Blogzilla - A web design oriented weblog by Izilla Web Development, Newcastle and Sydney, NSW Australia

JavaScript for Web Designers

Matt Stow — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 04:11:29 +0000

Learn how to use JavaScript, jQuery, and Spry to improve the interaction and overall user experience of your designs.

Read the full article in the Adobe Fireworks Developer Center.

Creating standards-compliant web designs with Fireworks CS4

Matt Stow — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 21:46:10 +0000

For years, Fireworks has played a huge role in my workflow from design to finished page. However, there was an obvious gap where I had to manually write the markup and CSS after slicing and exporting the relevant images. The Fireworks CS4 team and I realised this obstacle and set out to address the issue with its CSS Export feature.

As a Fireworks and web standards evangelist, I decided to work with the Fireworks team to help produce an enhanced version of the CSS Export feature, which empowers you to create better, standards-compliant web pages.

Read the full article in the Adobe Fireworks Developer Center.

Relative Font Size Reference Chart

Matt Stow — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 21:54:21 +0000

I thought I’d share this useful tool that the Izilla team have been using for a while now when building our web projects.

The Relative Font Size Reference Chart is a simple, customisable table chart that calculates common, relative font sizes in both percentages and ems.

Why is this important? Well, for IE’s font resizing to work, fonts need to be set using a relative size unit.

It becomes indispensable as your stylesheets become more complex, where trying to calculate nested font-sizes can leave you more than confused.

As the common browsers have a built-in default base font size of 16px, we can use this figure to calculate which value to resize an element by to achieve our desired font size.

To use the Reference Chart, find the base font size along the top row, and then find the cell that correlates to your target font size from the left.

For example, to achieve 12px on the body, find the Base Size - 16px, then Target Size - 12px, which gives you 0.75em.

If you then wished to set h1’s to be 20px, the Base Size is 12px, Target Size is 20px, which gives you 1.667em. Too easy!

The Chart also allows you to alter the size range from 1-50px, and choose which unit (% or em) to display the results in.

View the Relative Font Size Reference Chart
Download as a zip file to run locally
Download as an AIR app - requires the Adobe AIR runtime

Photoshop CS4 Video Preview

Matt Stow — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 11:46:38 +0000

Deke McClelland from dekeOnline presents an amusing but informative podcast on the notable upgrades Adobe has included into soon to be released Photoshop CS4.

Kevin Kelly: Predicting the next 5,000 days of the web

Matt Stow — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 21:54:50 +0000

At the 2007 EG conference Kevin Kelly explores the first 5,000 days of the internet, and predicts what the next 5,000 could bring.

Source

TED.com - Kevin Kelly: Predicting the next 5,000 days of the web

Aurora - exploring the evolution of the web browsing experience

Matt Stow — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 02:39:44 +0000

How will future advances change the way we browse the web? Adaptive Path in partnership with Mozilla Labs has been developing Aurora, a concept video series designed to springboard discussion and exploration into the evolution of the web browsing experience.

"With Aurora, we set out to define a plausible vision of how technology, the browser, and the Web might evolve in the future by depicting that experience in a variety of real-world contexts.".

"The release of Aurora is part of the launch of Mozilla Labs’ browser concept series, an ongoing initiative to encourage designers and developers to contribute their own visions of the future of the browser and the Web. ".

Aurora videos:

Sources:

http://www.adaptivepath.com/aurora/

How do visitors share content?

Matt Stow — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:26:47 +0000

Sharethis is a widget developed by ShareThis, Inc. that allows online publishers and users to instantly access all profiles, blogs, friends, and contacts for easy sharing and updating via a expanable menu installed to your blog or website.

It also provides the means to track details of how users of your blog/website are choosing to share your content out of the many available options such as Facebook, Myspace, Wordpress, email etc. After registering a free account with Sharethis, users are then able to login and view this “means of sharing” information via provided pie and line graphs.

Now what if I wanted to gain a broader understanding of how users are choosing to share content beyond the statistics of my own domain’s sharing activity? Well Sharethis are about to provide the results of an extensive study on sharing with Forrester Research.

