Web Design 95% Typography?One More Time: Typography Is The Foundation Of Web Design

For years you have been searching for it. You hear the question being asked in your dreams as you go on an Indiana-Jones-type-crusade to find the answer. When the answer comes to you, you know that the confetti will fall from the ceiling and the band will start playing your favorite song. You might even get a kiss from that special someone. So what is this question?

What is the secret to Web design?

A tough question and one that might not have an answer. In 2006, Oliver Reichenstein wrote Web Design is 95% Typography. Some people loved it, others were not so amused. If Web design was based that much on typography, then what was the point of learning anything else? All you needed to do is understand the elements of typography and you were good to go.

Of course typography doesn’t mean font selection. With the advent of @font-face and services such as Typekit, Webtype, Fontdeck, and Google Web fonts, your skills in typography won’t improve. You can easily create wonderful designs with one font for the rest of your life if you choose to—they had to do it centuries ago and they didn’t have Photoshop sticking things to guides for them. If anything, more font selection will make things worse for you because creativity and beauty become hard to achieves when more options are given to us.

More toys means more fun though, right? If you want to go that route, then by all means go for it. I love to look at the different fonts being used and admire anyone that can successfully pull off using newer fonts for the Web. However, I’ve seen too many times what can happen when development options are given to the masses, and it isn’t pretty (re: Myspace). Instead of having a user agreement it would be cool if Typekit made you read a book on typography before you could begin using a font—the Web would improve tenfold, if that was the case.

I’m not being sarcastic, saying that is all you need to know for a majority of websites. Try going through all of the Web designs that you love, strip out the images and ask yourself “how would that website look with just text and spacing?”. When designers say “text is the interface”, they really do mean it. The iA site is a great example of that.

Information Architects is based around strong typography.

One of my all time favorite designs is A Working Library. The site is a showcase of text being the interface. The spacing is just right and the typography is on point.

A Working Library by Mandy Brown.

Some people find design like this to be dull and boring, they feel that design should have more pop to it. At the end of the day some extra visual flair might be what separates your design from the rest, but you need to get the first 95% down. The website that you are reading this article on now has done a wonderful job of presenting a visual design that isn’t reliant on images to be beautiful.

Well That Isn’t Hard

It’s possible to create a wonderful design without the use of images at all. I know that sounds crazy, but it is possible. I’m not saying it should be done, but if we can create elegance simply with typography and white space, then why shouldn’t we be able to create greatness when we start throwing in images, videos and other effects?

With the use of images I’m not talking about images that are needed to represent something such as icons, but images that are there for flare. Sometimes a picture is worth at least ten better words than any word you could use, so it’s better to go with an image (but you still need to consider using white space with it).

Here are two more examples of beautiful websites that place a heavy emphasis on typography to control the design. The first is Blake Allen Design and the second is The Harriet Series (both use images to represent their typography, but you get the point).

Blake Allen Design uses images, but with great typography.

The Harriet Series by OkayType.

What makes the two designs above so interesting to me is that the typography not only guides you along a journey, but it does so with personality. You almost feel as if the typography is an expression of the person that designed it. Blake Allen uses Helvetica which gives the website a Swiss, clean and structured personality. On the opposite side of the spectrum, the Harriet Series website is a bit more playful and experimental—there is beauty in the organized chaos that the typography creates.

For 99% of the designs out there, typography and white space are going to be your underlying foundation. So if you can’t get them right, then the rest of your design has nothing to stand on. Stop worrying about the pop of your design and first worry about how it will stand tall. Once you get that down then you can begin to dress it up.

Clear is a very simple to do list application for iOS devices. While the majority of the excitement around it are the gestures used to control the interface, you will notice that the typography does enough to get out of the way and allow you to enjoy the application. Sure it is nothing more than Helvetica, but what if it was Comic Sans and had bad spacing all around? Great typography doesn’t have to stand out in a good way, but that doesn’t mean it should do enough harm when it stands out in a negative way, either.

Typography In Other Disciplines

Art of the Menu is a great website on menu design.

The Art of the Menu does a great job of showing the importance of typography in menu design. While a lot of restaurants like to add images and illustrations to their menus to give them a bit more pizzaz, they fail in providing a decent typographical structure that allows you to easily browse through the menu.

If you are a designer you have no excuse to say you can’t come up with a decent design. When you create a design that lacks a strong foundation, anything else you add to it is just going to make it worse. Too many designers attempt to save their designs with fluff without understanding they are pouring gasoline onto the fire. If a design is not enjoyable to read then it is not an enjoyable experience, no matter how many images, colors or sounds you decide to add to it.

Looking to understand typography a little bit better? Not too long ago Smashing Magazine did a comprehensive overview of some wonderful typography tools and resources.

(jvb)

Tags:Typography Web Design

↑ Back to top Share on Twitter

Source : smashingmagazine[dot]com

How Inspiring Your Readers Drives them to Search for Information (and Interact)

2012-08-14T01:46:00.001-07:00

One of my mantras that I’ve shared many times when speaking, and here in posts on ProBlogger, is to build blogs that:

Image courtesy stock.xchng user Eastop

inspire
inform
interact.

My experience is that a blog can really come alive when you not only provide readers with information, but also give them inspiration and a place to interact with one another.

One of the first times I discovered the secret of inspirational content was on Digital Photography School (my main blog) when I started posting image collections of great images that I’d found on Flickr.

Up until this time, most of the posts on dPS would have fitted into the “informational” category of posts—they were largely tutorials and how-to type content.

These new inspirational image collection posts were simply collections of images on a theme, with little written content.

For example, here’s one of the early ones—7 Clone Shots. At the time, thise was widely linked to around the web and rose to the front pages of social bookmarking sites like Digg.

These inspirational image posts really resonated with readers, and were the kind of content people wanted to share. They drove large amounts of traffic, so I built them into dPS’s regular posting schedule.

Inspiration leads people to search for information

After a while, I discovered that besides the traffic that they drove to the site these inspiration posts had another impact: they drove people to our “information” posts.

I noticed this one day after posting an image collection of 15 Long Exposure Images. Not only did the post attract a lot of traffic, but I noticed another post on our site was also getting quite a bit of traffic that day—a post I’d written a year earlier called How to Shoot Light Trails.

This second post was not linked to from the image collection post. What I discovered was that people arriving on that post were so inspired by the images in the image collection that they were using our search tool t find information on shooting long exposures—that’s how they were finding the earlier post.

What was happening here was something I’ve seen repeated many times since—people’s inspiration was driving them to seek information.

I also realised that there were other relevant tutorials in our archives that readers inspired by that image collection might find useful, so I updated the image collection post with further relevant reading (as you can see in the screen shot below).

I tracked the flow on to these information posts over the coming days and saw a significant clickthrough rate to these articles.

I also noticed quite a few extra subscribers to the site that week—I guess the combination of inspiration and information hit the mark.

These days I still use this same technique (in fact we’ve done these image collections many times (here are just a few more examples). Just last week I published 27 Great Panning Images [and How to Take Them].

You’ll notice in the screen shot above that I started the post with an image and then introduced the topic and included links to two previous panning tutorials. I then have a section at the bottom of the post which mentions the further reading tutorials again.

Once again, this week I can see a heightened level of activity on those older tutorials as a result of those links.

Here’s a chart showing the traffic to the Mastering Panning article mentioned in the image collection:

That post (which was published back in 2009) usually gets 150-200 visitors a day, but this week, after I linked to it from our image collection, more than 7000 visitors viewed it in one day. The other post mentioned in the image collection saw a similar spike in traffic.

Inspiration and information leads people to interaction

The last part of this journey of discovery has been to complete the “inspire, inform, and interact” mantra. In the past few months I’d started to follow up each of these inspiration image collections with a post a few days later that invites readers to interact around that topic by doing some homework.

We run these “challenge” posts every weekend to get our readers interacting with us, but I hadn’t not previously made the collections tie in with these interactive posts.

Here’s an example of how I recently tied them together.

First I led off with an image collection—25 Dreamy Images Shot Wide Open (featuring some beautiful images shot with wide open apertures).
This image collection linked to information posts on the topic of Aperture, as well as other relevant tutorials.
A few days later, I ran a ‘Wide Open’ Photography Challenge. This challenge linked back to the image collection as well as the tutorials (and also included a few more inspirational images as examples).

The take-up of our photography challenge that weekend was up on normal figures and it drove a heap of traffic backwards and forth around the site to the image collection and tutorials.

It also seemed to create momentum as the topic built over the week. I had a number of readers indicate that by seeing the inspirational images, reading the tutorials, and then being given an assignment to go away and do, they found themselves really driven to take what they were learning and implement it.

How could something like this work on your blog? Do you inspire, inform, and interact with your readers? I’m intrigued to hear if you use a similar strategy.

Source : problogger[dot]net

Productive procrastination

2012-07-10T02:45:00.001-07:00

Some days work sucks. We start out with good intentions, but our energy levels are low and we go from constructively improving our website to surfing the App Store looking for new games to play.

One response to this kind of procrastination is to force yourself to continue working. You plug away at whatever task you said you would work on at the beginning of the day, but achieve little. This can feel like banging your head against a brick wall and prove remarkably unproductive.

A better response to these periods of lethargy and procrastination is to switch gear and focus on less demanding activities. This is more productive than giving up entirely, but less demoralizing than attempting to complete a task which requires too much energy.

So as website owners, designers and developers what can we do to make the most of the low-energy moments? In this post I share with you 7 things I do when my energy levels are particularly low.

Let’s begin by wasting some time on twitter.

