Useful links from December 09
8 Things Programmers Should Know About UI Design
We all have our own strengths. The thing is, in some projects, you have to work on your own on a side that is not your primary field of expertise. As a developer, I for example find it quite difficult sometimes to work on a piece of design for a website I would like to create. In such a case, it is good to get some support from people that are more competent on the matter or that have encountered the issue in the past and found a solution. This article is the result of the thoughts and the work of a developer, that wants to help his fellow coders to get a better understanding of UI Design.
11 Ways to Increase Your jQuery Performance
As a powerful javascript library, jQuery allows you to use its full potential to solve problems via different solutions. Although they might all work, some of them will be more efficient than others. Do you think you have the right habits? Why not checking if you can improve the performances of your jQuery code thanks to this article that provides 11 straight forward tips that you can employ right away.
20 Excellent Facebook Scripts and Resources
Everybody that has got an internet connection has heard of facebook. It is now a ridiculously famous website, that so many people have joined. As a result, its features have become hugely popular and people have now higher expectations regarding other websites' capabilities. If you are thinking about having a script on your own site that is similar to a facebook one, then you should definitely head for this page which contains 20 tutorials to help you doing so.
23 Best jQuery Facebook Style Plugins
In the same spirit than the previous article from noupe, this one is another great list of resources to help you integrate facebook like features in your sites. You can for example find the code to implement elastic textareas, collapsible comments, autosuggest inputs, ajax walls, friend selectors and so on. Very handy resource.
Rock Solid HTML Emails
At some stage in your career, it's likely you'll be asked by a client to design a HTML email. But building an email is not like building for the web. While web browsers continue their onward march towards standards, many email clients have stubbornly stayed put. Some have even gone backwards. For those reasons, it's quite difficult to design an html email that is going to work with the wide majority of email clients. This article will guide you to help you design an email correctly from the beginning.
41 Free Insanely High Quality Icon Sets Every Designer Should Own
Every designer loves a freebie that can actually add something to their work. That is probably why free, beautiful, high quality icon sets are among the most coveted freebies for designers. In this collection, you'll find 50 beautifully designed, free and insanely high-quality icons for all designers. All of them can be freely used for private projects, and some are available for commercial use as well. Always read the licenses as they may change from time to time.
Animated Sharing Bar With jQuery & CSS
This month, I was looking for a way to integrate the same kind of animated bar in a website. The easiest solution was to include a flash plugin but I wanted to have a jQuery alternative. This is not the plugin I was looking for but it uses the effect I like. So it is possible to use what is given in this tutorial to get an animated bar used for a different purpose than a sharing bar. That's why I bookmarked it.
Creating a Rotating Billboard System with jQuery and CSS
If you are looking for a way to animate slices of an image together to obtain the same effect than a rotating billboard, then this tutorial is for you. The idea is to make one set of image slices disappear while another one (the other ad) appear. The width of each disappearing slice will be decreased, and then, the width of each appearing slice will be increased. This will give the effect of rotating slices, just like in a rotating billboard system.
Essential Tips and Tricks for Coding and Debugging AJAX Based Website
Several technologies are involved when you start to implement ajax interactions on your website, (server side, javascript and css for example), that's why sometimes, it might be difficult to troubleshoot an ajax script. Here are a few tips that could help you dealing with an ajax based problem.
Facebook Style Footer Admin Panel Part 1
The popularity of social media has been booming in the past few years and Facebook definitely has climbed high to the top of the social network rankings. It has many Ajax driven features and applications that are very impressive, such as the footer admin panel, where it neatly organizes frequently used links and applications. This is the first part of a tutorial on how to recreate the Facebook footer admin panel with CSS and jQuery.
Highcharts
Lately, I was looking for a javascript solution to draw interactive charts. I've found Highcharts, a charting library written in pure JavaScript, offering an easy way of adding interactive charts to your web site or web application. Highcharts currently supports line, spline, area, areaspline, column, bar, pie and scatter chart types.
Infinite Scroll plugin.
This is a Twitter like feature that allows you to control the amount of information that is visible on a page by hiding a certain part of it, which can be revealed is the users hits a 'read more' button. In other words, it saves the user some loading time by not loading some information, but there are still accessible because if the user wants to see them, they will be loaded by Ajax and inputted in the dom.
jPaginate: A Fancy jQuery Pagination Plugin
jPaginate is a jQuery pagination plugin that comes with a twist: animated page numbers. Along with the usual pagination functions, it supports a set of several nice animations. The user can slide through the available page numbers by clicking or just hovering over the arrows. Shortlinks to the first and last page are available as well. Very good looking plugin.
jQuery Plugin Repository
This is a very handy resource that I found only recently. It's, as its name implies, a repository of plugins for jQuery. They are sorted and tagged to allow you to retrieve them via a search, so it's easy to find the plugin you need via the site's interface. A definite bookmark.
A jQuery Plugin To Create CSS3 Text-Shadows In Internet Explorer
Because text-shadow is a CSS 3 property that is not currently being supported by all browsers, particularly not by (you guessed it) IE, this jQuery plugin can be an alternative solution to have a text shadow effect on the text of your choice.
PHP Filters and How to Use Them
I'm a big fan of the jQuery From Validation Plugin, from Jorn Zaefferer, particularly because it has powerful filters that can test the nature of an input. I was looking for some similar filtering capabilities in PHP and didn't know there was actually some PHP built in filters. This article explains what the filters are and how you can use them to control the user inputs from the server side.
URL Image Getter/Uploader/Resizer
If you are wondering how to get images from a site the same way like Digg or Facebook do, where it is only necessary to provide a link, and images get automatically uploaded to your server and resized, then you should definitely visit this resource's page. It explains how you can use two PHP classes to get this working on your website.
Why Do We Love These 5 Fresh and Awesome jQuery Plugins?
This page lists four of my five favourite jQuery plugins of the month. I really like the Gritter plugin that you can use to add very nice user notifications to your sites. Captify is a good one too. With it you can add good looking captions to some pictures. The sticky note plugin is quite original, and the form highlighter is a good usability plugin.
So you want to create WordPress themes huh?
Because creating a WordPress theme is quite a hard thing to do from scratch, and because the WordPress documentation is so huge, I sometimes quite find it a bit confusing to find the information I need. And then I found this page, which is a sort of walkthrough. It includes 16 hand held lessons on the subject. I hope you'll find some interesting information there to create your next WordPress theme.
