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Blogs » Archive for July, 2007
Find unused CSS selectors with “Dust-Me Selectors”
Regular readers will be well aware of the work we’ve been doing over the last few months to improve the SitePoint Contests and Marketplace. My role in all of that has been to improve the front-end — better semantics and accessibility, more efficient code, no unecessary scripting, and a reconciliation of all the disparate bits of CSS that were styling it.
As you can imagine, I inherited a lot of legacy CSS, both from the old Marketplace, and from the site in general. I needed some way of separating this out, of keeping only the rules we actually needed.
If you’ve ever worked on a large project — especially where several people are all working on the same stylesheets — you’ll know how quickly it can get out-of-hand. Styles are added over time, then forgotten about, and coming back on a stylesheet months (or in this case, years) later can be a scary experience. How much of that is necessary? You don’t always know, but you fear deleting anything, in case something, somewhere is using it.
I needed a tool that could work this out for me — something I could run in the background during development that would build up a profile …
How slow is your website?
Broadband connections mean nothing for users if your site is slow because it’s poorly coded or thought out.
YSlow, a new plug-in that integrates with Firebug , has just been released by Yahoo’s Expectional Performance Team to help you pinpoint and fix specific trouble spots.
YSlow evaluates 13 different performance factors and provides a letter grade to each. If for any reason you fail to score a straighth ‘A’, YSlow will provide additional detail to help you solve the problem.
Let’s see how sitepoint.com did:
Overall 64/100 (or a “D”) largely because we don’t use a CDN (Content Delivery Network such as Akamai) nor Entity Tags.
Aside from rating performance factors, YSlow provides useful stats on the loading size of your website, for both brand-new visitors as well as return users who might have portions of your site still in their cache. Here’s how it looks:
Update: All the performance rules are described on Yahoo’s site.
Facebook: Breaking Down the Walls
The following is republished from the Tech Times #169.
As of July 10th, Facebook had thirty million active members, one of whom is me. In the past two weeks, it seems like half my active contacts have joined the social networking site, including professionals who wouldn’t be caught dead on, say, MySpace. So what makes Facebook different?
Well, for one thing, it has a designer or two on staff, which means that you can actually use the site without developing a facial tick.
Unfortunately, those designers still need to learn a thing or three about web standards—the site is full of easily correctable validation errors.
But more significantly, Facebook is designed as an open platform for social web applications, with public programmer features (APIs) that enable third party developers to extend and enhance the site.
Despite its openness, Facebook is still a walled garden. If you want to connect with people on Facebook, you need to use Facebook to do it. And in some ways, Facebook is still a lot more closed than competing social networking sites. For example, Facebook will only let you show your Facebook profile to other Facebook users.
I firmly believe that the …
News Wire: Google’s New Meta Tag
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ACCC takes on Google
Google is facing charges from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission claiming that the difference between sponsored links and organic search results is unclear and misleading.
(tags: google search business) -
Google To Add “Unavailable After” META Tag
Google plans to introduce support in its search engine for an “unavailable_after” meta tag that will let Google know when a page’s contents will no longer be relevant.
(tags: google search) -
Conflicting Absolute Positions
A fascinating article about an improvement in IE7 that has gone largely unnoticed until now. Better support for CSS positioning in IE7 makes the creation of stretchy layouts much easier, and with a big of JavaScript IE5/6 can be made to play nice too.
(tags: css javascript design) -
Google Gears ORM v0.1
The first official release of GearsORM, the first object-relational mapping layer built on top of Google Gears.
(tags: google databases javascript) -
CSRF Redirector
In his ongoing efforts to spread the word that Cross-Site Request Forgery vulnerabilities are a real danger, Chris Shiflett has developed a simple script that generates a forged POST request out of any GET request. …
Geek Olympics: 24 hours, 2 teams, 1 trophy…
If you live in Australia or New Zealand, you may have heard about Full Code Press, the international site in a day “geek olympics” taking place in Sydney on August 18, between Australia and New Zealand.
If not, then you’re likely to hear more about these events soon — plans are for the concept to become a truly international event, beginning in February next year in Wellington, New Zealand, where many more countries will be competing.
