Siolon

Everyone, especially computer people, love lists of resources. I do as well, and I decided it’s time to share many of the resources that have helped me in my career. All of these resources (except for the print books) are either freeware, open source, or the application offers a free version.Firefox Firebug  - Essential tool for CSS/JavaScript debugging. YSlow - Firebug add-on to help determine performance bottlenecks. Web Developer Toolbar - Provides tools to compliment Firebug. Fireftp - The best FTP client and in a browser no less! Dust-Me Selectors - Scans the page against your current style sheet to determine extraneous styles. Server (read more...)

The most important, and yet often under-valued tag in XHTML, has to be the anchor tag. It’s usually one of the first tags learned in XHTML, and it is usually because of its importance. Imagine if the anchor tag didn’t exist: there would be no “surfing,” users could only browse the Internet with the address bar, and ultimately the web would be a lot less interesting. There are some good practices in creating these tags, and that is the premise of this short tutorial. I want to emphasize meaningful links, accessible links, and well-formed links. Creating Meaningful Links Wikipedia has (read more...)

The WordPress developers have been engaged in debate for a while now on how we should name the section currently entitled “Blogroll.” I believe strongly that “Links” is the preferred title especially to users using WP as a CMS. Regardless of what I think, there has been a vote set up to give us a better grip on what the user wants. Vote Now! (read more...)

A huge task in web design is not only determining the demographics of your intended audience but also figuring out the measure of technology that they use to view your website. The W3Counter has a global report on user’s environments in order to most successfully develop for the largest number of environments. Before I give what I feel to be the “average” web user it should be noted that these statistics aren’t the best for every audience. For instance, if your site is on bleeding-edge technology then it’s pretty safe to assume that you’ll have the best in web (read more...)

I have been fortunate to complete a few projects of late. They both consisted of ports of design concepts to the WordPress platform. Both sides needed a powerful, semantic, web-based publishing system; and WordPress fulfilled all of their desires. The Art of Capping The Art of Capping is a satirical blog that uses comics for their blogging medium. A few of the requirements specific to this project were: A rating system for posts. A “Youtube-like” effect for giving URLs to comics for embedding externally. Customized title generation through PNG. Optimized layout for maximum ad-revenue potential. The webmaster of the website had the following to (read more...)