Tag Archives: web design
Fill Your Apple iPad With Books From SitePoint
Sitepoint has two new offers that will help fill your shiny new Apple iPad [or Kindle or other Nook] with some great titles covering web design, web development and programming and business.
5-For-1 Deal
For the low price of 1 digital book [$29.95USD] you can get 4 more free. The sale ends April 16 so head on over and check the titles. Unless specified, a purchase gives you access to the book in PDF, ePub and MOBI formatted downloads. They’ve created some common bundles based on themes but you can select from more then 30 available titles. Check out the sale and place your order.
Already Purchased? Download the new format FREE
It must have been from a past sale, but I had a few old PDF versions of SitePoint books on my harddrive. I had tried converting them to ePub myself and the results were ‘just ok’. The folks at SitePoint were smart enough to anticipate the desire to do this and kind enough to allow you to log into their site and download the alternate formats for digital books you already have purchased. An informative blog post with all the details.
Some Suggested Titles
I always hit a sale and get overwhelmed with options not knowing what to pick. Having not read all 5 titles I bought in the day since I bought them I don’t want to go so far as recommending something blindly, but here’s my thinking. It’s hard to go wrong with books by Derek Featherstone and Jina Bolton, or Elliot Jay Stocks or Rachel Andrew. I grabbed a title like jQuery: Novice To Ninja just to see how it was written. But there are some books covering novice, server side development or business related topics as well.
This entry was posted in web and tagged books, digital editions, epub, free, ipad, kindle, Nook, pdf, sale, sitepoint, web design, web development. Bookmark the permalink.
CSS3 Box Shadow in Internet Explorer [Blur-Shadow]
For a recent project I was given the task of creating a lightbox style help dialog. The dialog was intended to highlight content of an odd or unknown size in addition to the more controlled information box. Essentially a figure in the shape of 2 adjacent rectangles of variable sizes that needed to be highlighted. The backbreaker — the 8 sided popup needed a large, opaque & diffuse drop shadow to make it stand out off the content.
This was the perfect use case for CSS box-shadow, but its also a public facing promotional site that for good reasons couldn’t just thumb its nose atMicrosoft Internet Explorer. The value proposition for any new CSS property – to make things like shadows and gradients easy to develop and manage with one rule replacing old complex solutions – is lost if you still have to code for that old complex solution juggling multiple PNG images and layering in added markup. Still, that work sounded painful to write for IE6, IE7 & IE8 as well as Firefox, Safari and Chrome so I started looking for an alternative in the proprietary MS filters which are supported in Internet Explorer 5.5 and up.
This entry was posted in project52, web and tagged blur, box-shadow, css, drop shadow, ie filters, msie, p52, tutorial, web design, web development. Bookmark the permalink.
Blue Beanie Day 2009
Today, November 30, is the 3rd annual Blue Beanie Day — a celebration and visible show of support for Web Standards & semantic, accessible markup. Web designers, developers, and users around the world are sporting blue beanies on their avatars to show their support for doing things right.
This entry was posted in web and tagged bbd09, blue beanie, blue beanie day, book, campaign, dwws, jeffrey zeldman, toque, web design, web standards. Bookmark the permalink.
Mystery Meat Pagination
Mystery meat navigation is a term web designers know well. It represents the result of a designer getting too clever for their own good and burying site navigational elements under the surface — expecting users to spend the effort to discover them. With important links behind objects that have to be interacted with a site’s visitor loses context and that information a first glance of the page can provide and may leave or give up before finding what they were looking for even if its there.
Mystery Meat Pagination
As a whole, the industry has learned from the past and I don’t encounter many examples of cases of mystery meat navigation in the wild. But with new technology comes new opportunities to run aground. In the last year or two I’ve seen many new sites implementing an infinite scrolling or lazy loading technique with AJAX.
These “remove the need for pagination clicking” techniques really tend to irk me. I haven’t seen one yet that doesn’t hit me as either clunky and heavy handed or that immediately cause me to lose the context of where I’m searching. Spending some time poking around 37signals recently launched web studio directory Haystack prompted this post, and is a good example, but they shouldn’t be picked on as the only or worst offender.
This entry was posted in design, web and tagged Ajax, design, discoverability, haystack, infinite scrolling, lazy loading, mystery meat, pagination, rant, usability, user interface, UX, web design. Bookmark the permalink.
CSS3 Trials: Box-Shadow And More
With some recent projects — like the redesign of Hike New Jersey and a little Flickr View Larger tool — I’ve had the opportunity to try a few bleeding edge techniques as a means of enhancing the look of a site while keeping code and maintenance down. In his recent book Handcrafted CSS, Dan Cederholm calls this ‘progressive enrichment’ — or providing a little extra spice in the visuals for the few browsers that can follow along, while functionality, page structure, and general styling rules remain at some stated baseline across browsers. While working with these new properties like box-shadow and rgba colors I hit a few quirks that I thought I’d share.
This entry was posted in web and tagged box-shadow, browsers, bugs, CSS3, Handcrafted CSS, quirks, rgba, web design, web development, web standards, WebKit. Bookmark the permalink.
Click Three Points – Now In Canvas
This entry was posted in web and tagged canvas, click three points, Dreamless.org, experiment, flash, flash sucks, Geoff Stearns, html5, showcase, vectors, web design, web development. Bookmark the permalink.
