News

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.

Sunday, January 27. 2008

Hassle-Free PDF Text Extraction

Getting text and other content out of your PDF documents is often a hassle. Adobe Acrobat™ (or your other favorite PDF viewer) can do copy-and-paste, but that's time-consuming and tedious for anything but the smallest jobs. Acrobat™ also has a 'save as text' option, but unless you spring for Acrobat™ Professional, it often generates inaccurate text and simply cannot cope with some languages (especially Chinese, Japanese, and Korean).

Matching, diffing and merging XML

I've said bad things about my job working on Carleton College's website, but fundamentally it's a really sound work environment we have. Just before winter break, one of the full-time employees came to me and asked if I could make a diff between two XHTML documents for use in Carleton's CMS, Reason. This would be useful for (a) comparing versions of a document in the CMS (b) merging documents, in case two people edit the same document at the same time, so as to avoid locks and the need for manual merges. They came to me because I told them I'd written an XML parser.