Cli2. Screencasts. Applet. Customize MediaWiki into Your Ultimate Collaborative Web Site. The free MediaWiki software is best known for powering Wikipedia, but you don't have to be writing an encyclopedia to put it to good use. Extend, skin, and customize MediaWiki to create any kind of easy-to-update, collaborative web site. When and Why MediaWiki? MediaWiki is arguably the most advanced, install-it-yourself, free wiki package available.
A wiki is an editable web site; you can change each page's content without having to log into a content management system like WordPress or access the server via FTP or other means—you just hit the edit button. While MediaWiki is built for public web sites that can update, like Wikipedia, you can customize it to limit access to certain users. Like WordPress and Firefox, MediaWiki is extendable via plug-ins that add functionality. MediaWiki is also skinnable, which means your wiki can sport a custom theme so it doesn't look just like Wikipedia. MediaWiki Installation and Basic Usage MediaWiki Skins MediaWiki Extensions MediaWiki User Permissions. Accessing HTTP/JSON services with JVM-based languages. Why I’m Done Making Desktop Applications. [Editor's note: now available in Belorussian translation and Polish translation.]
Breaking up has always been difficult for me. I tend to fall in love with being in love, and continue a relationship well past the point of futility. And so it is with my oldest love, writing desktop software. I’m sorry, desktop apps. We just don’t have a future together anymore. A bit of background: for the last three years I’ve sold Bingo Card Creator, a desktop app which pretty much does what it says on the tin. What Changed My Mind Over roughly the same period my day job has changed and transitioned me from writing thick clients in Swing to big freaking enterprise web apps.
If I were starting out today, I would, without a shadow of a doubt, write a web app instead of a desktop app, for these reasons: The Shareware Funnel Is Lethal I could go into more detail if I wanted, but that is seventeen different opportunities for the shareware developer to fail. Web Applications Convert Better Visitor to Free Trial: Web Content Optimization Guidelines and Techniques. Good Techniques Use Original Related Content The more original content (directly written for your website) you have on your website the better.
This is for many reasons, however one of the most direct being, more content equals potentially more keywords and the more keywords the better the rankings. Consistently Add New Content Adding new content to your website is not only preferred by search engines but by users as well. (Blogs perform extremely well because of this.) Big Keyword Text Size Having keywords stand out from the rest of the text on a page places more importance on them, thus making them more valuable then any keywords within the text itself. Stylize and Emphasizing Keywords Using effects such as bold italics and underlining to highlight keywords will also place more importance on them than the rest of the text on the page. Keep Content Updated The newer the content on your website the better.
Limit Content Length Generally speaking users scan content online rather than read it. URL Encoding. What is URL encoding? URL encoding is the practice of translating unprintable characters or characters with special meaning within URLs to a representation that is unambiguous and universally accepted by web browsers and servers. These unprintable characters include: ASCII control characters Unprintable characters typically used for output control. Non-ASCII control characters These are characters beyond the ASCII character set of 128 characters. Reserved characters These are special characters such as the dollar sign, ampersand, plus, common, forward slash, colon, semi-colon, equals sign, question mark, and "at" symbol.
Why encode URLs? Unprintable characters and characters with special meaning can cause a different result than you might expect. The URL specification RFC1738 specifies a limited set of allowable characters in a URL but HTML allows the entire ISO-8859-1 (ISO-Latin) character range (and HTML4 goes further to include the Unicode character set). When should I encode URLs?
By hand. 30 Examples of Extreme Minimalism in Web Design. July 22nd, 2009 by Webmasterish in Articles As a follow up on last week’s roundup of 105 Examples of Clean and Minimal Twitter Apps, I thought this week would be the time to share with everyone examples of extreme minimalism in web design, and how with minimal elements, when properly used, so much can be achieved. The 30 Examples of Extreme Minimalism in Web Design are grouped in 4 sections: The intention is to give inspiration for the fans of minimal web design, and to highlight the effectiveness and diversity of using minimalism in web design, even if it’s taken to an extreme. Enjoy! Web Apps 1. DownForEveryoneOrJustMe A useful service for knowing if a site is actually down, and you are not the only one unable to access it. 2. And this one sends you an email when the site is up again. 4. A speedy search engine for songs and music videos. 5.