Wasting time on social networks

Twitter and Facebook are often described as a productivity drain. However, that depends on what you are doing.

For website owners they can be an important method of engaging with users. For designers and developers they are an excellent way of staying up-to-date with web innovations and the web community.

Social Networks don’t have to be damaging to productivity. They can be beneficial to your job. Both Twitter and Facebook are brilliant for:

Community building

Customer support

Getting feedback

Brand building

Finding answers

Discovering educational content

Most of all they are a brilliant way of getting to know people. Either those who use your product, site or service, or those who are your peers in the industry.

When we are procrastinating many of us naturally turn to Facebook or Twitter as a way to avoid work. Why not then use this time constructively to interact with your users or peers and get to know them better. This will provide a wealth of benefits and is enjoyable at the same time.

While you are using these social networks don’t forget to take the time to search on what people are saying about you, your company, products or website.

Search and respond

It’s great to spend time interacting with your followers. However, some of the best discussions are with those who have not actively engaged with you, but are talking about you or your site in someway.

When you find it hard to focus on more productive work, take the time to search on social networks and the web to find out what people are saying about you.

If you find people saying complimentary things, take the time to thank them. It’s amazing how a thank you can turn a happy user into an evangelist for your brand.

Services like Social Mention help you regularly monitoring what users are saying about you and your products.

If on the other hand you find people complaining, see this as an opportunity rather than a problem. There are many great examples of how organizations have turned their reputation around by being responsive to unhappy customers. Taking the time to answer people’s complaints personally (especially if they did not contact you directly) goes a long way to repairing the relationship and turning them into a fan.

Of course, if writing to disillusioned users is too much like hard work, then why not put your feet up and read?

Sit back, relax and read

With the web advancing at a mile a minute we have to keep our skills up-to-date and be aware of the latest innovations.

We do this by reading blogs, subscribing via RSS and following people who share good content on social networks.

Unfortunately there is so much good content out there we miss a lot and even what we do see we don’t have time to read immediately.

We inevitably end up adding content to a service like Instapaper or Readability. This supposedly allows us to save a post to read when we have more time. In reality we rarely find the time and our reading list grows ever longer.

Having a list of articles in Instapaper if you never make time to read them

This is where procrastination can become really useful. If you can’t face normal work, spend some time catching up on your reading. This makes effective use of your downtime and the reading can often inspire you to start working again.

That said, for reading to be a valuable form of procrastination, you have to be harsh. If you start reading a post and it doesn’t grab you in the first few paragraphs, move on.

Adding something to your reading list is not a commitment to read it. If the article is not engaging then the reading list stops being procrastination and starts being work. Also the chances are, if it’s not engaging then it’s not proving useful and so don’t waste your time.

Of course, sometimes even reading is too much like hard work. That is when videos are a worthy distraction.

Watch something

There are some amazingly inspiring, helpful and informative video out there. Whether conference talks or screencast tutorials, there is no shortage of material ripe for procrastination.

The trick with video content is having it ready when you feel the need to procrastinate. You need a watch list to sit alongside your reading list.

Pocket allows you to keep a list both of things to read and videos to watch

Fortunately there is one application that can be both. Pocket allows you to save written articles as well as video content for later consumption. That way when procrastination strikes you can just fire up pocket and start watching.

Watching videos and reading are worthwhile activities, but if you want to be more proactive try reviewing your site.

Review your website

Instead of surfing Youtube for the latest Ze Frank video, or looking up football results on BBC sports, try visiting your own website for a change.

We don’t really look at our own website. We may quickly visit it to grab a piece of information or check some new functionality, but we don’t explore it as a user would.

Next time you are struggling to settle down to work, have a look around your own site. Go from page to page making a note of any issues you find. Try completing key user tasks and write down problems you encounter.

The idea is not to fix these problems (after all that would be far too much like hard work) but rather to make a note of them so they can be fixed later.

Create a list of issues with your website, but don’t try and fix them while your energy levels are low.

Personally I use Omnifocus to keep a list of problems that need fixing. You might use Evernote or jot them down in a notebook. Whatever you use, looking around your site and identifying issues is a great procrastinating exercise.

The downside of finding problems on your site is that it can be depressing. If that is the case, cheer yourself up with some playful experimentation.

Play and experiment

We all know that children learn through play. Adults are no different. For those of us involved in running and building websites, play and experimentation are essential components of the learning process.

A developer may play with a different coding approach, a designer with a new jQuery plugin. Website owners may play with social media tools or a new analytics package. Whatever the case, play provides an opportunity to experiment with new stuff that can later be applied to your job.

Jessica Hische works on side projects when she starts procrastinating

Because play is fun, it makes it ideal for procrastination. If you read about a new technique that gets you excited, don’t stop there. Try out the approach and experiment.

You may find yourself too tired to focus on proper work, but you will be amazed how much energy you can muster to play with new stuff!

Talking of being too tired, I want to leave you with one tip that has transformed my procrastination time.

Have a ‘low energy’ list

We all keep a task list. Normally we are happy working through the urgent or important items of that list. However, as we have already established, there are times when we just don’t have the energy.

This is when we start procrastinating. Even with good intentions and this article to help, you will find yourself wasting time because you are just too tired to come up with anything better to do.

When we procrastinate, we stop thinking. We are just too tired. So, don’t make yourself think. Plan ahead. Keep a list of low energy tasks that you can do when you start procrastinating. That way you avoid having to think of tasks when you are tired and can just pick from an existing list.

Paul Boag has been working with the web since 1994. He is now co-founder of the web design agency Headscape, where he works closely with clients to establish their web strategy. Paul is a prolific writer having written the Website Owners Manual, Building Websites for Return on Investment, Client Centric Web Design and numerous articles for publications such as .net magazine, Smashing Magazine and Web Designer Depot. Paul also speaks extensively on various aspects of web design both at conferences across the world and on his award winning web design podcast boagworld.

There you have it, my guide to making the most of your procrastination. But what about you, what do you do when you run out of energy? Do you give up or power on through? Do you waste time on Facebook or do you have some specific tasks that you keep for such occasions? Let me know in the comments below.

Share this story

Tweet

Pin It

10 awesome social sharing plugins for WordPress
Infographic: the best education websites by the numbers
10 Twitter tools for better social networking

Source : webdesignerdepot[dot]com

How to Create Contests that Increase Engagement

2012-07-09T13:18:00.001-07:00

This guest post is by Jeremy Statton of JeremyStatton.com.

Contests are an effective way to increase activity. Most websites run one of some type. If you haven’t, you should. Nothing attracts a crowd like the possibility of winning something for free.

But the standard contest that provides a free “prize” for those who enter may not be the best way to get your readers more involved.

That approach reminds me of credit card companies that throng college campuses in the fall hoping to get students to sign up by offering them a free T-shirt. Initially enthusiasm is high, but over time, your readers will get used to it. A T-shirt will never be more than a T-shirt, free or not.

What’s your goal?

The primary goal of our websites is to build an online community. A tribe. A group of people who share common interests and then interact with each other.

Increased traffic might be fun to see, but increased engagement is better. I would trade ten new readers who participate on regular basis than 100 people who have only signed up for a chance at free stuff.

These engaged readers are the ones who can help you find others who will benefit from your community. They are the ones who will keep showing up even after your content suffers from a bad day. They are the ones who will remained subscribed even after they receive their free gift.

A way to develop this type of reader involvement is to design a contest that reflects this goal. Instead of just giving stuff away, we need a contest that gets our readers more involved.

A new type of contest

My site is about living better stories. My readers and I encourage each other to step away from what most would call a normal life and step into a life full of risk, obstacles, and personal transformation. Instead of choosing comfort and ease, we have decided to make a difference.

As I interacted with my community, I discovered that many of them were already doing just that. I started asking questions, and the answers I heard were amazing.

So the “Secretly Incredible You” contest was born.

I asked my readers to submit the stories of people who are living these secretly incredible lives. It could be themselves or someone they know. The winners are featured in a blog post each Friday. At the end of 20 stories, I will collect them to make a book which will be printed and distributed to each winner.

The best part of this contest is that everybody wins. I get an incredible post and reach new readers each week. The winner is featured on my blog and has their story told.

How to create your own contest of engagement

If you want to create a similar contest for your site, here are four things to consider.

1. Reveal hidden treasure

The key to this type of contest is to discover what your readers are already doing that everybody else would be interested in. Find the place where your theme and their awesomeness intersect. My site encourages stories. A tech site might feature a best widget contest. A photography site could hold a contest with a different theme each week.

It doesn’t matter what it is. Find the hidden treasure and then give people a chance to show off.

2. Display the work

For traditional contests to work, you give out free stuff. But with this type of contest, instead of giving people stuff, give your readers the opportunity to show off their work on your platform. Since it feels and looks like a contest, they will do their best work with the hope of winning. And then they will give that work to you to display to the world.

By giving others a chance to show off their work, you can develop even better content then what you already have.

3. Make it regular

Your body suffers when certain necessities are not met with regularity. The contest is no different. Your tribe needs that same schedule. Instead of making the contest a one time event, consider doing it weekly or monthly. And then keep it running.

By declaring winners on a regular basis, you will create a sense of anticipation that keeps others coming back for more.

4. Reward winners even more

Go beyond featuring the winners on a blog post. Include them in something bigger as well. For my contest, I will put each post in a book and then have the book printed. I plan on sending the book out to each winner.

Give the winners something more than an opportunity to display their work.

Create contests that add value

The type of contest is a chance to not only bring new members to your tribe, but to also add value to your currents readers experience and increase user engagement.

