Webdesigninformer.com

Adactio Go to the source

The geeks of the UK have been enjoying a prime-time television show dedicated to the all things webby. Virtual Revoltution is a rare thing: a television programme about the web made by someone who actually understands the web ( Aleks , to be precise). Still, the four-part series does rely on the usual television documentary trope of presenting its subject matter as a series of yin and yang possibilities. The web: blessing or curse? The web: force for democracy or tool of oppression… Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

The last thing I needed was more choice in apps for keeping a ‘Design Scrapbook’, but that’s what’s happened with Zootool . At first glance, it looked like just another FFFF ound , Ember or Img Spark , but it turns out it’s much more than that. The developer, Bastian, told me to think of it as more of a visual Delicious. Once I got into that mindset it made more sense. Zootool ‘lassos’ not only images, but documents (like PDF s), videos, and pages (not complete pages yet) and stores them in your ‘zoo’… Read the rest here

Mezzoblue Go to the source

For no particular reason, I present to you a list of things that were true on August 27, 2001 : The iPod, XBox, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, Ubuntu, and Blu-Ray did not exist. IBM was still in the PC business, Handspring was still around, and Blackberries were data-only devices with no telephone capabilities. The Euro had not yet entered circulation, currencies like the Franc, Mark and Lira were still legal tender. George Harrison, The Queen Mother, Gregory Peck, Barry White, Johnny Cash, Ronald Reagan, Ray Charles, Julia Child, Pope John Paul II, Johnny Carson, Steve Irwin, Gerald Ford and Michael Jackson were still alive. SARS, Avian Flu, H1N1 were not in the common vernacular… Read the rest here

Mezzoblue Go to the source

For no particular reason, I present to you a list of things that were true on August 27, 2001 : The iPod, XBox, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, Ubuntu, and Blu-Ray did not exist. IBM was still in the PC business, Handspring was still around, and Blackberries were data-only devices with no telephone capabilities. The Euro had not yet entered circulation, currencies like the Franc, Mark and Lira were still legal tender. George Harrison, The Queen Mother, Gregory Peck, Barry White, Johnny Cash, Ronald Reagan, Ray Charles, Julia Child, Pope John Paul II, Johnny Carson, Steve Irwin, Gerald Ford and Michael Jackson were still alive. SARS, Avian Flu, H1N1 were not in the common vernacular. Enron and WorldCom were still in business. … Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

As a self confirmed conference junkie I speak at a dozen events each year, and attend many more. As such I’ve probably seen close to a thousand talks over the last five years. Because of this I’ve got a pretty good idea what makes for an exciting talk and how you can guarantee your session will suck. As somebody who also organises two conferences, UX London and dConstruct I’m really keen on getting new talent into the speaking circuit while still maintaining quality. As such I’ve put together a quick guide to help both new and experienced speakers kick arse/ass. Most of these tips aren’t new, but you’ll be surprised how few people actually follow them. … Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

At some point, for some reason I cannot quite fathom, a WordPress or PHP or mySQL or some other upgrade took all of my WordPress database’s UTF-8 and translated it to (I believe) ISO-8859-1 and then dumped the result back right back into the database. So “Emil Björklund” became “Emil Björklund” . (If those looked the same to you, then I see “Börklund” for the second one, and you should tell me which browser and OS you’re using in the comments .) This happened all throughout the WordPress database, including to commonly-used characters like ’smart’ quotes, both single and double; em and en dashes; ellipses; and so on. It also apparently happened in all the DB fields, so not only were posts and comments affected, but commenters’ names as well (for example). … Read the rest here

Mezzoblue Go to the source

You probably experience this on a regular basis: a client sends you an illustration or a logo they’d like to use in a project, but it’s a low-res bitmap or a flat image file with a background texture. Or both, if you’re really lucky. Sure, you can try and ask for a vector version, but more often than not what they originally sent was the best copy they had on hand. I seem to have made something of a hobby out of trying to coax useful results out of this type of file. Over the years I’ve stumbled across far better ways of doing it than manually clipping the background with the the magic wand or various selection tools. For the next time you’re handed a less-than-ideal source image, here are a few of my tricks for isolating the part of the file I want to work with in Photoshop. … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

This post will most likely come off as a ramble of sorts, but I’m okay with that. I figure I write enough stuff carefully crafted, from punctuation to grammar to sentence structure, that I can afford a break once in a while. Even if publicly. Speaking of writing, this post is all about that. Let’s start with a question I’m asked occasionally by those of you considering authoring something of your own: Should I sell my book as a PDF or publish it in print (either via Lulu or a publisher)? First of all, if you’re considering self-publishing, I’ve already written about the ups and downs of that … Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

