Recent Blog Posts
Blogs » Archive for June, 2007
Web Directions South: Early Bird Pricing Ending Soon!
The lovely folks at Web Directions have informed me that the Early Bird Pricing for this year’s Web Directions South conference in Sydney has been extended to July 4. If you’re thinking of attending the Australian conference for web professionals in September, then you only have a few days remaining to act.
SitePoint will of course be sending its usual team of orange- and blue-t-shirt-wearing geeks this year, so make sure you come up and say hi.
Hope to see you there!
Web Directions South 2007
September 25-28
Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre
http://www.webdirections.org/
With more than 30 leading experts, including a dozen international stars of the web industry, across three tracks, including this year for the first time management and strategy, Web Directions South will focus on the key technology and business issues of the web in 2007. This really is Australia’s premier event for the web industry. Speakers for 2007 include:
- Andy Clarke: Transcendent CSS
- Aaron Gustafson: Javascript and Ajax
- Brian Fling: designing for the mobile web
- George Oates: user experience design for communities
- Bert Bos: co-creator of CSS on the future of Web Standards
- Rashmi Sinha: online communities
- Adrian Holovaty: making data smart
- Mark Pesce: commons based peer production
plus many more new and old faces to educate and inspire us all once …
News Wire: The Business Case for Web Standards
-
Instant.js (now with IE 6/7 support)
Exploiting the dynamic graphics features of current browsers (e.g. the canvas element), instant.js (along with corner.js, glossy.js, and loupe.js) adds special effects to images on your page that you can configure by applying special CSS class names.
(tags: css design javascript software) -
Beta of Opera Mini 4 is here!
Opera has released a beta version of the new Opera Mini 4 browser for mobile phones. You can play with the live demo in your desktop web browser, or install it on your phone for free.
(tags: opera mobile) -
Google says Vista search changes not enough
In response to Google’s antitrust complaint regarding Windows Vista’s Desktop Search feature, Microsoft has pledged to make changes to the operating system, but Google claims the changes are not enough.
(tags: windows google microsoft search business) -
Yet another one more thing… a new Web Inspector!
Although it remains unclear whether or not it will be released along with Safari 3, the Safari team has announced a brand new Web Inspector window that brings most of the power of Firebug (the only exception being JavaScript debugging) to Safari.
(tags: safari css javascript http) -
Implementing Silverlight in 21 Days
This tale from the trenches documents how a team of developers on Novell’s Mono …
Simply JavaScript
It’s aliiiiiiiiiive! The first copies of Simply JavaScript—SitePoint’s latest book, co-written by Cameron Adams and me—have arrived! And if you’ll forgive my obvious bias, it looks awesome.
I’m so proud of what Cameron and I have achieved with this book. We knew from the beginning that it wasn’t worthwhile writing another beginner’s JavaScript book unless we could produce something really special, and we definitely have.
Simply JavaScript teaches the technology with unprecedented clarity, featuring loads of color illustrations and advice on how to use JavaScript the right way in the real world.
It’s also a surprisingly entertaining read, although I’ll admit our sense of humor is a little odd at times. On one occasion, we had to fight to keep a joke in when the proofreader had crossed it out with the note “not funny” in the margin. All the same, I daresay it’s the funniest book SitePoint has published to date, which is saying a lot!
The first chapter of the book, The Three Layers of the Web, is currently the feature article on sitepoint.com. The first three chapters of the book are available to download in PDF format …
Rich Developer, Poor Developer
In case you’ve had your blinkers on, over the past twelve months the marketplace on sitepoint.com has gone completely gangbusters.
What began as a simple platform for SitePoint’s online community to buy, sell and trade web sites and domain names has exploded into an onslaught of back-to-back auctions, to which there are now entire blogs devoted.
Powered by software that was custom-built especially for these auctions (and with our team adding more features as you read this), the transactions have become so fast-paced it’s getting difficult to keep up, with over USD $1 million worth of new sites now being listed every month! The quality has increased too, with sites regularly selling for tens of thousands of dollars, and some auctions even attracting six figures. It’s an exciting community that has grown out of the forums, and it’s only getting stronger.
So is this post a shameless ad for the SitePoint Marketplace?
No! It’s a wake-up call to those web developers out there who, until now, have not explored adding additional revenue streams in their spare time. Investment gurus like Robert Kiyosaki preach that additional revenue streams are the key to financial independence — but from where should these revenue streams come? Real …
Fireworks CS3: 5 Reasons You Might Upgrade
I wrote most of this piece for the Design View, but the graphics took some time, so I figure it’s worthwhile posting it here too.
Obviously the main reason you upgrade any application is to be able to do new stuff. I’ve been working with Fireworks CS3 and it’s betas since last year so I’d going to concentrate on the features I’ve actually been using every day.
You can then make your own call on how valuable they might be to the way you work.
1) The Pages Panel
Pages, a brand new panel in Fireworks CS3, lives happily alongside your Layers, Frames, and History panels.
As you might infer from by the title, Fireworks’ new Pages functionality is essentially a design templating system.
Currently, I suspect most professional web designers mimic this function — regardless of their choice of graphics program. Like many, I typically design a cross-site header, footer and navigation, lock it on a layer, then add new layers containing variations for different page types — article pages, search results, the cover page, category level pages, and so on.