"Forrester and ShareThis, teamed up to find out what and how people are sharing information online with one another. This is part of ShareThis’s continued effort to help online publishers better understand how their users are interacting and sharing the things they are interested in across their networks. This study, which will be released next week, provides some really interesting statistics around how people share, including:"

Email is still primary channel for sharing – 69% of adults cite email as the primary source of sharing information

Less than 1/3 of online adults said they learned about the new content from generally shared content sources such as YouTube, a wiki, or social networking sites

84% of people still use the traditional cut and paste method to share a URL or information

Though the primary motivation for sharing differs, 81% of adults claim that they share to help others – believing that a person will benefit from the information they share

Sharing increases site traffic 2x, thus increasing ad dollars or revenue for publishers

Men are more likely to share recommendations and videos than women; 77 percent of adult males and 74 of younger males shared news and web links

Women are more likely to share products or ideas they like via easy or direct sharing methods (ie texting)

Needless to say the full report should be an interesting read. I’ll attempt to publish the entire thing once released.

7 Free Online Tools for Creating flow charts, diagrams, floor plans etc

Matt Stow — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 01:09:24 +0000

Visual-Blast Media published a fantastic little article the other day on free online tools for creating flow charts, diagrams etc.

Out of the selection, I was most impressed with Mindomo’s online mapping software.

"Mindomo is a versatile Web-based mind mapping tool, delivering the capabilities of desktop mind mapping software in a Web browser - with no complex software to install or maintain.

Create, edit mind maps, and share them with your colleagues or your friends."

Worth a look at least

Sources

Visual-Blast Media - 7 Free Online Tools for Creating flow charts, diagrams, floor plans etc

Mindomo.com - Web-based mind mapping

Wordpress Plugins - All in One SEO Pack

Matt Stow — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 02:59:58 +0000

I recently installed the All in One SEO Pack Wordpress plugin for Blogzilla. The plugin automatically generates page specifc meta data by detecting key words within the page/articles and outputs them as meta keywords in the head section of each page. After running the plugin for over a month, I’ve already seen an increase in visitors and ping backs (other sites linking to this site).

Some features:

Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
Generates META tags automatically
Avoids the typical duplicate content found on Wordpress blogs
For Wordpress 2.3 you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
You can fine-tune everything
Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.

Update to Google Chrome’s terms of service

Matt Stow — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 23:03:40 +0000

After the public beta release of Google’s very own web browser Google Chrome, several users contacted Google to express concern at Section 11 of the product’s terms of service which noted that the service gives Google “rights to any user-generated content “submitted, posted or displayed on or through” the browser.

Google has since updated it’s terms of service:

"You’ll notice if you look at our other products that many of them are governed by Section 11 of our Universal Terms of Service. This section is included because, under copyright law, Google needs what’s called a “license” to display or transmit content. So to show a blog, we ask the user to give us a license to the blog’s content. (The same goes for any other service where users can create content.) But in all these cases, the license is limited to providing the service. In Gmail, for example, the terms specifically disclaim our ownership right to Gmail content."

"So for Google Chrome, only the first sentence of Section 11 should have applied. We’re sorry we overlooked this, but we’ve fixed it now, and you can read the updated Google Chrome terms of service. If you’re into the fine print, here’s the revised text of Section 11:"

" 11. Content license from you
11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services."

Source - Official Google Blog

Blogzilla - A web design oriented weblog by Izilla Web Development, Newcastle and Sydney, NSW Australia

JavaScript for Web Designers

Creating standards-compliant web designs with Fireworks CS4

Relative Font Size Reference Chart

Photoshop CS4 Video Preview

Related Links

Kevin Kelly: Predicting the next 5,000 days of the web

Related Links

Source

Aurora - exploring the evolution of the web browsing experience

Aurora videos:

Sources:

How do visitors share content?

Related Links

7 Free Online Tools for Creating flow charts, diagrams, floor plans etc

Sources

Wordpress Plugins - All in One SEO Pack

Related Links

Update to Google Chrome’s terms of service