TechCrunch posted an article, “Facebook Just Made It Super Easy To Put Connect On Your Site,” discussing how easy it has now become to implement Facebook Connect on your site. For those unfamiliar with Facebook Connect, it “is a powerful set of APIs for developers that lets users bring their identity and connections everywhere. Developers can access a user’s:
Source: TechCrunch | Subject: Site Design (Architecture, Coding, UI, etc.)
Subject: Marketing Your Site
Using AJAX on websites and applications is pretty much taken for granted nowadays. Users expect it. They want search queries to be auto-suggested, and they want to be able to edit a page or submit a form without refreshing the page. Why? Because those things make browsing quicker, easier and, more importantly, enjoyable.
As great as AJAX is, though, it is not for every website or … [ Read more ]
Author: Paul Andrew | Sources: 30 Fresh AJAX Tutorials And Techniques, Noupe | Subjects: AJAX, Site Design (Architecture, Coding, UI, etc.)
In “50+ Fresh CSS Techniques, Tutorials and Resources,” Paul Andrew brings you up to date with the latest in CSS development through a collection of fresh CSS tutorials, techniques, and resources. The hope is that this extensive list will teach you something new, or else remind you of some methods you haven’t used for a while.
Author: Paul Andrew | Source: Noupe | Subjects: CSS, Site Design (Architecture, Coding, UI, etc.)
Stoney deGeyter offers up The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, Period!, a master website marketing checklist covering over 400 specific items over 23 topics. These topics include things such as website development, SEO, usability, accessibility, etc. This list doesn’t cover any “how tos,” which are essential ingredients to successful online marketing, but sometimes you need to first know what to do so you can … [ Read more ]
Subject: Marketing Your Site
Over at A List Apart, Robert Hoekman Jr. has written an article, “The Myth of Usability Testing,” which argues that usability evaluations are good for many things, but determining a team’s priorities is not one of them. The Molich experiment proves a single usability team can’t discover all or even most major problems on a site. But usability testing does have value as … [ Read more ]
Author: Robert Hoekman Jr. | Source: A List Apart | Subject: Site Design (Architecture, Coding, UI, etc.)
There are two popular approaches to positioning with CSS: float and absolute positioning. Both approaches have their pros and cons. Eric Sol offers an article on A List Apart, “Faux Absolute Positioning,” which describes a new positioning approach that gives us the best of both worlds.
Author: Eric Sol | Source: A List Apart | Subjects: CSS, Site Design (Architecture, Coding, UI, etc.)
Aaron Gustafson has written a very interesting article on A List Apart titled, “Progressive Enhancement with CSS.” For those not in the know (including me before reading this article), progressive enhancement is just a fancy way of describing a structured approach (as opposed to the haphazard ones used by most DIY webmasters) to designing your websites for cross browser compatibility. There are many ways … [ Read more ]
Subjects: CSS, CSS, Site Design (Architecture, Coding, UI, etc.)
Dean Frickey has written an interesting article titled “A More Useful 404.” In it he describes how he uses a perl script to provide relevant information to the user while also providing immediate feedback to the developer so that, when possible, the problem can be fixed. I have done something similar on my sites for quite a while, but I use PHP instead of Perl.
One … [ Read more ]
Author: Dean Frickey | Source: A List Apart | Subject: Site Design (Architecture, Coding, UI, etc.)
Håkon Wium Lie offers an article on A List Apart, CSS @ Ten: The Next Big Thing, in which he discusses the need for a good selection of fonts on the Web and a proposed solution: web fonts. Instead of making pictures of fonts, the actual font files can be linked to and retrieved from the web. This way, designers can use TrueType fonts … [ Read more ]
Subjects: Fonts, Site Design (Architecture, Coding, UI, etc.)
Rob Swann offers an article on A List Apart, Conflicting Absolute Positions, in which he shows how you can produce a layout in which a fixed-width scrolling side “pane” and flexible scrolling main “pane” must resize to fill all available space in a browser window.
Subjects: Designing for Mobile Devices, Site Design (Architecture, Coding, UI, etc.)
Web forms don’t have to be irritating, and your inline validation choices don’t have to be based on wild guesses. In his examination of inline form validation options, Luke Wroblewski offers that rarest of beasts: actual data about which things make people smile and which make them want to stab your website with a fork.
Author: Luke Wroblewski | Source: Inline Validation in Web Forms | Subjects: Forms, Site Design (Architecture, Coding, UI, etc.)
You undoubtedly are familiar with using if…else (if else) statements in your PHP programming. Are you also aware that for simple if…else needs (e.g., only needing to set one variable) you can get by using only one line of code?
The basic format of the one line if…else statement is:
$variable = (if statement) ? if true code : if false code;
Let’s illustrate with an example. … [ Read more ]
Subjects: PHP, Site Design (Architecture, Coding, UI, etc.)
On the forums of one of my current hosting companies, I came across someone (Doug Robbins) who has written some pretty nice scripts to help administer and monitor a VPS or dedicated server. Below is a list of those scripts as well as others I have come across elsewhere:
Subject: Configuring and Administering Your Server
Making sure your email reputation is solid can be one of the most important factors in making sure your messages get to. But before you can improve you reputation you must know what it is. Here are three free online evaluation services to help you find out about your email reputation.
Data source: 100,000 organizations representing 25% of global email
Subject: Marketing Your Site
Occasionally do-it-yourself webmasters have to put on the designer’s hat and one of the considerations of good design is font choice. Below are some resources to help you out.
Subjects: Fonts, Site Design (Architecture, Coding, UI, etc.)
I wrote a PHP application for creating and editing forms and decided to make it open source and publicly available. A few days after releasing the first public version I received an email which alerted me to a security flaw which was posted on a hacking and security community site. Besides obviously being a personal disappointment, it proved to be a useful learning experience. … [ Read more ]
Subjects: Security, Site Design (Architecture, Coding, UI, etc.)
HTML entities (also known as character entity references) enable you to use characters that aren’t supported by the document’s character encoding or your keyboard. For example, you can type © to output a copyright symbol.
You can also use numeric character references. Numeric character references can be defined with either a decimal or hexadecimal value (although decimal is more common). The numeric character reference … [ Read more ]
Source: HTML Special Character Reference | Subject: Quick Reference
Most of the time, we write PHP scripts with the idea that they will be run directly in a browser (HTTP). Occasionally, we want to run a script directly from the command line (e.g., in a SSH environment or via a cron job). Unfortunately, running these scripts from the command line can cause problems since most HTTP environment variables are either not available in the … [ Read more ]
Subjects: PHP, Site Design (Architecture, Coding, UI, etc.)
As a do-it-yourself webmaster, you probably aren’t going to be starting and/or working on open source projects. But, you might, and more likely, you will be using a lot of open source software. In either case, you will undoubtedly come across something known as a version control system (aka revision control or source control). The two main ones out there are CVS and Subversion (sourceforge … [ Read more ]
Subject: Miscellaneous