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: Web Tech BlogWhy The data: URI Scheme Could Help Save Your Slow Site
Slow page loads getting you down? The data: URI scheme could be the solution! While not supported in all browsers yet, data: URIs allow you to embed images within an HTML documents, thus reducing the need for an http request. As Meitar describes, it couldn’t be easier to use—whether you’re calling images for content within your HTML, or for background decoration from your style sheet.
6 Steps to Professional Podcast Publishing
A couple of weeks ago, I offered up 8 Professional Podcast Production Tips. If you followed those, you should have a professional-sounding show all ready for the world to hear. But how do you get it out there?
The Art & Science Of CSS is FREE to Download!
For the next 14 days, one of SitePoint’s most popular books is available to download for FREE. Just follow us on Twitter, and you’ll receive a PDF of the top selling “The Art & Science Of CSS.” No strings attached!
A Journey To The Edge Of The Web (Perth, 2008)
Nathanael Boehm attended the inaugural Edge of the Web conference (EOTW) in Perth, Australia on 6 November 2008. The conference venue was at the University of Western Australia (UWA) and organised by the Australian Web Industry Association (AWIA). Nathanael was sponsored by AWIA through Free Australia Wireless to attend the conference and help with the free Internet wireless network.
Over on the east coast we often see the Perth web community migrating across for conferences such as Web Directions South so it was great to be able to support the first web conference of its type on the west coast. Dozens of people flew in to Perth from Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and overseas to support Edge of the Web 08.
Derek Featherstone the internationally-renowned expert on web accessibility from Ottawa, Canada delivered the opening keynote presentation titled “Journey to the Edge of the Web”. He started at the birth of the Internet as we know it with Gopher, then looked at several examples of maturity in interaction design for the …
How To Create Friendlier Random Passwords
One aspect of web applications which is almost always overlooked when it comes to accessibility is how easy any randomly generated string might be to read. For many users distinguishing between zero and upper-case Os, ones and lower-case Ls, and even the letters b and d can be difficult.
How to Use Conditional Comments for Better CSS
Sometimes it’s the simplest things that go unnoticed for the longest time. Case in point, while catching up on some WSG reading tonight, I discovered a way to use conditional comments to write better CSS.
8 Professional Podcast Production Tips
They say the audio quality is far more important than the picture quality when it comes to producing watchable video for the Web. When all you’ve got is the audio, it’s even more important! A little extra work to get the details right will go a long way for your podcast.
Twitter Competition, Part 2: CSS Book Giveaway
With all the excitement of last week’s Edge Of The Web prize draw, I completely forgot to draw the second part of the competition—the winner of our latest book, Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong.
If you’ll recall, all you had to do to be eligible to win was follow us on Twitter (@sitepointdotcom).
Well, I just hopped on over to random.org, and asked it to deliver me a number between 1 and 551 (the number of followers on Twitter that we’ve attracted in only a couple of weeks!)
*drumroll please*
And the winner of this much-discussed book is… @theWeigo, aka Eystein Alnæs, a Norwegian fellow who also happens to live in Perth, Australia.
Congratulations Eystein—send us your details and we’ll get your book to you (although there may be a short wait given that we’re currently sold out).
SitePoint Edge Of The Web Competition: And The Winner Is…
Last week we announced that we were holding a competition in conjunction with the Edge Of The Web conference, which is on next week in Perth. To enter, all you had to was follow us on Twitter (@sitepointdotcom) and tell us (via a public post to the Twittersphere) why you think you deserved to win the free ticket.
The results are in!
There were a stack of entries, ranging from the bleeding heart pleas to the more humorous to the extreme end of brown nosing, and we loved them all! Here are a few of our favourites, though:
velvetsarah: @sitepointdotcom I want to go to #EoTW to nourish my starving inner geek. Was hoping to get a dance with @sentience, maybe you can send him? [#]
ronc1974: @sitepointdotcom I want to attend Edge Of The Web because I left my job to be stay-at-home-dad 3 kids, forgot what adult interaction is like [#]
Margaretw: @sitepointdotcom I want to attend Edge Of The Web because my boss won’t pay & all my friends are going! Please Please :) Lame but true! [#]
mooloolabaweb: @sitepointdotcom I …
Sometimes the Smallest Amount of Help is Greatly Appreciated
As a web professional it’s often easy to forget how steep those first few steps on the learning curve were. I was recently tasked with assisting a customer, Josh, who had bought the SitePoint book Build Your Own Website The Right Way Using HTML & CSS. He was having a problem getting his images to display. It was a simple matter of getting the path in the src attribute correct and it took several emails back and forth before he was able to figure it out.
It’s the sort of problem that is very easy to solve if you know how, but extremely frustrating if you don’t understand what’s going wrong. Josh was so appreciative that he offered to draw me as a cartoon; it turns out that he’s a professional illustrator/cartoonist. So I sent him a photo and you can see the result below.
Inspired by the book, Josh’s very first website, Big Pencil Design, is now live too.
So, don’t begrudge someone a little help, you may be rewarded for your patience in a most unexpected way!
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