The new Pages panel lets you formalize this templating method. After designing your core page interface you can use the …
Find Us a Team Leader, Get a MacBook Pro!
SitePoint Solutions needs a Lead Developer and we’re willing to bribe you with shiny and expensive trinkets (the MacBook Pro pictured here) to help us find one.
Working within our fast growing solutions division, the new hire would work in our Melbourne office, and be responsible for leading a small team of developers creating custom web applications for clients around the world.
How do you get it?
Simple. All you need to do is use our shiny, new form to tell your friend/colleague/aquaintance about the position.
If they get the job, a shiny new Macbook Pro is yours—it’s that easy.
Twitter Recruiting Members for User Testing
Like it or hate it, Twitter has caused a stir in the online social networking space.
In a nut shell, Twitter allows users to pump out infinite amounts of (usually) ego-driven noise to the intarweb with a multitude of widgets, mashups and plugins that make it even easier to do. Take a look at Twitterific for the Mac or Twitterlicious for Windows - two apps that do just that.
Now one of the things that intrigues me about the deluge of 2.0 apps and sites is the notion of the perpetual beta, “a term used to describe software or a system which never leaves the development stage of beta”. To me this is a perfect example of informal user testing, where the design team of an app are able to harvest the feedback of users directly from the app, or via feedback mechanisms on the site.
Interestingly, Twitter has just announced that they are recruiting users who have been a member for two months or more to participate in some user testing.
You can help us improve Twitter by participating in a user test. Your feedback will directly inform the design of future features.
But before you get too excited and fire off an …
Moonlight - Open Source Silverlight on Mono
We have many proponents of open source, cross platform software in the SitePoint community, and I think Microsoft have left some of us scratching our heads over where to stand after unveiling Silverlight and the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR).
Microsoft’s DLR is a layer on top of their Common Language Runtime (CLR), which provides support for dynamically typed languages such as Python, Ruby and JavaScript. The great news is that the DLR is released under Microsoft’s Permissive License - their way of saying open source. Microsoft’s .NET/DLR implementations of Python and Ruby, named IronPython and IronRuby respectively, are both covered by the same Permissive License as DLR.
Microsoft describes Silverlight as “a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications.” That all sounds great - cross platform, cross browser - but unfortunately it’s missing the magic words “open source”.
Even so, it’s hard not to be a bit excited about the prospect of a ubiquitous platform/plugin which brings together dynamic languages like Ruby, Python and JavaScript to the …
Not-so ClearType :: Apple FTW
There’s been much hoo-hah regarding the font rendering in Apple’s beta release of Safari for Windows. I decided to install the beta myself and see what all the fuss is about.
Here’s why I think Apple gets it right and why Microsoft could learn some lessons from them:
Apple’s font renderer more accurately maintains the intended look of the font. It does this by smoothing the edges and corners of characters where appropriate which can sometimes lead to small letters looking a little blurry. Microsoft’s ClearType technology attempts to make fonts sharper and more readable by jamming characters into pixels in a miscellaneous and sometimes unpleasant fashion.
I’m not a designer, but I own a few typography books and have a strong appreciation for the topic. Which side you choose in this debate is likely to be influenced by which platform you use. However, I don’t see why Microsoft needs to remove the designers ability to use a font in exactly the way it was intended, especially when you consider the availability of various fonts designed specifically for on-screen reading.
OK, so to most seasoned Windows users Safari probably looks a little strange; we’ve got years of mutilated descenders to blame for …
News Wire: Look Who’s Back from the Dead
-
WCAG Samurai
An anonymous group of developers, led by accessibility guru Joe Clark, has published an independant review of the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. Independently reviewed by two additional experts, this document was a year in the making.
(tags: accessibility standards) -
Trying not to pretend
Accessibility guru Joe Clark has announced his departure from the world of web accessibility. He believes current web accessibility standards are both sufficient and largely irrelevant, now that developers know how to produce quality sites without them.
(tags: accessibility standards) -
Safari 3 Public Beta
Apple has released a public beta of Safari 3 for both Windows (XP and Vista) and Mac OS X 10.4. See Matt Magain’s blog post on SitePoint for more details.
(tags: safari software) -
WWDC 2007 Keynote
In his keynote address, Steve Jobs demoed the new Safari 3 beta, including the Web Clipping feature that allows Mac users to create widgets from portions of web pages. Also shown was the Safari-powered platform for Web 2.0 applications on the iPhone.
(tags: safari) -
Camino 1.5 Released
Based on Mozilla’s Gecko 1.8.1 rendering engine, Camino 1.5 is lightweight browser with a native Mac user interface. The new version includes feed detection, spell checking, session saving, and improved tabbed browsing, among other new features.
(tags: software) - The All-New …
Sponsored Links
Logo Design, Web page Design and more!
- Custom logo designs created ‘just for you’.
- Pick the design you like best.
- Only pay if you’re satisfied with the result.
SitePoint Kits
Download sample chapters of any of our popular kits.
The Search Engine Marketing Kit, 2.0
The Web Design Business Kit 2.0
The Email Marketing Kit
The Usability Kit
SitePoint Books
Download sample chapters of any of our popular books.