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An Ajax-Include Pattern for Modular Content
Clever and useful pattern for brining in non-essential content to a page after its iniital load. i do a good bit of this on Lendle (although not with this particular technique). The intesting thing to me when this is discussed in regard to mobile, as it is here, is that the “loading…” aspect of web sites and apps is one of the thing that make people like native apps so much better. They always feel so much faster because once a view appears on screen, it’s all the—theres nothing more to load. Tradeoffs…
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How I shut down comment spam on this site
In the past, I’ve only allowed comments on recent blog posts, not older ones. Because I didn’t blog for the longest time, I had no recent blogs posts, which meant I got no comments (or comment spam). When I re-launched JeffCroft.com recently and started writing again, I actually started getting comments again (thanks, guys!). Of course, I also started getting comment spam again. Like, a ton of it. On average, I was getting about 10 comment spam posts per hour.
Frustrated, I went to my standby from the good ‘ol days, Akismet. I quickly found that it wasn’t working for me. It was letting through most of the spam and also preventing a lot of ham from being posted. After a tweet on the matter, Mike Davidson pointed me down a path that has worked beautifully for two weeks now — not a single comment spam post.
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Backbone patterns
Nice collection of Backbone.js patterns and best practices.
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Forest, trees, and acko.net
Few people can take the fun out of something quicker than an over-zealous user experience nerd.
Over the weekend, I came across Steven Wittens’ blog acko.net. If you read Steven’s About Page, you’ll discover that he’s a programmer who likes to “build and design cool pieces of technology.” And that’s exactly what he’s done with the latest version of his personal site. The entire UI is done in 3D, using Javascript, CSS, and not a single image. In order to build it, he had to first build his own 3D scene editor for Three.js. The end result is a mind-bending UI that not only animates perspective changes on each individual page as you scroll, but also neatly uses the HTML5 pushState API to animate changes from page to page. The whole thing is responsive, and gracefully degrades for smaller screens and browsers without support for the 3D goodness.
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Smokescreen: Flash Player in Javascript
A pretty amazing piece of work, this JS Flash player looks far more advanced than the Gordon project which floated around awhile back. It’s apparently going to be open source, as well. I’m not sure something like this will work as a long-term solution, but it may be an effective way to get many legacy SWFs to play on platforms that don’t support Flash. If nothing else, it’s a technical marvel, for sure.
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HTML5 Geolocation with Fallback to Google Ajax API: HTML5
This looks a bit more bulletproof than the fallback I’ve done on BarStar — might have to switch to this when I get a moment.
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When can I use…
Handy chart detailing “when you can use” various advanced web development techniques.
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Simplest jQuery Slideshow
I wish more designers thought like Snook. People love jQuery plugins, and for good reason, but half the time they’re overkill or not exactly what you want, and you can very quickly and easily write a custom script instead.
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Create a Realistic Hover Effect With jQuery
Nice example of how to create useful animations with jQuery.
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QuirksBlog: There is no WebKit on Mobile
PPK details the myth that is the idea that “WebKit on mobile is taking over.” His point, which is totally valid, is that while WebKit is indeed becoming the dominant rendering engine on mobile platforms, each of those platforms has distinctly different versions of WebKit, so the idea that if you build for WebKit, all of these devices will render your site the exact same way is a misconception. His point is well taken, if a bit dramatic. It’s true that there are subtle differences between each version, and it’s also true that most people don’t realize this. But, in the real-world, they’re “close enough” that targeting WebKit will generally get you a very similar experience on all these platforms.
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Uploadiify JQuery File Upload Plugin
What it says it is.
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Mapstraction
Pretty nice-looking abstraction API that gives you a single interface to several different mapping service providers.
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Introducing Typekit
Jeff Veen, who I have mad, mad respect and admiration for, announces his company’s new project: TypeKit. It’s basically a hosted solution for web fonts, wherein Jeff and team negotiate a license with font foundries, and then you (the average web developer) pay Jeff and team a fee in order to use the fonts. It will use standards CSS @font-face embedding, and automatically switch out Opentype for EOT based on a user’s browser. This all sounds great, but the post is a bit short on details, and I definitely have questions: will it scale? How much will it cost? What will the license look like? All concerns people have over a subscription-based music service versus the iTunes model apply, here. What happens when you unsubscribe? Are the plans per-site or per-designer? And so forth. So, bottom line: sounds like there’s a lot of potential, here, but I’ll save my fanboyish excitement for when I have more information.
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360° MP3 player UI demo (SoundManager 2)
Really great Canvas + JS audio player.
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Xian’s django_compressor
I’ve tried pretty much all of the Django CSS and/or JSS compression apps, and Christian Metts’ django_compressor looks like the winner to me. Why? Mostly because it doesn’t make me list all my CSS/JS files in my settings — it just reads it straight from the
Visitlinkandscripttags in my HTML templates. This is how it should be. Well-done, Xian! -
jQuery Sparklines
Pretty sweet-looking implementation of sparklines using jQuery.