Have you run a contest that increased engagement? Tell us about it in the comments.

Jeremy Statton is an orthopedic surgeon and a writer. When not ridding the world of pain he helps others live a better story. You can follow him on his blog or Twitter.

Source : problogger[dot]net

Find the Right Blogging Answers By Asking the Right Questions

2012-07-09T07:18:00.001-07:00

This guest post is by Nick Thacker of livehacked.com.

I first started blogging in 2009, and I had to learn the hard way.

I chased every shiny object there was—the informational products that were going to hand me the blueprint to strike it rich overnight, the newsletters promising me the “latest and greatest” in making money online and blog marketing tactics.

I am a lifetime (paid) member of the Warrior Forum, and still subscribe to the old-school “guru” blogs out there.

But only now, after three years, am I starting to build the platform I’d originally envisioned.

Don’t think I’m saying that I’ve “arrived,” or “I’ve made it”—on the contrary, I’m only just getting started. Instead, though, hear me when I say that as soon as I stopped focusing on myself, my blog, and my future, I started to really grow.

For the last few months, I’ve been working on a new book that helps bloggers get their dreams and aspirations on paper—and onto their blogs. I used this method to grow very quickly, and I haven’t slowed down since.

We bloggers love to see tangible, visible results, so here’s what I’m talking about:

That is my Google Analytics traffic growth over the period between March and April 2012. Obviously there’s a big spike right at the end, but you can see a steadily increasing amount of traffic in a little over two months.

Okay, one more:

This image is taken from my MailChimp dashboard, showing the 200% increase in my newsletter subscription rate for the past few months.

Now, I hate the “braggy” feeling of showing results (part of the reason I took off the numbers), but I want to stress one important point:

If I can get these results, so can you.

Seriously. I’m not an expert on any of this–in fact, I have a degree in music. However, I’ve realized the difference between the blogger I was three years ago, and the blogger I am now.

What is that difference, you ask?

I can tell you one thing for sure: it didn’t come from a “magic bullet” strategy, or even a “guru” answer. It didn’t just spring up overnight, either. It was a change in me that happened only after I put in the hundreds of posts, thousands of words, and countless hours of Twittering, Facebooking, and connecting.

The difference between my old blogging self and my new blogging self is deceptively simple.

Rather than focusing on finding the right answers, I started asking the right questions. I began to look for the right questions to ask myself, and then I asked them.

For example:

Instead of trying to find the answer to “how can I make money online,” I asked myself, “if I could make money online, how would I do it?”

Instead of looking for the answer to “what is the best way to advertise on my site,” I asked myself, “do I want to advertise on my site? Do I ever click on ads?”

The answers I gave to these questions, as far as many of you are concerned, are completely and utterly irrelevant.

They don’t matter.

The “answers” don’t matter because they’re mine—they’re the perfect answers for only my blog, my niche, and my products. They won’t work in the same way for your stuff.

I could easily have given you the “right answers” (according to me) to these and other questions, like “set up Google AdSense and start writing 60+ search-engine friendly posts a month!” or “focus on guest posting only and wait until you have 2,000 visits/day before setting up ads!”

But the problem with those answers, even if they seem to be well-intentioned and harmless, is that they’re not based on your particular site and demographic, they’re based on mine.

There are stereotypes for a reason, and there are generalities that make answers like these common at best and downright overused and over-promoted at worst. There are answers that are all-around “good,” but because they’re not laser-focused on your blog’s niche, they’re not as useful to you.

But if you ask the right questions…

If you ask the right questions, you’ll come up with some answers that fit your brand perfectly. You have already read up on the most popular blogging platforms, advertising systems, and income-generation methods.

It’s time to stop reading; to stop focusing on other peoples’ answers, and start asking yourself the right questions. Start with these:

Why do you want to blog?

Do you want to make money blogging? How much?

What is your passion, and how will it be incorporated?

How do your passion, your blog, and your marketplace relate and interact?

Why will someone buy your product from you?

These questions get progressively more difficult to answer on purpose—they’re meant to make you think; to make you really dig down into why you want to make it as a blogger. Sure, grandeur, fame, and fortune all are a part of it—but why?

You already know these answers, so I’ll let you in on a little secret: you can read every word on every blog, in every corner of the entire Internet, yet none of it can answer these questions for you.

It’s up to you—you decide the “why,” “what,” and “how” of your future with blogging—not us.

The blogging world can give you tools and ideas and products and methods and on and on, but we can’t answer these questions for you.

Unless you’re still a baby blogger, someone who’s brand new to all of this (and that’s perfectly fine! You’re in the right place!), you already have a large stock of these answers in your brain’s blogging storehouse.

You’ve got the tactics and strategies you need to make a killing online, and you already know the best plugins, resources, tools, and PDFs to help you with the details.

You have the right answers—you just need to ask the right questions.

Why I’m harping on this

Alright—you get it. You know you need to start asking the right questions, and more importantly, start answering them for yourself.

I’m a stickler about all of this for two reasons.

First, I talk with writers, artists, and creators every single day (through my fiction-writing course) who are all struggling with getting noticed, building a platform, and growing to a respectable size. They’re great at what they do—creating art—but are confused with all of the terminology, methods, and possible scams out there. It’s difficult for them to wade through the baloney and figure out what’s going to be helpful to them.

To these people, I offer the exact same advice every time: focus on the one or two areas where you can make an impact, and start connecting with people by adding value to their lives. Once you get this down pat, start adding channels and networks, and begin asking yourself the right questions.

Second, I really care about this concept of “asking the right questions” because I’ve been struggling for years to ask them myself.

I’ve suffered through eight or nine incarnations of my current blog, and many failed attempts at other blogs. I’ve sat by and watched as blogs I loved took off and started gaining massive attention in seemingly no time at all. The frustration and jealously I’ve felt was, though hard to admit, present.

Again, I’m nowhere near where I think I can be in one or two years’ time, but I’m doing much better than I’ve ever done before. It’s possible, it’s doable, and it’s not even hard if you ask yourself the right questions.

I’d love to hear your take on this—what are the right questions you’ve asked to achieve your blog’s growth? And what are the answers that you’d give to these questions?

Leave a comment below and let’s get this thing started!

Nick Thacker is a blogger, writer, and author of fiction thriller novels. He recently finished his book, Building A Blog for Readers, available through Amazon. You can check out his site at LiveHacked.com, or subscribe to the LiveHacked.com newsletter here.

Source : problogger[dot]net

50 Super Cool T-Shirt Designs You’d Love To See!

2012-07-09T06:05:00.001-07:00

Pin It

We all have weaknesses. Mine, at least one of them, is t-shirts, especially cool t-shirt designs! Summer’s finally here, and now is the best time to reorganize or supplement your wardrobe. T-shirts can be way more than just a piece of clothing. It’s often a way to express yourself/your interests/your views. What’s more, a great tee might even force you to stay in shape, just look at #47 if you want to know what I mean.

Beautiful design is beautiful design. Whether it’s a website, a poster or a t-shirt. Check out these 50 beautiful and creative T-shirt designs and, who knows, maybe you possess the same weakness as me!

50 Super Cool T-Shirt Designs!

1. When Panda’s Attack

2. Get awesome!!!!

3. Altitude Sickness

4. Use your brain!

5. I listen to that

6. I’m doin me

7. Think BIG

8. Self-sufficient

9. Foam Monster

10. Don’t Play With Matches

11. Sun Spills. Night Falls

12. Lions Are Smarter Than I Am

13. Crystal Tiger

14. This Technology is for the Birds

15. Retro TV Colour Test Man

16. SASQUATCH FRENZY!

17. Alone Again

18. WAKE

19. Event Horizon

20. Energie renouvelable

21. Don’t call me a hipster

22. As tall as lions

23. Ugly Summer Sweater

24. When it rains

25. Off the Reservoir

26. W.T.F?

27. The Brave Little Kang

28. Flowers in the Attic

29. The cool kids

30. The universe

31. Morrison’s brandy

32. Pauvre Chou

33. Wish You Were Here

34. Water Balloons

35. Foxy Hip Hop

36. I Can’t Draw

37. Black Bear

38. The Wolfman Ate My Homework!

39. Mister Mittens’ Big Adventure

40. I Would Cuddle You So Hard

41. Feel Like A Sir

42. Beavis And Butt-Head

43. Ron Burgandy

44. Human Being

45. Think forward & look back

46. Unicorn across the Universe

47. The Situation

48. Make Tea Not War

49. Dumb Old Man

50. Mountains

Which one is your favorite? Share in the comments below.

Source : 1stwebdesigner[dot]com

Hot in web standards: June 2012

2012-07-09T03:08:00.001-07:00

Hot in web standards: June 2012

By
Lea Verou on
July 09, 2012

Share this article

Short url

In her second monthly report, Lea Verou rounds up the latest developments in the W3C working groups including 'unprefixing', media queries, sticky positioning and lots more

The Northern Hemisphere is already in the heart of the summer, and almost everybody is slowing down work and taking time off to enjoy the sunny weather. However, the W3C WGs are restless, always bringing us new developments to drool over. This month, several specifications advanced to the next stage, and we also saw some interesting new features being accepted. In addition, some long overdue topics, such as sticky positioning, are finally getting their fair share of attention. If you are already curious to find out more, read on!

Transforms, transitions and animations go nude!

…and by nude, I mean unprefixed. The CSS WG finally approved unprefixing these features, which was admittedly long overdue. The IE10 team didn’t waste a minute: it already unprefixed not only those, but also a bunch of other specs it deemed stable enough. If you future-proof your code, that shouldn’t be a problem for you, except in the case of gradients. Keep in mind that this means you don’t have to use the -ms- prefix at all for transitions, animations and gradients, since no stable build of IE was ever released that requires it.

