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Entries from January 2008
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Thursday, January 31. 2008
10 Principles Of Effective Web Design
Usability and the utility, not the design, determine the success or failure of a web-site. Since the visitor of the page is the only person who clicks the mouse and therefore decides everything, user-centric design has established as a standard approach for successful and profit-oriented web design. After all, if users can’t use a feature, it might as well not exist.
20 Resources for Freelancers
Many people are deciding to take the plunge and leaving the relative security of their job and take up a career as a freelance designer these days. Its a brave step and you will need all the good help and advice you can get. Today TutorialBlog rounds up the best online resources to help you on your way
A PHP killer feature - Streams abstraction
This article explains what are stream handlers and how they simplify PHP developers lives by allowing PHP applications to easily read and write data from containers, like remote Web pages or e-mail messages, as if they were files.
A real world example is presented to demonstrate how you can access messages in a POP3 mailbox and how it can be used to automatically process messages from the site users requesting support.
Wednesday, January 30. 2008
The Principles of Beautiful HTML Email
As web designers, we're used to designing for the particular constraints and capabilities of web browsers, and there's a ton of great advice out there to help. HTML emails are a different story, though -- they've often been the black sheep of the web design world, and have either been ignored or actively repelled.
8 Web Design Mistakes That Developers Make
An excellent website takes a particularly savvy blend of both great design and great code. Because of this, you often find designers having to figure out code and developers trying their hand at design. Speaking as a developer who spent his university years studying among other developers, I can safely say that programmers are not designers. Thankfully, we were graded back then for having reusable code and proper OO methodology -- never for our aesthetics. But nowadays, one of the greatest assets a developer can have is a keen understanding of design.jQuery Validation plugin overview
I’ve recently posted about the 1.2 release of the validation plugin. The post contains an unordered list of changes from the last release, which is handy when coming from a previous release, but lacks the perspective of someone new to the plugin. Therefore this post will cover three areas where the plugin has been improved significantly, and will also serve as a introduction to the plugin.
Tuesday, January 29. 2008
5 CSS Tips to Make IE (You) Happy
If I could, I’d give you a special present this christmas - I’d tell you how to make IE on Windows behave like a grown-up browser. Sadly, reality sucks - as does IE on Windows - so I can only offer to share with you a couple of CSS tips to ease the pain of working with that piece of crappy software.Monday, January 28. 2008
Applying Unix Philosophy to Personal Productivity
Reprogramming your personal workflow with a productivity system is a lot like programming computer software: given a stream of incoming information and tasks, you set up holding spaces and logical rules for turning it all into action. Like software that automates activities, good productivity systems take the thinking out of what to do with incoming data, and make it a no-brainer to turn those bits into an accomplishment. While I'm at best a novice student of Unix philosophy and its rules for designing great software, several tenets are worth thinking about when you're designing your productivity system. Many of the rules that apply to writing great code also apply to writing down tasks and projects that you'll actually carry out instead of put off. Let's look at a few of the basic rules of Unix philosophy and how they apply to your personal productivity system.
A Simple RSS Reader with SimpleXML
SimpleXML is exactly that: a simple way to handle XML data (including RSS feeds) with PHP5. Today we'll look at using SimpleXML to read and display RSS 1.0 feeds. We'll start by breaking down what information exactly we want to get from our XML file.Continue reading "A Simple RSS Reader with SimpleXML"