A service that allows you to look up any country code. 6. 7. 8. 9. A service that lets you email audio postcards. Portfolios 12. ethicka 13. hakki 17. keeno. Web Form Validation: Best Practices and Tutorials. Advertisement Ideally, users will fill the web form with necessary information and finish their job successfully. However, people often make mistakes. This is where web form validation comes into play.
The goal of web form validation is to ensure that the user provided necessary and properly formatted information needed to successfully complete an operation. In this article we will go beyond the validation itself and explore different validation and error feedback techniques, methods and approaches. Validation methods User’s input can be validated on the server and on the client (web browser). Server-side validation In the server-side validation, information is being sent to the server and validated using one of server-side languages. The exception is validation using Ajax.
This diagram shows differences between client-side and server-side validation and other techniques. Client-side validation Server-side validation is enough to have a successful and secure form validation. What to validate. Scalable Web Applications Programming the new world. Purpose of the entry On Saturday June 13th 2009 I attended a talk by Eli White on Scalable web applications. Eli White previously worked at digg.com and now holds the position PHP Community Manager & DevZone Editor-in-Chief at Zend Technologies.
When you hear him talk you immediately notice he has a high knowledge on programming, good practices and he is eager to distribute his knowledge and does it with passion. That explains his position at Zend. Eli gave for what I am concerned the best talk at the conference. Of course I didn’t attend all talks but I can hardly imagine a talk more interesting than this. Overview What is scalable application designTip 1: load balancing the webserverTip 2: scaling from a single DB server to a Master-Slave setupTip 3: Partitioning, Vertical DB ScalingTip 4: Partitioning, horizontal DB ScalingTip 5: Application Level PartitioningTip 6: Caching to get around your databaseResourcesClosing notes What is scalable application design Resources Closing notes. Advanced Load balancing for Developers.
I don’t make a habit of inserting myself into OSS wars, they tend to hurt everyone and benefit no one. Far too often (content management OSS projects are a great example) they result in code splitting and users with limited options moving forward. With that said, I read with some amount of interest the competing posts first by Randy Bias and then by Robert Scoble, and feel that this is an odd conversation to be having, all things considered. Where do I get my opinion? From the trenches. For t... You may have noticed that I’ve been awfully quiet out here lately. #F5 - #ADN, not #SDN should be the end goal. #SPDY implementation, testing, and verification tools, SPDY implementation bits. Lori and I were discussing the entire topic of agility the other day, she looking at it from the SDN prospective, and I from the evolutionary perspective for development.
Driving tacks in carpentry is just that – putting small nails in to hold something (normally carpet) in place. 100 Outstanding Login Forms. This post is to be of inspiration and a guide to overall good interface design, we will ultimately focus on one important aspect of graphic user interface design that helps users interact with your site and enter areas that require login credentials. As you’re in the process of designing a login form/area you might yourself face to face with a few vital questions: i.e. Will I display the name of the form as login, log in or sign in? How will I design the graphical aesthetics of the login (or log in/sign in) area?
Where should the forgotten password link be displayed? What if I were to include a cancellation button? Should I use graphics and transparent properties that will match the overall design of my site? And so on.. No matter the question pertaining to your login form, there are always multiple solutions to your concerns. Hopefully these sites will open up your mind to the endless and creative possibilities you can explore when designing this aspect of your site.
247 web usability guidelines. Web usability guidelines Home page usability: 20 guidelines to evaluate the usability of home pages. Task orientation: 44 guidelines to evaluate how well a web site supports the users tasks. Navigation and IA: 29 guidelines to evaluate navigation and information architecture. Forms and data entry: 23 guidelines to evaluate forms and data entry. Trust and credibility: 13 guidelines to evaluate trust and credibility. Download an Excel workbook containing all 247 web usability guidelines You can also download translated versions of this checklist (in French, Spanish and Russian). How to use these guidelines Work through each of the guidelines in each list and mark your site as either conforming or not conforming to the guideline. Remember that all guidelines are context specific. The guidelines are purposefully expressed as positive statements, so that when you feed the results back to the design team you can identify some strengths of the design before you launch into the problems.