Media Queries and View Mode reach Recommendation status

There has been a lot of celebration in the community for the Media Queries and View Mode specifications reaching Recommendation status. Although this is a great step forward for both specs, it’s not as an important milestone as most people make it out to be. As far as most implementors and authors are concerned, Proposed Recommendation (PR) and Recommendation (REC) are almost equivalent. As noted in the announcement, there were absolutely no changes between PR and REC.

Work starting on Media Queries 4

On a more exciting note, work has already started on Media Queries Level 4, which includes quite a few interesting new features, such as:

script: is JavaScript is enabled on the current document?

pointer: is a mouse available? Is it a touchscreen?

hover: can the :hover pseudo-class work on the current device?

The script media feature can also be polyfilled quite easily, so we could start using it now.

New unit: vmax

Hopefully, you’re already aware of viewport-relative units. If not, I strongly suggest you read this excellent primer by David Storey. These units, already supported by IE9 and WebKit, are going to take responsive web design to a whole new level.

You might have noticed, however, that something was missing. We had vw for 1/100th of the viewport width, vh for 1/100th of the viewport height and vmin for either of the two, whichever happens to be smaller. However, there was no vmax for the opposite behaviour. Thankfully, the CSS WG recently agreed to add it.

Sticky positioning

Even if you’ve only been developing websites for a few months, I’m pretty sure you’ve run into this: an element that needs to be statically positioned when it’s in view, but when the user scrolls, it should scroll too, in order to remain visible. This effect is most commonly applied to table headings, sidebars and other controls that are crucial to a page’s function.

JavaScript used to be unavoidable to achieve this kind of effect up until now. However, the CSS WG recently started discussing this matter seriously. So far, no consensus has been reached, so if you read the entire discussion and still feel like you have a better syntax to propose, feel free! Be warned, however: it’s a long thread.

Sticky positioning in Google News

Flexbox going to CR

After a lot of back and forth, and changes that rendered obsolete pretty much every Flexbox tutorial on the web and in print, Flexbox has finally stabilised and is on the track for Candidate Recommendation status. To some, that’s comparable to … achieving singularity.

document.parse() is coming?

The WebApps WG is seriously considering adding a new method to the Document interface that will parse an arbitrary string of HTML into a document fragment, similar to what document.write() and innerHTML do. Ian Hickson seems to be the main opponent of the idea, suggesting HTML literals instead, inspired by E4X. Hopefully, these solutions will help to eliminate some quite hacky workarounds traditionally employed by JavaScript libraries.

Early draft of Push API

A first Editor’s draft was recently published for Push API, which will enable clients to handle messages pushed from the server via a number of different methods, such as Server-Sent Events. Push-style server-client communication is certainly something that needs to become easier, so efforts like this are always welcome.

Backporting find() behavior to querySelector()?

Many of you already know that find() and findAll() are essentially going to replace the more verbose querySelector() and querySelectorAll() methods. Not only are they shorter, but they also resolve scoping in a much more sensible way. Of course, the querySelector() methods will always be supported, as not doing so would break too many existing websites.

This caused some people to advocate that this behaviour should be backported to the older methods, and that they should be deprecated. The resulting discussion is a must-read: one that will make you understand the considerations and struggles that go into pretty much every web standard in existence.

Source : netmagazine[dot]com

Add Menu link in admin grey menu with drupal 7

2012-07-09T02:45:00.001-07:00

For adding the new link or menu in grey menu in drupal admin section use this article.

Than pop will appear and click on add shortcut link.

Then create new link.

Now menu link added..

Source : digcms[dot]com

Startups: refined UX vs. quick rollouts

2012-07-09T02:25:00.001-07:00

A startup, by definition, is an entity with limited resources. Those resources could be budget, time, talent, or anything related, but what is certain is that there is indeed some form of limitation on resources – otherwise it wouldn’t be a start-up.

It is because of this that a lot of management styles have been tried and battle tested to tackle the challenge that is launching, and running, one of these beasts of time and energy. And over the years there seems to be two independent schools of thought that have emerged within the market: the lean launch, and the big buildup.

The lean launch involves things like agile development processes, user testing, idea validation, purposeful programming, behavior driven development, and many others. Then, on the other hand, you have the big build before launch: in this model one would sink tons of time, and developers into a project to make sure that it is feature complete before a single customer ever sees it once.

These two schools of thought each have their advantages and disadvantages as one might imagine, and they each have managers that believe in them to almost a hard-headed extent. Through in this article, we may find out which ones aren’t being hard-headed and which ones are. Or we may find something surprising. Let’s dive in.

Having a refined user experience

Let’s face it, design is massively important. In fact, design is so important that it has almost entirely overtaken some startups’ processes. They focus all their time and energy on the user experience, and getting themselves to a feature complete state that they have little time for anything else — and perhaps rightfully so. Now, the other side wouldn’t say that it is the right way, but we will leave that argument for later. For now, we are talking about the world of a polished UX and feature set before launching.

The positive side of a refined UX

Leveraging the full brand Branding is a massive topic, and it is for this exact reason that it seems people feel the need work in this manner. They feel that if they are going to launch they should launch with everything their brand stands for, being built into the site from day one. The classic, “v1 should be feature complete” is something I’ve heard from managers frequently. And there is a good reasoning behind it. They don’t want their website to reflect that which they aren’t, and therein lies the travesty. We will get more into this in the cons section, but this can lead to serious feature creep. My motto is, if you are walking into a space where there are competitors that are branded perhaps more heavily than any other space online (think: Dropbox, or Apple) then you might want to seriously consider this, because in that case branding will be very important. Though, one can marry a lean launch with fabulous technology and a nice brand, all in one — which we will also discuss later.

Receiving immediate interest Another positive when it comes to the refined and polished roll-out is that it may attract more users up front due to the fantastic design and full service care given to the entire product. At least, that is what we love to assume. Realistically though, it can be a barrier to entry as well. I have seen users who feel a product is too big or has too many features for them to get any feeling of ‘want’ when it comes to using it, and they will bounce off the site in less than a minute. Happens all the time, and is all too sad honestly. I hate to see entrepreneur’s or even manager’s ideas get sucked down the tubes because of the all too frequent feature creep. Although it does happen, it still doesn’t keep entrepreneurs from feeling that the interest will be increased ten fold should they complete their product entirely before launch. This is a big one.

Being feature complete If you do make it to this stage and are living in this camp, then you are more than likely feature complete at this point. We have spoken about this a bit so far in the above sections, but here is where it gets interesting. A lot, and I mean a lot of start-ups feel they need to be feature complete before they can charge, or make an impact for that matter. I am not saying that there isn’t some merit to that argument, but I think that it has been exaggerated over the years. From my point of view and from what I’ve seen over the years you can simply ask if users would pay for a product before fleshing out the entire thing. Now, let’s say you were gung-ho about being feature complete, and you did indeed want everything in. Well, you could launch a very minimal version of each feature. Something that represents the features in question, or perhaps even videos of the ones missing. Keep in mind there are ways around being feature complete without actually being there.

The downside of a refined UX

Feature creep This is an all-to-common failure when it comes to the polished UX and feature complete approach to launching a start-up. And this is what we call a situation called the death spiral of feature creep. The managers or owners will feel the need to add more and more features to the product as you complete others, until there is literally nothing to do but add more features. It is a never-ending cycle in some cases, and especially in cases where you don’t have a rigid set guidelines or specifications established.

Waterfall development

Waterfall development is a con in its own right, and not without controversy. A typical waterfall work-flow looks like this: idea, design, development, testing, maintenance. There are some people who thrive in such an environment, but at least an equal number find it absolutely detrimental. Or it is a pretty standard process that feels very normal to most of us, and yet for ideas that will soon become apparent it can often be detrimental to actually shipping a product.

The reason isn’t necessarily in the system model itself, it is in the fact that you have separate teams doing work that is each being micro-managed by individual managers. For instance, a typical flow may look like this: an idea is formed by the founder/entrepreneur; he hires on a design and development team, and perhaps managers or creative directors for each team; the idea gets passed off to design, to create mockups, those mockups get turned into Photoshop documents that are going back and forth with the owner and creative director until they are perfect; then, without any consensus as to what is even possible, it gets passed off to development to be created; and then after going back and forth with the dev team leader, the owner, and possibly even the creative director, they find a meeting ground, and finish the product.

What I didn’t mention though, is that each of those steps involved probably 50–100 emails individually, and that is a conservative estimate (very conservative). As you can see, that isn’t really efficient, because at any time the owner and founder could add on more work that wasn’t in the plan, or change things. Micromanaging is often not the best option when it comes to software development, and yet the waterfall system seems to thrive in such a management style.

Always keep that in mind, and if you don’t work well being micromanaged then do let your boss know. Remember, it is always better to be upfront and honest about a possible unproductive future than to go down that road actually being unproductive. And also keep in mind there are more typical micro-managing issues all in the pipeline for this system; from my personal experience it isn’t ideal.

So what is ideal? Well, that is subjective, but I can tell you in my experience the ability to launch quickly and iterate over cycle times has given me and my teams the ability to ship a larger amount of products than we ever could have with Waterfall. So what is this mysterious magical system of shipping product?

Quick rollouts, and the lean start-up

The lean start-up is something that has, in my opinion, revolutionized our community. And that is primarily because it is based on something called the learn-build-measure feedback loop.

