jScrollPane - cross browser styleable scrollbars with jQuery and CSS Responsive Web Design The English architect Christopher Wren once quipped that his chosen field “aims for Eternity,” and there’s something appealing about that formula: Unlike the web, which often feels like aiming for next week, architecture is a discipline very much defined by its permanence. Article Continues Below A building’s foundation defines its footprint, which defines its frame, which shapes the facade. Each phase of the architectural process is more immutable, more unchanging than the last. Working on the web, however, is a wholly different matter. But the landscape is shifting, perhaps more quickly than we might like. In recent years, I’ve been meeting with more companies that request “an iPhone website” as part of their project. A flexible foundation#section1 Let’s consider an example design. But no design, fixed or fluid, scales seamlessly beyond the context for which it was originally intended. Becoming responsive#section2 Recently, an emergent discipline called “ responsive architecture .
How to Display Wordpress Sidebar on Other (Non WP) Sites While working on my latest project, DevGrow Discussions, I came across the need to embed my entire WordPress sidebar on a non-WordPress site – specifically a bbPress forum. Since I make use of various widgets to display popular posts and other dynamic content, simply copying and pasting the HTML would not suffice. In the end, there are really only two ways of going about this: Include your wp-load.php file in your application and in effect load the entirety of WordPress to get access to the plugin functionsUse simple caching to store the sidebar in HTML format and include it in any other application, then rebuild it as necessary when new content is published If it’s not obvious enough, the first option is very costly in terms of database queries and can significantly slow your site down. Caching Your WordPress Sidebar Before we can write our function, we need to understand exactly what we’re trying to do. Creating the Functions Configuring Your Sidebar Using Your Cache Conclusion
5 Website Features You Can Easily Offload to Reduce Costs This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. The term "offload" or "offloading" in information technology and computer science refers to the transfer of something from your system to an external system. In the context of websites, your system is your website (and your web servers/web host), and the external system consists of third-party web services such as Google Analytics or Shopify. This article suggests five common site features that you can host elsewhere. Why You Should Or Shouldn't Offload There are advantages and disadvantages to having parts of your website catered to by third-party web services. Pros of Offloading Reduced Cost: Whether it's lower web server costs, fewer employee hours to commit to maintenance and management, the web solutions listed below will generally lead to cost reductions. Cons of Offloading 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Adobe Flash Tutorials – Best of - Smashing Magazine Although usability evangelists often consider Flash to be a usability nightmare, used properly, Flash can provide users with a rich and interactive interface which would be impossible otherwise. Today Flash is the de-facto standard for interactive elements on the Web as most users install Flash plug-in by default. And in fact, there are many paths creative designers can take to create a more interactive and user-friendly interface. Searching for ‘flash tutorials’ via Google & Co. won’t provide you with the results you expect. Not that you won’t find any relevant results, on the contrary — you will be directed to a large number of Flash repositories which offer everything: sometimes useful, but mostly not. This article provides hand-picked professional Flash tutorials which can enrich your design skills and improve the quality of your works. Animation and Effects Link Misty River10Read this tutorial and see how to create misty river animation. Images and Videos Link Basic elements Link
Cogito » Blog Archive » The Ontology Myth For the past year, I have been observing a phenomenon in the US market, that of the spread of the ‘myth’ of ontology. Ontologies are important elements for understanding text through semantic analysis, but they are insufficient (and, often, not even necessary) to resolve the problem of how to handle unstructured knowledge. Nonetheless, according to this ‘idea,’ they say that if you have a complete ontology, you don’t need anything else. Instead, semantic technology should be able to do it all automatically (for example, the typical activities correlated to knowledge management activities such as automatic categorization and discovery of knowledge and relationships between data). An ontology is a structured and formal representation of relative knowledge in a certain domain or micro universe. In summary: A well made ontology can help you work more efficiently and obtain better results quickly. I hope that this post helps you understand the pros and cons of ontologies a little better.
Making a Custom YouTube Video Player With YouTube’s APIs Martin Angelov Video presentations are a great addition to any product page. With a presentation you can showcase your product’s features without making the visitor read through long paragraphs of text. But apart from producing the video, you still need to manually convert it and find (or code) some sort of flash player that will display it on your site. The other possible path is that you upload it to a video sharing site such as youtube, but you are going to have a rough time trying to incorporate the player into your design. Luckily for us, YouTube does provide a solution to this problem – their chromeless player (a stripped down version of the regular embeddable player), which allow you to build and style your own custom controls. The Idea Today we are going to make a jQuery plugin which uses YouTube’s chromeless player, and creates our own set of minimalistic controls, which allows for perfect integration with your designs. Using the plugin to embed videos is extremely easy: script.js
Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags This piece is based on two talks I gave in the spring of 2005 -- one at the O'Reilly ETech conference in March, entitled "Ontology Is Overrated", and one at the IMCExpo in April entitled "Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification." The written version is a heavily edited concatenation of those two talks. Today I want to talk about categorization, and I want to convince you that a lot of what we think we know about categorization is wrong. I also want to convince you that what we're seeing when we see the Web is actually a radical break with previous categorization strategies, rather than an extension of them. What I think is coming instead are much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization schemes allow, based on two units -- the link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. PART I: Classification and Its Discontents # And yet. Domain