Dr. The whys, hows and whens of pagination. Why In the most basic form, pagination is best illustrated by books: there’s a lot of content, and just expanding the sheet would too cumbersome. And then we discovered that by dividing the content into pages, and stacking them we’d get a lot of content in a handy way, and also making it pretty easy to navigate. Especially by prepending or appending a table-of-contents (ToC). Web-pagination came, I believe, in the days of modems as a solution to keep the amount of data to download smaller, and then letting it up to the user to decide which parts of the paginated content (s)he’d check – although that’s a pretty basic assumption – anyhow, that’s not of the scope of this post.
The problem What I see all too often is something like this: Example of common pagination The problem with this approach, even though it’s the most common one, is that the links to the different pages gives no indication of what you’ll find there. Another example of common pagination - guess from where! Dynamic filters. 15 Best Techniques For Implementing Autosuggest With AJAX Into Y. Making your site as user friendly and easy to navigate as possible is every developers goal and implementing autosuggest is one way to help achieve it. Not only is it helpful to the user but is also somewhat expected now that most of the top sites have already built this functionality into their own sites.
This collection includes standard auto suggest scripts, del.icious tag suggestion, autosuggest control to search images on Flickr, and advanced table filter with auto suggest control. The AutoSuggest class adds a pulldown menu of suggested values to a text field. The user can either click directly on a suggestion to enter it into the field, or navigate the list using the up and down arrow keys, selecting a value using the enter key. The values for the suggestion list are to provided as XML, or as JSON (by a PHP script, or similar). SearchField features 3 states for search input field based on user’s actions. This uses AutoComplete to find images by tag from the Flickr webservice. Minimal design website gallery.
Web Development Best Practices. High speed Internet connection and Technology Giants such as Google and Apple make most of the people to use internet daily. So, Web Development is getting important place in Software development. We need to consider many factors when doing website development. - The most important factor is knowing about target audience. It will be helpful to provide more user-friendly UI (User Interface). Because different type of people will prefer different type of navigation / screen design. - We should know which factor should be given more importance, whether it is "performance" or "look & feel" or "user-friendliness" or "cost". - Now-a-days it is important that the websites should be search engine friendly.
-Since many people started using iPhones, it is important to make your website iPhone friendly if you want them to see your website. . - We should keep in mind that the users may not have the browser/screen resolution/color settings/browser settings same as ours. Structured process you must know to develop a web application. 30 Essential Controls. By Theresa Neil As Bill mentioned in an earlier post, we don’t want to limit this blog to just the principles and patterns found in the book. For that you can check out our Explore the Book section.
This is the second article in a three part series on patterns and principles for RIA design. Standard Screen Patterns: 12 patterns w/100 examplesEssential Controls: 30 controls for RIA design and developmentComponents for Commonly Requested Features: 15 patterns and examples Every designer has a set of controls they rely on to communicate an effective UI. This is my library of essential controls. Unfortunately, no single RIA framework offers all 30 of these. The frameworks reviewed include: Flex, Laszlo, Silverlight and 12 Ajax frameworks and toolkits: ExtJS, Dojo, YUI, Google Web Toolkit, Prototype/script.aculo.us, JQuery, MooTools, MochaUI, SproutCore, LivePipeUI,IT Mill, Backbase. 01. Google’s Auto-Complete 02. Carousel Prototype carousel widget Coverflow MediaEvent Service’s Slideflow 03. 04. How we make websites. 15 Helpful In-Browser Web Development Tools. Firebug Firebug is an extension for the Mozilla Firefox browser that allows you to debug and inspect HTML, CSS, the Document Object Model (DOM) and JavaScript.
Though it has many strong features, it’s most known for revolutionizing the way developers debug and profile JavaScript code. For example, before Firebug, many developers would use the alert() function to see what a variable contains or to find what line the code breaks. With Firebug enabled, you’re told specifically what the error is and which line it comes from. Firebug is an excellent tool for AJAX application developers because it lets you explore and perform on-the-fly edits on the DOM to see what happens when you manipulate Web page elements after a user action. Aside from its popular JavaScript and DOM functionalities, Firebug can also log network activity to allow you to see detailed results of HTTP connections, inspect and edit HTML on the fly and debug and visualize your CSS.
Further Reading Web Developer YSlow Fangs FireShot. Stripes Framework. Sign Up Forms Must Die.