The art of the quick rollout — often it can be a simple page that asks if users would pay for this, or it can be a bare bones product — is something that people have perfected over the years, and as I get more entrenched in our tech world I feel it is more and more important.

The big thing here is market acceptance and validation. A key question: who says the code you are writing is meaningful? We live in a day and age where people really can’t fritter away a single ounce of their precious time. It is a time of make it or break it attitudes, and go big or go home mentalities. It is a time when reality hits us in the face every day when we can’t buy food or afford rent, and that is why it is all the more important to make sure you aren’t wasting away coding something nobody will use.

You don’t have to be a genius at marketing, but you do need to understand an experimental state of mind. The constant state of beta is a brilliant metaphor to this. We should never get wrapped up in our pride so much that we can’t even change an item on a project. We have to remember that life is experimental, and the sooner you realize this the better: and there is no better way than with the lean startup.

The upside of the lean start-up

User feedback

Using a method like this is something akin to being told about a stock before it peaks. This is a great way to get info on your core target demographic, and to get validation before you waste your time.

Here’s how you do it. Get a landing page made, and show what your product or service does in a very beautiful and explanatory way. Spend some money on this part if you’d like, because it’s the most important. Then put a simple sign up with your email address if interested in it. Done. Now, that may not seem like you are doing much, but you are doing quite a lot in reality. You are validating an entire product market or service market with one page. You aren’t spending months and thousands of dollars to build something unnecessary that nobody will use, you are simply creating one thing to find out if it is worth it.

There have been people that launch 5 service pages similar to what I just said, and the ones they get the most feedback on, are the ones they move forward with. It is a brilliant act, and it can be seen as investing in a lot of ways. You are getting returns on your investment, and if not you are exiting the market before you lose a lot of potential gains. I think Warren Buffet would love this.

Quicker iteration cycles One of the best things about doing product development in a lean fashion is that you will often find that your iteration cycles are much quicker, and in some companies they ship code over 20 times a day. There is a lot of philosophy behind this, for instance how at Facebook when a new engineer is brought on board they are given 5 bug fixes in their welcome email on their first day. A lot of the reasoning behind doing things like this is that if you have your system set up in a way that it breaks every time a new employee comes on board, then it’s not them it’s your system that’s broken.

Agile development Agile development is in essence going from one small thing to the next as quickly as possible. You then move from each sprint to the next sprint, which is often defined by a user story and that is simply a user on your site who wants some bit of functionality. It is very similar to testing in Rails or other framework, as you are only doing as much as you need and nothing more. One can save a massive amount of time by doing development in this fashion.

The downside of the lean start-up

One small negative that may happen when you are a user of the agile development and lean startup system, is that the site may change over the course of time. Now, ideally this would happen because of a user’s request, but still it may be jarring to some users.

So doing it with class and elegance is important. Especially if it is a product they care about. Don’t uproot the core user-base of your product like Digg v4 did, but instead provide details on what you are doing and why, and if all else fails roll back.

Always be sure to use something like git or subversion to save versions of your product. In fact, I do so as branches, so that we can always roll back if need be.

In conclusion

If your startup is so technically advanced that it doesn’t matter, go with the quick roll out. People will care because of the technological change they are seeing. Though, if you are competing in a space with massive competition then perhaps a combination of both is best. In short, always do the best you can with refined UX, but do it in short agile bursts.

Dain Miller is a Sr. Engineer at a Chicago based start-up, though he is still accepting freelance projects. He has a passion for responsive design and Ruby on Rails. You can follow him on twitter at @_dain, or find him on about.me.

Are you trapped forever in a feature-rich project that won’t see a customer for five years? Maybe you just launched the concept you dreamed up over this morning’s breakfast. Either way, let us know in the comments.

Share this story

Tweet

Pin It

Do’s and don’ts of call to action pages
Five important lessons Mark Zuckerberg taught us about business
Interview with Kristina Halvorson

Source : webdesignerdepot[dot]com

How to Be Profound

2012-07-08T07:18:00.001-07:00

Before you ask, let me start by saying that I don’t feel that I’m a profound writer, or that many of the things I have to say fit the description of “profound”!

But in some blogging niches—self help, personal development, and other emotive categories—”profound” is a word that’s often used to describe posts. I don’t have any stats on it, but I think profound content is probably more likely to be read all the way through, to encourage comments from readers, and to get shared.

It’s probably fair to say that profound content draws more readers, and may have a better chance of going viral in some cases. For bloggers, profound content is a worthy goal.

So what is profound? And how can you and I, who may not write on such an emotive level, create “profound” content?

What is “profound”?

I think “profound” content usually unravels something for us and make us see that thing in a different light. It takes a common concept or idea—something we take completely for granted—and recasts it so that we can see something new or undiscovered in it.

If you think about it, this is really what Apple does with its products. The idea of a portable colour touchscreen computer may not seem like a massive leap from, say, a laptop. After all, touchscreens were already popular in many applications. But it took Apple to recast what we saw as “computers” and “computing” in the form of an iPad for people to sit up and say, “yeah, that’s great!”, and to use it, and love it.

I think this is pretty much the definition of “profound.”

Making profound content

A profound idea is, I think, the basis for profound content. You need to start by thinking—though I’m sure many ideas come from an “ah-ha” moment, the fact is that even those sparks of inspiration take mental energy.

Beyond that, I think there are probably several writing techniques that can make or break your profound content.

1. Clarity

The clarity of your expression is important in communicating a profound concept. The aim is likely to be to communicate what you need to with as few words as possible. This leaves the reader the mental space to take in the information and digest it as they read.

So avoiding lengthy, repetitive descriptions, unnecessary humour or undue seriousness, is important. A post doesn’t need to be “weighty” to be profound, but it does need to be effortlessly comprehensible.

Above all, make sure that every word in your profound post is necessary—that every word counts.

2. Length

Some posts are profound because they say so much in so little space—if you follow The Dalai Lama on Twitter, you’ll know what I mean.

The shorter the post, the more pithy it’s likely to be. That doesn’t mean a longer post can’t be profound, but it probably does mean that sentences are likely to be short, and the overall post contains no fluff.

3. Word choice

I think the most profound posts communicate, so that means the words you choose for the post need to be easily understood by all readers.

This doesn’t mean you need to “dumb down” your post, but a profound post is usually one that, as I mentioned above, takes little to no effort to comprehend. So word choice is important. Make your posts as accessible as possible by using words that your readers won’t struggle to understand—that will allow them to focus upon your message, and give their full attention to what you’re communicating.

4. Formatting

A trend I see often on blogs is that of using formatting to emphasise “profound” or meaningful points within a post. We might separate already-short sentences onto separate lines, bold them, or italicize certain words in them.

That’s fine, but it’s important to remember that formatting doesn’t make for profundity. More often than not, I see it used to draw attention to points that, if the blogger had taken more care with the text of the post itself, would happily stand alone and have impact without formatting.

If you craft the post well, you may not ned to use formatting to drive your points home at all. A truly profound post draws readers through its length by virtue of its power.

Do you have a profound post?

Is there a post in your niche that fits the description of “profound”? Share it with us in the comments so we can take a look and get a feel for how profound content works in different situations.

Source : problogger[dot]net

Will Handheld Devices Replace Your Laptop?

2012-07-08T06:05:00.001-07:00

Pin It

It has been quite some time since the era of handheld devices dawned upon us. Smartphones, tablets, eBook readers – you name it! With each passing day, it seems as if the gadgets we use and the technology we employ is shrinking in size.

So, how many of these super portable handheld beauties do you own? An iPad? Amazon Kindle? MS Zune?

Something? Anything? Everything?

And as with any new trend in technology, debate is in the air – will this new trend kill the old one?

You may ask, which old one? Well, here the ‘old one’ refers to devices such as laptops, desktops and anything that can’t be held in your hand.

Before we proceed to answer the question, let us be clear about certain things. The definition or classification of ‘handheld’ itself is not rigid – I mean, you can carry a notebook/laptop/netbook with you, but it’s not considered a handheld device. For the sake of simplicity and clarity, devices such as tablets and smartphones shall be treated as ‘handheld devices’ in this article, and laptops and desktops shall be called ‘mainstream/traditional devices’.

Now, let’s simply dive head-first into our main question: will handheld devices kill the mainstream?

Before we go on to address the question, we shall attempt to arrive at the answer using two different methods – sheer empirical facts and figures, and analytical opinions and viewpoints.

Handheld Devices will NOT Replace Traditional Devices, says Market Research

Allow me to start bombarding you with numbers and figures (unrelated info: I always loved Statistics back in college). As many as 56% of the market experts think that handheld devices will not replace or overpower mainstream ones anytime soon.

Image Credit

You may argue that with the rise in innovations related to tablets and other handheld devices, laptops and desktops are as good as over. In fact, Rupert Murdoch once told Fox Business Network that tablets are the “end of laptops”. A strong statement that can be debated. However, there isn’t much to support it as of now – when asked about handheld devices as compared to traditional ones, only 12% of iPad users said that their iPad can totally replace their laptop.

Along similar lines, most experts are divided when it comes to handheld devices as opposed to mainstream ones. 4% of them think the rise in handheld devices will leave the market for traditional devices unaffected, whereas 7% feel that handheld devices will have a huge impact on laptops. Over 36%, however, feel that there will be some impact of handhelds over laptops and desktops, but not too huge.

Partial replacement? Yes, anytime.

Total extinction? Nope.

Reasons why Mainstream Devices will not Perish Anytime Soon

1. Creativity > Consumption

Does this sub-heading baffle you? Fret not.

