Mobile Web Design: Tips and Best Practices Feb 09 2010 Last year, more than 63 million people in the United States accessed the Internet from a mobile device. It’s forecast that by 2013 there will be more than 1.7 billion mobile Internet users worldwide. With those kinds of numbers, it’s imperative that web designers and developers learn optimal development and design practices for mobile devices. For the most part you won’t need to learn any new technologies for mobile site design. But you will need to look at site design in a new way, one that is decidedly more restrictive than design for standard browsers. You may want to check out the following related article as well: Mobile Web Design Trends for 2009 Familiarize Yourself with the Hardware and Software Available Cell phone and mobile device platforms vary greatly when it comes to operating system, screen size, resolution, and user interface. StatCounter Global Stats – Top 8 Mobile OSs Mobile browsers are another factor to consider. Simplify! Examples A List Apart Mobile The Onion
Project Avalon - Klaus Dona: The Hidden History of the Human Race Click here for the PDF version of this interview (20 pages) Click here for the video presentation March 2010 **Ed note: Some transcripts contain words or phrases that are inaudible or difficult to hear and are, therefore, designated in square brackets.** BILL RYAN (BR): This is Bill Ryan here from Project Camelot and Project Avalon. Klaus is going to be doing an audio commentary on one of his extremely special, unusual, and fascinating slide shows about the artifacts and the various phenomena that he has been researching, discovering, investigating personally all over the world relating to what I think you could legitimately call The Hidden History of the Human Race. KLAUS DONA (KD): That's a very good summary, yes. BR: [laughs] So I'm going to step back here, and what follows now, just kick back and enjoy this slide presentation. What are we looking at here ? Ancient World Maps Ecuador Even the next one, [right, above] you can see how this statue is sitting. Bolivia Colombia Giants BR: Good!
Website Performance: What To Know and What You Can Do - Smashing Advertisement Website performance is a hugely important topic, so much so that the big companies of the Web are obsessed with it. For the Googles, Yahoos, Amazons and eBays, slow websites mean fewer users and less happy users and thus lost revenue and reputation. In your case, annoying a few users wouldn’t be much of a problem, but if millions of people are using your product, you’d better be snappy in delivering it. For years, Hollywood movies showed us how fast the Internet was: time to make that a reality. Even if you don’t have millions of users (yet), consider one very important thing: people are consuming the Web nowadays less with fat connections and massive computers and more with mobile phones over slow wireless and 3G connections, but they still expect the same performance. Performance is an expert’s game… to an extent. Know Your Performance Blockers Performance can be measured in various ways. So here are the things that slow down your page the most. Scripts Images Yahoo’s YSlow
mental_floss Blog & 18 Social Media Icons You Need to Know Sure, you know what those Twitter, Facebook, reddit and Digg icons mean at the bottom of most blog posts these days, but what about all those other funny-looking ones? There's a pantload of them - so many that it can be overwhelming and confusing. Allow us to break down our 18 favorites for you (click each icon to be taken to their Web site): 1. Delicious What started out as Del.icio.us has evolved into Delicious.com. 2. Like flipping through channels on the television, StumbleUpon allows you to surf the web but only hit the sites that interest you or fit the criteria you choose. 3. Use Squidoo to find or create useful posts, called lenses, on any topic. 4. Here's one of my personal favorites! 5. Both a research tool and a social collaborative community, you can use Diigo to organize your bookmarks, archive pages, and annotate each page. 6. 7. Currently invitation only, Gnolia is a community based on sharing and saving links and bookmarks. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. iLike 14. deviantART 15. 16.
13 Useful JavaScript Solutions for Charts and Graphs Graphs and charts are used to simplify complex data and make it easy to read and understand. So it really wouldn’t make sense if it was difficult to integrate a graph into a website. Thanks to Javascript and a bunch of talented developers, we have at our disposal solutions for easily adding graphs and charts to our web projects. Here are 13 of these, including some written for jQuery and MooTools, that you will find very useful. Highcharts Highcharts is a charting library written in pure JavaScript, offering an easy way of adding interactive charts to your web site or web application. JS Charts JS Charts is a JavaScript chart generator that requires little or no coding. PlotKit PlotKit is a Chart and Graph Plotting Library for Javascript. jQuery Sparklines This jQuery plugin generates sparklines (small inline charts) directly in the browser using data supplied either inline in the HTML, or via javascript. jQuery Visualize Plugin jqPlot milkchart Canvas 3D Graph Moochart TufteGraph ProtoChart flot
How To Tell If Somebody Loves You & Thought Catalog Somebody loves you if they pick an eyelash off of your face or wet a napkin and apply it to your dirty skin. You didn’t ask for these things, but this person went ahead and did it anyway. They don’t want to see you looking like a fool with eyelashes and crumbs on your face. They notice these things. Somebody loves you if they assume the role of caretaker when you’re sick. Somebody loves you if they call you out on your bullshit. Somebody loves you if they don't mind the quiet. Somebody loves you if they want you to be happy, even if that involves something that doesn't benefit them. Somebody loves you if they can order you food without having to be told what you want. Somebody will always love you.
Using a Pre-Launch Checklist for your Website | Webdesigner Depo Accounting for every aspect of a new website isn’t easy, especially at the last minute. The problems aren’t the details themselves, but rather the process of making sure that seemingly minor details don’t add up to sloppy work. The best solution is to write it all down. The worst solution is to not take a pre-launch checklist as seriously as the planning stage itself. With the hundreds of details that go into building or redesigning a website, overlooking minor points is easy, especially as deadlines loom—or pass. But missing details detract from the quality of a website. Call it quality control or covering your butt, but every project has certain tasks that need to be accomplished before it is launched. A pre-launch checklist entails a systematic approach to ensuring that important details are addressed before launching or relaunching a website. Most of the items on the list list will be common to all websites, including registering a domain name and removing dummy content. Site-wide
the quiet place communication with the quiet place will be operated via the [spacebar] keycommunication with the quiet place will be operated via your fingergently squeeze that key, nowgently touch the screen, now in order to get the most out of your experience please silence your phone, turn on your speakers and press the [f-11] key or [cmd+shift+f] on macin order to get the most out of your experience turn up the volume and rotate landscapeagain, press [spacebar] to continueagain, tap to continue seriously though, silence your phone. it's pointless otherwisedon't worry - this is *not* one of those places that scare the crap out of youdon't worry - this is *not* one of those places that scare the crap out of you welcome to the quiet placeagain, press [spacebar] to continue in the quiet place, there are no capsletters that are all big and yell at you also, there are no facebook notifications or twitter google+ foursquare email messenger etc wow have you ever noticed how many things require your attention? little
Zen Coding: A Speedy Way To Write HTML/CSS Code - Smashing Magaz Advertisement In this post we present a new speedy way of writing HTML code using CSS-like selector syntax — a handy set of tools for high-speed HTML and CSS coding. It was developed by our author Sergey Chikuyonok and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers. How much time do you spend writing HTML code: all of those tags, attributes, quotes, braces, etc. We had the same problem in JavaScript world when we wanted to access a specific element on a Web page. But what if you could use CSS selectors not just to style and access elements, but to generate code? div#content>h1+p …and see this as the output? Today, we’ll introduce you to Zen Coding, a set of tools for high-speed HTML and CSS coding. If you’d like to skip the detailed instructions and usage guide, please take a look at the demo and download your plugin right away: Demo Demo (use Ctrl + , to expand an abbreviation, requires JavaScript) Downloads (Full Support) Downloads (Partial Support, “Expand Abbreviation” Only) Element Types