Yojimbo 2 has suddenly arrived! , but I’ve immediately hit a snag. When you first open it, Yojimbo 1 users are met with this message: So if you try out version 2, you screw up your installation of 1. It’s good manners that it warns you, but a better solution would be to offer a backup and restore facility. The message put me off upgrading, but I found the database (home>Library>Application Support>Yojimbo) and have backed it up. Hopefully, if I decide not to upgrade, I can just restore this folder to revert to version 1. Great to see a new improved icon though! Update : Making a backup of the database works, although I found that wasn’t enough… Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

With all the talk of URL shortening services, I decided to add a quick service into Snook.ca, which is run on CakePHP, to redirect a short URL to a post. Because my static content already has short URLs and all I have are posts, creating a short URL handler for it was very easy. To give you some context, I route my posts through a specific structure: /archives/:category /archives/:category/:articlename In this case, I have a couple routes that route everything to my Posts controller and the bycat or view actions. These action take the named parameters and pulls out the appropriate content. Easy peasy. … Read the rest here

SimpleBits Go to the source

The Bitcave was temporarily transformed into a video studio this week, while shooting a DVD for New Riders . I’ll have much more info on the video and other fun stuff related to it, soon. After seeing all the work that goes into setting up a simple shoot like this (lighting, sound, rigging, data transfers) I have newfound respect to those that produce motion stuff for a living. There were parts of the taping where I felt comfortable (when presenting against familiar material) and other times where it was downright grueling (talking directly to the camera for 30 takes in a row). Major props to those that can do this kind of thing on a regular basis, and make it look effortless… Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

Now that I have a little more free time, I’ve begun the process of bringing Snitter back to life. The crowd of desktop applications has not deterred my resolve to (re)build a Twitter application of my own. I have a vision — a vision that I’ve had since before SXSW of last year — that I still have an opportunity to bring to fruition. However, along the way, I’ve decided to accomplish a little extra along the way: I’m building a framework to allow others to build their own applications quickly and easily. This framework, I have dubbed Streamliner . … Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

In creating the combo-bar charts for the survey report , I stumbled into an Explorer bug that I didn’t remember ever seeing before, and Google didn’t turn up anything that seemed to be related. This could easily mean that I’m the only person who ever did something this insane and thus found the bug. It could just as easily mean that my Google-fu has failed. Either way, I’ll write it up here so it can enter the collective memory. … Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

At last—at long, long last!— the results of the A List Apart Survey 2008 are available , along with the anonymized raw data we collected. There are a great many reasons why it took so long to get this out the door. A big part is that it’s almost entirely a volunteer effort, which means it happens in our “free time” (and there the word “free” has a couple of meanings). I say it’s almost entirely a volunteer effort because the detailed analysis is actually done by a pair of professional statisticians, who are paid for their time and expertise. They did a great job once more, and did it in a reasonable time frame. … Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

Twitter will soon get rid of the auto-follow feature. It wasn’t necessarily a public feature. You had to email support to have your account enabled. When a person followed you, you’d follow them back, automatically. Why autofollow… Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

As you’re no doubts aware I’m an unabashed conference junky, so it will come as no surprise to you that I’ve spent the last couple of weeks in the States attending three such events. First up was ETech, the emerging technology conference from O’R eily. Moved from it’s spiritual home in San Diego, this year it was help in the Chino wearing capitol of Silicon Valley, San Jose. The event was much smaller than last year and the tone was somewhat downbeat. However I don’t think this was necessarily down to the economy as a lot of people were speculating. … Read the rest here

SimpleBits Go to the source

Small Batch, Inc. are some super smart folks. But you already knew that. They’re the team that created Measure Map, which was later bought by Google. Earlier this week, they launched Wikirank , a tool for exploring and comparing what’s popular on Wikipedia . It’s pretty damn cool. … Read the rest here

Digital Web Go to the source

As some of our regular readers have guessed, yes it is true. Digital Web Magazine has ceased publication. For the reasons cited in Time To Change , it was clear to us that what we had was no longer working. We called upon both our staff and readers for ideas on what we could change. We received a lot of good feedback. … Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

While I’ve known of Yahoo Pipes for awhile, I never really thought to use it until now. Pipes is a neat tool that Yahoo has put together to allow you to mashup feeds, filter feeds and create a completely new feed. Commonly, I’ve seen people take feeds from a number of different sources on a particular subject and combine them into a master feed. For example, they want a master CakePHP feed but want to grab only posts that actually mention CakePHP. … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

I was reviewing analytics data for Authentic Jobs this morning, and some figures emerged that are remarkable, but also somewhat unsurprising: For the same monthly period one year ago, visits to the site have increased by 45.9% and average time on the site has increased by 22.9% . For the same annual period one year ago (technically two years ago), visits to the site have increased by 76.0% and average time on the site has decreased by 5.1% . I say somewhat unsurprising because given the current economic climate, one can assume traffic to online job boards has increased in the last 6-12 months. Indeed, a recent report from comScore confirms this assumption: Job search ranked as the fastest growing U.S. online category in 2008 . Had comScore’s study included other countries, the same trend would likely have emerged. … Read the rest here