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typeface.js
sIFR-alike, written in JavaScript using
Visitcanvas. Looks pretty nice at a glance, if not as developed as sIFR. It’s certainly unfortunate that we still have to use these kind of hacks, but as long as we do, I’ll keep noting them here. -
Eric Meyers: JavaScript Will Save Us All
Eric’s got some great thoughts on how we can use JavaScript to get some of the CSS functionality we’d like to see. Some of it is a little bit pie in the sky and maybe not completely practical (for example, I don’t believe Gecko makes unrecognized CSS properties accessible from JavaScript) but the general concept is great. It’s all about getting shit done in an elegant way, rather than putting all the focus on doing things exactly how the standards would suggest — and you know I like that.
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CSS Browser Selector
This seems like such a smart, elegant, simple solution to targeting browsers with CSS - I’m surprised no one thought of it before.
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Raphaël: vector graphics JavaScript library
I got to chat with Dmitry Baranovskiy, the creator of Raphaël, at Web Directions South, and I was impressed with both him and his work. This JavaScript library is Really Smart Stuff™. I don’t think there’s any doubt that SVG, Canvas, and VML are part of the future of web graphics, and Raphaël is making it possible to use them today. Awesome.
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jQuery finds its way into Microsoft and Nokia stacks
Wow. Big win for jQuery. Microsoft is apparently planning to distribute the JavaScript library with Visual Studio, and make it the sort-of go-to library for .NET development. I’m still of the mind that backend development frameworks like .NET (and Django, and Rails, and Cake, and Java…) shouldn’t be in the business of “preferring” a particular front-end library, but you can’t really deny that this is a Really Big Deal™ for the jQuery project.
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Django snippets: Orderable inlines using drag and drop with jQuery UI
Simon throws together a handy snippets which allows for orderable inlines using drag and drop (via jQuery) in the Django admin. Sweet.
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Cappuccino Web Framework
I’m quite interested in Cappuccino and Objective-J. Too bad it seems the documentation sucks right now.
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HeatMap API
A nice-looking API for adding heat maps as overlays on a Google map.
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Shortwave
Shaun Inman’s clever little search bookmarklet is extensible and customizable. Simple and clean. I dig it.
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Google AJAX Libraries API
Google is now serving copies of popular Javascript libraries, including Prototype, Mootools, jQuery, and Dojo, to help with caching. Nice.
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jQuery Tutorials for Designers
I’ve been meaning to get my learn on with jQuery for a while now — these Web Designer Wall tutorials seem like a great place to start.
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WebKit gets Native getElementsByClassName
Here’s to innovation among browser makers! Nice work, WebKit. Mozilla and Opera, where you at?
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IEBlog : Internet Explorer 8 passes Acid2
Wow, very nice. This is impressive. It also makes Opera look very, very silly. So now that all the majors can claim reasonable standard compliancy, can we please get those browser wars started again? :)
Congrats, IE8 team!
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YUI 2.4.0 Released: CSS Selectors, Charts, Profiler, Script/CSS Get, and JSON Support
Tons of new stuff in the latest release of YUI. I’m particularly stoked about CSS selectors. Awesome. Can’t wait to play with it.
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jQuery plugin to auto adjust leading as the measure changes
If you’ve seen my talk on typography, yo know that the rule of thumb says that narrower columns require less leading (or
Visitline-height, in CSS) than wider ones. This cool little plugin for jQuery handles this for you automatically, and works very smoothly. Check out the demo page. Via Wilson. -
Digital Web: jQuery Crash Course
Although I’ve been using YUI a lot lately, I have definitely felt tempted by jQuery. I think I’m going to give it a shot and see what I think — Nathan Smith’s crash course looks like a great place to start.
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GridLayouts.com: Useful Javascript Helper for building grid-based pages
Very handy. Me likely.
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Daniel Mall and Shaun Inman: Cross-Pollination: Breeding a Better Web.
Even though I don’t like the crowd-sourcing, I”m still not above suggesting everyone go and vote for this panel. I’d love to see it, myself!
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jQuery for JavaScript programmers
Simon seems poised to do for jQuery what he has done for OpenID.
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Simon Willison: jQuery in 15 minutes
I’ve been mostly using YUI in my last few projects, but Simon definitely makes jQuery look appealing. Might have to give it a good look one of these nights.
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Rob Goodlatte: Syncotype Your Baseline
A few weeks ago, Newsvine’s Intern Rob™ showed me a version of what is now called “Synotype” he was using in development of his recently redesigned site. I insisted that he must release it to the public. He has done so, and it very well might be the most useful typography tool to hit the web in quite a while. If you’ve ever wanted to make sure your baselines are all neatly lining up, do check it out. Thanks, Rob!
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Julien Lecomte’s YUI-based Image Cropper Widget
Sweet implementation of an image cropping tool, built with my favorite JavaScript framework, YUI. I will definitely put this one to use. Thanks, Julien!
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17 powerful bookmarklets for your iPhone
Before anyone completely freaks out that this says “for your iPhone*, the bookmarklets should work fine in most browsers. But they are especially handy on an iPhone. If you’ve got a Jesus phone, check ‘em out.
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Joe Hewitt: Introducing iUI
Joe’s clever JavaScript and other bits for quickly making iPhone-friendly web apps. When I get some spare time, I want to grab this and throw together an iPhone version of LOST-Theories.com. It would also make for a great tutorial on how to create a mobile (read: differently-templated) version of an existing Django site. It’s astonishingly simple!
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Jeff Croft
I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with nGen Works, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.
Some of my clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, The Lawrence Journal-World, and the University of Washington.
I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.
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