The concept is simple. Web teams take each other on, at the same location, to build a complete website in 24 hours. No excuse, no extensions, no budget overruns.
SitePoint is excited to be sponsoring the event — the first of its kind as far as I know. Competitors will have access to SitePoint books for reference during the competition, and we’ll be providing one impressive-looking trophy for the winning team to take away. Both the winners and runners-up will also receive vouchers to spend at the SitePoint book store.
Of course, these goodies and bragging rights aside, the best takeaway from this competition is that a non-profit organisation will walk away with a brand new …
JavaScript Sprite Animation Using jQuery
Last week I reported on my tests using percentage to position background-images. Today’s post is a walk thru of where I put this research to work — published earlier in the week in the July 2007 Design View.
One of the nicest things about going to a real bricks ‘n’ mortar bookstore is the effortless pleasure of thumbing mindlessly through any book that takes your fancy — not that you actually read anything in particular, but it’s just a great way to get a general sense of its layout, style, and quality.
While it’s difficult to convey information about the paper and binding quality via a screen (compared to fingertips), our marketing manager Shayne and I started wondering whether it might be possible to reproduce some of that effortless “page flicking” feel, using a touch of JavaScript.
The result of our first take on the idea is here — promoting Kevin and Cam’s new JavaScript primer, fittingly enough, although not actually part of the book’s content.
Although you’re more than welcome to pick through the live version on our site to see how it’s done, I’m going to step through you through a …
Aussie Web Design Awards Roundup
It’s that time of year, when Australia seems to be abuzz with web design awards.
First on the calendar are the WAWAs (Western Australian Web Awards), organised by the Australian Web Industry Association.
While statistically the WA web industry might be small compared to the rest of the world, these awards (and the exceptional standard of the finalists) is a terrific example of how a relatively small community can bond together to support each other, fostering a healthy local web industry. Other states (and countries) could certainly take notice.
Nominations for these awards have closed, and finalists were announced last week. If you’re in WA, I strongly urge you to get along to this event (and check out the excellent regular port80 social functions too!).
Next up are the Desktop Create: Awards. These awards cover graphic design in all mediums, not just web.
From the organizers:
The theme “In the Spotlight” reflects all the glitz and glamour of a movie premier combined with the spectacle of a big scale production. Icons and idols, directors and designers, reality and fantasy all drawn together to create the 2007 Desktop create:awards night of nights.
The evening of Friday …
@media London podcasts – day 2 sessions released
Just to follow up on my earlier post, podcasts of nearly all of the sessions from the second day of @media London have now been made available. Slides and notes from most of the sessions have also been posted.
Thanks to Patrick and the Vivabit team once again for a great conference.
Creating a Tactile Interface
As AJAX has come into the spotlight over the past few years, many web developers have been creating some great applications that handle data more like a desktop application. However, much of the interface mechanisms from the desktop have not been brought to the web. Here are a few techniques to make your web application feel a bit more like a desktop application.
News Wire: PHP 4’s Days are Numbered
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Dojo 0.9 lands softly.
Dojo 0.9 beta is out with a significant speed boost, pervasive improvements to accessibility (including keyboard navigation), a revamped and consistent themeing engine for widgets, and redesigned online documentation.
(tags: javascript software opensource accessibility) -
30 free HTML email templates
The fine folks at Freshview (and Campaign Monitor) have assembled a collection of 30 clean, free, and highly compatible HTML email templates for download—no strings attached.
(tags: email design) -
Presentation Layer Performance Tuning
This article provides a nice summary of client-side performance issues and the solutions available for solving them.
(tags: http css javascript) -
HTML elements index
A table of HTML tags, with their availability in HTML 3.2, HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, as well as the work-in-progress specs, XHTML 1.1, HTML 5, and XHTML 2.0.
(tags: html standards) -
Ultimate htaccess Blacklist
An interesting approach to combatting comment spam and bandwidth theft, this .htaccess blacklist will also block legitimate users of mass download and screen scraper products such as GetRight. Whether this is an acceptable tradeoff is up to you.
(tags: apache security) -
Web Application Form Design
A fascinating look at …