Image Credit

What exactly is the purpose of your iPad? Read and answer emails on the go, scroll through your Twitter feed and check your Facebook notifications while commuting, play that Angry Birds game, edit some urgent document, and so on? If you are an author, do you use your iPad to write full fledged books? No, chances are, you turn to your laptop for that (at least I rely on my laptop for this purpose). Similarly, if you are a photographer, what will you use for editing and retouching your photos — your iPad or your computer?

I think that drives the point home – for serious creative usage, a laptop or desktop is still unbeaten. Even if you take a look at the App Market or Google Play store, you’ll notice that the majority of the apps are for casual usage or consumption, rather than serious creative work.

2. Generic Usage > Dedicated Usage

Another baffling sub-heading? Again, fret not!

Image Credit

Truth be told, handheld devices are ideal for serving a dedicated cause. For instance, Amazon Kindle is a perfect companion to keep you hooked for hours and satisfy your thirst to read awesome stuff. Yet, you can’t really do anything apart from read books on it, can you? A Sony Walkman or iPod will help you enjoy your favorite music, watch some videos, and…what else?

At the end of the day, laptops and other mainstream devices live well to the tag of ‘all-encompassing’. Perhaps your laptop will not beat Kindle when it comes to reading while in an elevator, but then again, there are a zillion things that the laptop can do, and Kindle can’t.

3. Affordable > Eye Candy

Yet another baffling sub-heading? Fret not…ah well, I guess I should stop mentioning this line now.

Image Credit

Yes, handheld devices are seeing a drop in price, and this trend is likely to continue, but so are laptops and desktops. Eliminating desktops from this discussion for the time being, a laptop with a dual-core processor is still way cheaper and more powerful than a popular tablet. Don’t believe me? Ask yourself: how much did your current laptop cost you, and what’s its configuration? Now compare the same with the cost and configuration of the iPhone 4S.

4. Usability > Non-feasibility

How many pages can you type using a touch screen and/or an extra-cramped keypad, before you finally give up?

Image Credit

No matter how awesome the touch support on handheld devices is, at the end of the day, nothing comes close to beating a physical keyboard. And when I speak of ‘keyboard’, I do not refer to the super-cramped keypads that certain tablets ship with.

Thus, while handheld devices are awesome for sending that urgent email right away, they do not really beat traditional devices in terms of feasibility for prolonged usage.

5. Specialized Audience > Special Audience

A very popular argument often cited in favor of handheld devices over mainstream ones is that handheld devices satisfy the social networking addicts’ urge to stay connected, and since such internet users are a good segment of the market, they will eventually move away from their laptops and opt for tablets or smartphones.

Image Credit

Well, hardcore internet users and social networking lovers form a ‘special’ segment of the market. It cannot be denied that this ‘special’ segment can indeed consider moving away from laptops completely, sometime soon.

However, a ‘special’ audience is different from a ‘specialized’ audience. If you are a graphic designer, you will probably opt for a tablet or smartphone, but you won’t leave your laptop, because you need it. Similarly, if you are a programmer/coder, you need your computer to do the debugging and coding, even though you may have a tablet and a smartphone to help you stay connected.

Gaining a special audience for a product is not the same as gaining a specialized audience. The special audience may consider leaving traditional devices and switch to handheld devices entirely, but the specialized audience, like it or not, needs the traditional devices.

The Counter-Argument

So, are handheld devices that bad? Should you just drop your plan of gifting your spouse a handheld device?

No.

Image Credit

It can be said that handheld devices come with tools of their own, which, over time, may evolve to challenge the dominance of mainstream tools. For instance, apps for dictation can considerably reduce your reliance on touch screens for typing (though this leads to another inevitable peril: accent). Plus, tablets tend to present text display with a great level of clarity – imagine viewing a document on a 264ppi screen!

Further more, a built-in camera means you have a handy scanner wherever you go. Also, if you insist on having a real keyboard (for me, a ‘real’ keyboard is something which isn’t cramped), you can very well make use of Bluetooth to pair it with your handheld device.

Hence, handheld devices have advantages of their own. Such advantages can allow handheld devices to partially challenge the authority of mainstream devices, but won’t be sufficient to replace mainstream devices altogether.

Lastly, Shall I Discard My Laptop and Go for that Handheld Device?

In simple terms, NO.

In the end it boils down to what your needs are – I couldn’t have written this article on an iPad, I needed my laptop. But each morning when I get up, I turn to my Android smartphone for checking emails, rather than switching on the laptop and connecting to the internet and then launching the browser to open my Inbox. I cannot picture spending a day without my smartphone, but at the same time, I cannot ever imagine a tablet coming anywhere close to replacing my laptop. My smartphone does a lot of things for me – emailing, social networking, gaming, photography – the list goes on. But there are limits to what it can do. I draw and write using my laptop, code stuff and do the odd amount of gaming every now and then – none of this can be (properly) accomplished on a handheld device. To sum it up, handheld devices, no matter how good, cannot yet replace or eliminate mainstream ones. Of course, if you have a smartphone or a tablet, it will serve you well. It can surely co-exist along with your laptop and make your life easier. But it cannot REPLACE your laptop, period.

Will handheld devices ever manage to eliminate the need of a laptop/desktop? What do you think? Feel free to share with us in comments!

Source : 1stwebdesigner[dot]com

Our favorite tweets of the week July 2 – July 8, 2012

2012-07-08T02:28:00.001-07:00

Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the best tweets that we sent out this past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that we tweeted about, so don’t miss out.

To keep up to date with all the cool links, simply follow us @DesignerDepot

The Beginners’ Guide to Benchmarking User Experience http://ow.ly/bXEKh Good ‪#UX‬ read

Check out this awesome tutorial on how to create a promotional Website Infographic http://ow.ly/bXJ98

Darragh Casey’ “Shelving the Body” is exploring the relationship between people, shelves & the objects they hold http://ow.ly/bXK4d

Serifs, sans serifs and… scripts http://ow.ly/bZ0fD

Saul Bass: The Legacy of An Artist http://ow.ly/bZcQe

Chris Silas Neal’s colorful & highly creative book covers http://ow.ly/bZeZJ

Add Some Pizzazz to Your Text Boxes with HTML5 and CSS3 http://su.pr/1SNR1n

#Useful‬ – How to Switch from Blogger to WordPress without Losing Google Rankings http://ow.ly/c0vUT

Design Students, Check This Out http://ow.ly/c0wjl 6 Simple, But Important Tips

What Bad Designers Know That You Don’t http://ow.ly/c0wbC /via @speckyboy

Stop building your idea. Start solving a problem http://ow.ly/c0x01 What do you think about this?

The importance of moral in design http://ow.ly/c0xaW

“Dubstep Dispute” is a fun animation about a crew of lovable droids http://ow.ly/c0yq0

Design for Readability http://ow.ly/c1DuQ Great ‪#UX‬ read

Bummer: CERN scientists inexplicably present Higgs boson findings in Comic Sans http://ow.ly/c1DCG

London 2012 Olympics logo, even though mocked by many, is a triumph in Joe Stone eyes. Why? http://ow.ly/c23S8

Prepare to be amazed: breathtaking metallic rain installation http://ow.ly/c25at

How to Live a Recommendable Life http://ow.ly/c29ZD *Great read

Tips For A Finely Crafted Website http://ow.ly/c2ajR

Fashion, glamour and detail in the oil paintings of James Rieck http://ow.ly/c26D9

Erin Fostel’s photorealistic drawings take us far away http://ow.ly/c2avE

Want more? No problem! Keep track of all our tweets by following us @DesignerDepot

Share this story

Tweet

Pin It

Our favorite tweets of the week Mar 5-Mar 11, 2012
Our favorite tweets of the week Apr 30 – May 6, 2012
Our favorite tweets of the week Jan 2-Jan 8, 2012

Source : webdesignerdepot[dot]com

Weekend Project 2: Success Secrets of 5 Multi-topic Blogs

2012-07-07T07:18:00.001-07:00

This guest post is by Natalie Webb of Leave Me to My Projects.

You try telling Martha Stewart she needs to pick a niche.

So why is everyone in the blogosphere telling you that doing just that is the key to achieving any level of success in blogging?

True, it is easier to build and write a popular blog when you stick to one topic. But now more than ever, there is an opening for multi-topic blogs to hit it big, if they do it right. Wait, you don’t see the opening? That’s funny, it has a big flashing sign pointing the way.

That sign says “Pinterest.”

What is Pinterest?

If I need to tell you what Pinterest is, I’d be mildly concerned that you have been in a coma for the last six months. But what is it about?

Pinterest is about collecting. People love to collect things. In the big wide world of the internet, this impulse is no different. As a matter of fact, it can be amplified.

Pinterest is where people collect pretty much everything they like from all around the internet and pin it to categorized and organized virtual pinboards. Each “Pin” is a nice large image with a description, which tickles our visual cortexes ever so nicely.

People … who are totally not me … have been known to spend entire days off getting lost in the inspiration. With Pinterest, you can visually create the life you are planning on living as soon as you get the time and money to do so.

I’m talking about lifestyle, folks.

What is the Pinterest niche?

The Pinterest niche, as this writer seems to have coined it, is the wide-open lifestyle area. Much of Pinterest, and therefore the Pinterest niche, centers around DIY (as in, things you can make).

The most popular topics on Pinterest, and in the niche, are Home, Arts & Crafts, Style/Fashion, and Inspiration/Education, according to Mashable. While those are the most popular, there tons of other topics to choose from as well—the Wedding category is also immensely repinned.

Because there are so many good topics to choose from, Pinterest niche blogs are not difficult to differentiate from each other. All you need is a focus. We walked though how to find your focus for a multi-topic blog yesterday. Now let’s get to some real-life examples.

The blogs selected here were chosen not necessarily because they are the biggest and baddest on the block. Some are run by whole teams of staff, some by one little ol’ person. Some have been established for a number of years, while some are newer on the scene.

What they have in common are all of the elements it takes to make an impact in the Pinterest niche. So what are these elements? Who better to show you than the Grand Dame of the Pinterest blogs, Martha Stewart.

Martha Stewart

A strong personality

A blog centered around a lifestyle, as Pinterest niche blogs are, need a face to associate with that lifestyle.

Martha Stewart has this so wrapped up that when you even think about homemaking, hers is the first face that springs to mind. She may run a media empire, live a life so beautiful it can make one green with envy, and have more prison street cred than some rappers, but when your mind turns to homespun craftiness, you think of Martha.

A strong message

Martha gives her readers and followers tools to simplify and beautify their homes and their lives through the power of DIY.

A super-specific customer avatar

All of Martha Stewart’s work is geared toward moms with kids and pets. They are a little older, settled down, and they own homes.They enjoy entertaining, gardening, cooking, crafting, and simply making their lives more beautiful.

Incredibly helpful and informative

I hardly have to mention how much how-to power Martha Stewart packs into her website, blogs, books and magazines. She has literally written the book(s) on homemaking.

Beautiful photography

Although Martha Stewart’s photography resources are nearly unlimited these days, her photography has always been top notch.

The good news is, with as little as a smartphone, paired with a little creativity and practice, anyone can take beautiful photos these days.

5 Great Pinterest blogs

Now let’s explore five innovative multi-topic Pinterest niche blogs, including those all-important five secrets, the important stats, and what they are doing so well.

1. Hello Giggles

Personality: Founded by Zooey Deschanel and two friends, Hello Giggles has some serious starpower behind it in the indie darling. She is known to have coined the phrase “Adorkable.”

Message: Entertaining and empowering inspiration for young women. Girly feminism, if you will.

Reader: Young women in their “finding themselves” phase of life.

How they help: Hello Giggles features tons of reader-submitted work and guest posts on a huge range of topics and creates a positive, female-friendly environment for reader interaction.

Photography: A combination of professional and reader-submitted photography keeps the look of the site both polished and approachable.

Topics: Entertainment, Treats, Beauty, Cuteness, Home, Social Issues, Opinion, Parenting, Humor and more.

Twitter Followers: 97,492

Facebook Fans: 165,000

Bloglovin’ Followers: 3,138

Secret: Besides the starpower behind the blog, the best thing Hello Giggles has going for it is its feel-good factor. It absolutely oozes “Yes you can,” and that is what keeps its readers coming back.

2. A Beautiful Mess

Personality: Perhaps it is no coincidence that the force behind A Beautiful Mess looks so much like Zooey Deschanel. Elsie, however, is more vintage indie than cute and dorky indie. She is always incredibly positive and upbeat, and lets you inside her life, home and business in such a way that readers powerfully connect with her.

Message: Pretty things that you can make and wear.

Reader: 20-somethings living in apartments or other semi-temporary residences who love to make things themselves.

How they help: Loads of tutorials and inspiration, as well as comprehensive ecourses.

Photography: Elsie is a fantastic photographer, and uses everything from Instagram to vintage cameras to fancier photo-takers.

Topics: Projects, Outfits, Treats, Beauty, Photography, Decor and more.

Page Views Per Day: 170,859

Page Views Per Month: 5 million

Twitter Followers: 29,412

Facebook Fans: 35,399

Pinterest Followers: 23,312

Bloglovin’ Followers: 32,600

Secret: Elsie (and her sister Emma) over at A Beautiful Mess own a vintage clothing boutique called Red Velvet. While their business may be clothing, the blog is all about inspiration for the vintage, indie lifestyle. Elsie lives and displays the beautiful life her readers aspire to, and shows them how to create it.

3. Cupcakes and Cashmere

Personality: Emily is a girl who makes chic style look easy.

Message: A guide for defining your style, reinventing your space, and entertaining with ease.

Reader: The late 20s-early 30s married professional woman with no kids.

How they help: Cupcakes and Cashmere is about personal lifestyle refinement with plenty of written and video tutorials featuring both Emily and industry pros.

Photography: The photography here is spacious, simple, and beautiful.

About: Outfits, Recipes, How To, Decor

Twitter Followers: 56,769

Facebook Fans: 61,439

Pinterest Followers: 22,945

Bloglovin’ Followers: 8,1505

Secret: Although Emily is sweet as pie, she brings a serious sense of authority to her style mentoring. She more than walks the walk herself, and she brings in the pros to truly help you up your game.

4. The Dainty Squid

Personality: Brightly colored hair does have a certain draw, and Kaylah the thrifting queen, amateur mycologist, cat lady, and collector of many many things goes through so many shades. She also has a cat named Dr. Octopus that lets her dress him up. Full of personality, this one.

Message: Explore and be colorful.

Reader: Shy, quirky, quiet, studious 20-somethings with insatiable curiosities and a love of multi-colored things. And they also love cats.

How she helps: Inspired style inspiration, lots of laughs, detailed tutorials, and thought-provoking explorations.

Photography: Kaylah is a photography fiend. Her style is whimsical, creative, and curious, and it always makes you think of her skipping around in the woods and fields with multiple cameras swinging around her neck.

About: Beauty, Cats, Crafts, Fashion, Food, Hair, Photography

Google Friend Connect: 6,104

Twitter Followers: 5,278

Tumblr Followers: 28,400

Facebook Fans: 5,241

Bloglovin’ Followers: 3,350

Secret: It is all about the personality. Kaylah is a shy girl (she even says so on her about page), and that is the kind of reader she attracts. The fact that she is so bright and colorful and outgoing on her blog is an inspiration to her readers, and she shows them step by step how to bring her carefully curated aesthetic into their lives.

5. Sincerely, Kinsey

Personality: Kinsey is a wedding photographer who exudes and air of calm and tranquility that you can feel in every aspect of her blog.

Message: Inspiration and exploration of the small, simple sweetness of life.

Reader: Festival-going flower children that live with a camera in their giant hobo bags.

How they help: Inspirations and tutorials for a creative life.

Photography: There is a dreamy quality to all of Kinsey’s photography. She weaves magic with morning sunlight.

About: Fashion, DIY, Photography

Page Views Per Month: 265,000

Google Friend Connect Followers: 2,434

Facebook Fans: 1,077

Pinterest Followers: 2,647

Bloglovin’ Followers: 2,662

Secret: Kinsey makes this beautiful life look effortless. Her style, crafts and tutorials are presented in a way that makes them incredibly accessible and doable. On top of it all, her light, energy and passion shine through on every single page.

Have it all

Whether you already run a multi-topic blog or are thinking about starting one, you really can have it all, if you do it right.

If you can identify and focus your personality, message, and reader, provide them with real, concrete help and back it up with beautiful images, you will have a lifestyle blog that readers yearn to emulate and will come back to again and again. Why? Because it feels like home.

What are your favorite multi-topic blogs, and what keeps you coming back as a reader? What are your secrets to multi-topic success? I’d love to hear from you in the comments!

Natalie is a truly Edward Scissorhands living in a Martha Stewart world. A Chicago-based writer, barber and obsessive DIYer, she blogs over at Leave Me to My Projects about her adventures in the DIY lifestyle with loads of how-tos and inspiration. She also spends way too much time on Pinterest.

Source : problogger[dot]net

Image Tagging Tutorial Using jQuery and CSS

2012-07-07T06:05:00.001-07:00

Pin It

There is a popular saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. Images are a great way of catching our attention instantly. But sometimes its necessary to tag or link specific parts of images to provide information. Popular social media giants like Facebook and Google Plus use image tagging to identify the people and places in images.

In this tutorial I am going to show you how to create a simple image tagging system using jQuery and CSS. Lets get started.

Image Tagging Tutorial Demo and File Download

Demo

Download

Creating the Initial Layout

In this step we are going to setup the initial layout with the image to be tagged. We need to use the jQuery UI library for dragging and dropping and resizing. Let’s take a look at our initial code.


<html>
    <head>
        <title>Image Tagging with jQuery and PHP</title>
        <link href="jquery-ui.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
        <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.min.js"></script>
        <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-ui.min.js"></script>

    </head>
    <body>
        <div >

            <div style='margin: auto;
                 text-align: center;
                 width: 600px;'>
                <div  >
                    <img src='tagging.jpg'   />
                    <div  ><img src='save.png' onclick='openDialog()' /></div>

                    <div id="planetmap">

                    </div>
                    <div >
                        <div >
                            <div >Title</div><div ><input type='text'  /></div>
                        </div>
                        <div >
                            <div ></div>
                            <div >
                                <input type='button' value='Add Tag' onclick='addTag()' />

                            </div>
                        </div>

                    </div>
                </div>

            </div>
            <div style="background: none repeat scroll 0 0 #C7C7C8;
                 border: 1px solid #AEAEAE;
                 clear: both;
                 margin: 20px auto;
                 padding: 20px 0;
                 text-align: center;
                 width: 600px;">
                <input type="button" value="Show Tags" onclick="showTags()" />
                <input type="button" value="Hide Tags" onclick="hideTags()" />
            </div>
        </div>

</html>

Now lets get an idea about how our layout is structured and important components for this tutorial.

Initially we include the CSS and JavaScript files necessary for the demo. I have used the jQuery UI library.

Then we have the #image_panel which has all the components related to tagging.


<div  >
                    <img src='tagging.jpg'   />
                    <div  ><img src='save.png' onclick='openDialog()' /></div>

                    <div id="planetmap">

                    </div>
                    <div >
                        <div >
                            <div >Title</div><div ><input type='text'  /></div>
                        </div>
                        <div >
                            <div ></div>
                            <div >
                                <input type='button' value='Add Tag' onclick='addTag()' />

                            </div>
                        </div>

                    </div>
                </div>

First we have the image to be tagged with the ID imageMap

Then we have an element called #mapper which will be hidden initially. It’s used to define the tagging area.

#image_panel is positioned relative to the main_panel and #mapper is absolutely positioned. Also, the mapper should have a higher z-index value since it needs to be displayed on top of the image.

Then we have a component called planetmap. It is used to keep the tagged sections. When a tag is created on the main image a small div will be created and appended to this planetmap section.

Next you can see the #form_panel. It used to create title of tags. When a tag is created it will popup and request for tag name. Once created it will hide.

Now we have a basic idea about our layout. Styles used in the demo are not included in the above code. So make sure to use the project files while you read the tutorial to get a better understanding.

Generating Tag Window

We have to load the tag window when the user clicks somewhere on the image. If you haven’t checked it already, load the demo and click somewhere. Lets see how we can create the tag window using the following code. Look at the $(“#imageMap”).click in the project files and I’ll be explaining it step by step.


var image_left = $(this).offset().left;
var click_left = e.pageX;
var left_distance = click_left - image_left;

var image_top = $(this).offset().top;
var click_top = e.pageY;
var top_distance = click_top - image_top;

Offset gets the coordinates of the image relative to the document. This is called inside the mouseclick event. So event.pageX will give you the absolute x coordinate of image.

Then we get the actual distance to clicked position from the beginning of the image using click_left – image_left.

We apply the same method to retrieve the top distance of clicked position.


var mapper_width = $('#mapper').width();
var imagemap_width = $('#imageMap').width();

var mapper_height = $('#mapper').height();
var imagemap_height = $('#imageMap').height();

Then we calculate the width and heights of mapper (window for tagging) and the actual image. Now we have all the required parameters to start loading the tag window. We can use the top_distance and left_distance to load the tag window. The problem is it should not go outside the image container, we have to do the following validations while loading tag window.


                    if((top_distance + mapper_height > imagemap_height) && (left_distance + mapper_width > imagemap_width)){
                        $('#mapper').css("left", (click_left - mapper_width - image_left  ))
                        .css("top",(click_top - mapper_height - image_top  ))
                        .css("width","100px")
                        .css("height","100px")
                        .show();
                    }

In the above image, the tagging window exceeds both top and left positions of the image. So we prevent that using the validation inside if statement.

Then we assign the recalculated left and top positions and show the tagging window.


                    else if(left_distance + mapper_width > imagemap_width){

                        $('#mapper').css("left", (click_left - mapper_width - image_left  ))
                        .css("top",top_distance)
                        .css("width","100px")
                        .css("height","100px")
                        .show();

                    }

The tagging window above exceeds left positions of the image. So we prevent that using the validation inside if statement.

Then we assign the recalculated left positions and show the tagging window.


                    else if(top_distance + mapper_height > imagemap_height){
                        $('#mapper').css("left", left_distance)
                        .css("top",(click_top - mapper_height - image_top  ))
                        .css("width","100px")
                        .css("height","100px")
                        .show();
                    }

In the image above, the tagging window exceeds the top positions of the image. So we prevent that using the validation inside if statement.

Then we assign the recalculated top positions and show the tagging window.


                    else{

                        $('#mapper').css("left",left_distance)
                        .css("top",top_distance)
                        .css("width","100px")
                        .css("height","100px")
                        .show();
                    }

In the above image, the window is positioned correctly without any issue. So we show the window at its current positions.

Finally we want our tagging window to be moved across the image and resize. Following code will enable dragging and resizing on tagging window.


$("#mapper").resizable({ containment: "parent" });
$("#mapper").draggable({ containment: "parent" });

Saving Tags on Image

You can see a save icon inside the tagging window opened in the previous section. Move and resize the tagging window and position it where you want to create the tag. Then click the save button which will call the openDialog function as shown below.


var openDialog = function(){
        $("#form_panel").fadeIn("slow");
};

Form used to save the tag details will be displayed as shown below.

You can type a title for the tag and click the add button. The tag will be saved and hidden immediately. The section below shows the code for add tag functionality.


          var addTag = function(){
                var position = $('#mapper').position();

                var pos_x = position.left;
                var pos_y = position.top;
                var pos_width = $('#mapper').width();
                var pos_height = $('#mapper').height();

                $('#planetmap').append('<div class="tagged"  style="width:'+pos_width+';height:'+
                    pos_height+';left:'+pos_x+';top:'+pos_y+';" ><div   class="tagged_box" style="width:'+pos_width+';height:'+
                    pos_height+';display:none;" ></div><div class="tagged_title" style="top:'+(pos_height+5)+';display:none;" >'+
                    $("#title").val()+'</div></div>');

                $("#mapper").hide();
                $("#title").val('');
                $("#form_panel").hide();

            };

First we get the left and top positions of the tagged window and width and height of mapper.

All the tags will be stored inside the #planetmap div. So we append the newly created tag to the #planetmap div with the title.

Then we hide the tagging window and reset the form details.

Create as many tags as you want using the same procedure. Now we have to show the hidden tags when the mouse is moved over the tag area. Consider the following code.


            $(".tagged").live("mouseover",function(){
                if($(this).find(".openDialog").length == 0){
                    $(this).find(".tagged_box").css("display","block");
                    $(this).css("border","5px solid #EEE");

                    $(this).find(".tagged_title").css("display","block");
                }

            });

            $(".tagged").live("mouseout",function(){
                if($(this).find(".openDialog").length == 0){
                    $(this).find(".tagged_box").css("display","none");
                    $(this).css("border","none");
                    $(this).find(".tagged_title").css("display","none");
                }

            });

Every tag we created has a class called tagged. So we search for added tags inside the image.

On mouseover we check if the class called openDialog exists in the tag area. This class is available in the edit mode and will be explained later.

If it’s not in edit mode, we show the tag title and tag box using the CSS display:block attribute.

We also added a border to the tag to preview it properly.

On mouseout we hide all the tags.

Since tags are created dynamically, we have to add jQuery events by using the live event.

Now we have completed the tag creation process. Sometimes we may want to edit current tags by repositioning them. Let’s move onto editing tags.

Edit Tag Positions

Once you mouseover a tag, it will be displayed. Then click on the tag and you will see a tag window open with save and delete buttons. Lets look at the code first.


$(".tagged").live("click",function(){
                $(this).find(".tagged_box").html("<img src='del.png'  value='Delete' onclick='deleteTag(this)' />\n\
        <img src='save.png' onclick='editTag(this);' value='Save' />");

                var img_scope_top = $("#imageMap").offset().top + $("#imageMap").height() - $(this).find(".tagged_box").height();
                var img_scope_left = $("#imageMap").offset().left + $("#imageMap").width() - $(this).find(".tagged_box").width();

                $(this).draggable({ containment:[$("#imageMap").offset().left,$("#imageMap").offset().top,img_scope_left,img_scope_top]  });

            });

            var editTag = function(obj){

                $(obj).parent().parent().draggable( 'disable' );
                $(obj).parent().parent().removeAttr( 'class' );
                $(obj).parent().parent().addClass( 'tagged' );
                $(obj).parent().parent().css("border","none");
                $(obj).parent().css("display","none");
                $(obj).parent().parent().find(".tagged_title").css("display","none");
                $(obj).parent().html('');

            }

            var deleteTag = function(obj){
                $(obj).parent().parent().remove();
            };

Save and delete buttons will be shown when you click on a current tag in the image. Now the tag is in an editable mode.

You can move and reposition the current tag. In the code img_scope_top and img_scope_left variables are used to identify the scope where your tag can be moved.

Then we make the tag movable within the calculated scope.

Once finished, try positioning the cursor on the save button again to save the tag in the new position. Function editTag will be called in this scenario.

First we disable the dragging once the edit button is clicked.

Then we hide the tag window after saving as we did previously.

Also, you can click delete button to remove the tag from the current image.

Now we have completed the image tagging process. No tags are displayed in default mode. So you can use the following code if you want to show and hide all the tags specified in the image.

Show All Tags


           var showTags = function(){
                $(".tagged_box").css("display","block");
                $(".tagged").css("border","5px solid #EEE");
                $(".tagged_title").css("display","block");
            };

Hide All Tags


            var hideTags = function(){
                $(".tagged_box").css("display","none");
                $(".tagged").css("border","none");
                $(".tagged_title").css("display","none");
            };

In this tutorial I have explained the process and necessary code for creating a simple image tagging system. Now it’s your responsibility to add new features and use it in your projects. Hope you enjoyed it and feel free to add your suggestions and questions in the comments section.

Source : 1stwebdesigner[dot]com

Comics of the week #137

2012-07-07T02:37:00.001-07:00

Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD.

The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers.

These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today.

So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons.

Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below as well as any related stories of your own…

The data plan

Thin to thick skin

Rough landing

Can you relate to these situations? Please share your funny stories and comments below…

Share this story

Tweet

Pin It

Comics of the Week #51
Comics of the week #78
Comics of the week #95

Source : webdesignerdepot[dot]com