Useful links from April 2010
If you are a writer yourself and post on your site some useful resources or tutorials, don't hesitate to send me a quick email with a link and a little description. I'll add the best ones to the list every month.
The links are stored every month, you can use the search bar in order to retrieve past links more easily.
The Power of WordPress Custom Fields
Wordpress is a powerful Content Management System. It gives you the opportunity to create pages and post easily via a set of predefined fields. But the power of Worpdress is that it has been clever enough not to constrain you with those predefined variables. It is flexible enough to allow you to add your own variables, to expand the properties of a post to better match your own needs. Custom fields are very handy when used properly, all the work has been handled by the WordPress backend to make their use as easy as possible. This article from wparena will help you to better understand the custom fields capabilities through a series of tutorials.
3 Simple Steps To Optimize Website Load Speed - Case Study
Very big news from Google this month, who confirmed that page speed will become a ranking criteria. It would therefore not be a bad idea to have a look again at your site performances, to see if you could improve a few things here and there. It will be nicer for the user in terms of experience, and will be good for your SEO as well. If you don't really know where to start, I suggest you should have a read through this article. It will show you how you can analyse your site to see where things can be improved. It will introduce you to gzip compression, its benefits, and how to put it in place. And finally, there's a section about caching, helping the browsers not to have to recompute everything in your pages every time it loads one.
31 jQuery Snippets That Will Help Make You A JavaScript Pro
This article written by Addy Osmani is presented under the form of 31 'Did you know?'. For each of them, he explains a concept with a snippet of code. Those snippets are quite advanced but very instructive if you are interested in writing better jQuery code. It's of course up to date with examples from jQuery 1.4. The snippets are based on quite a wide range of topics such as performances, events, DOM manipulation, advanced selectors and so on. Very interesting then if you would like to improve your javascript skills.
40 Excellent jQuery Plugins To Work With Data Presentation and Grid Layout
Since the introduction of table free layouts, using tables has been seen as a bad practise and tables have been a bit let down. The thing is, there's nothing wrong in using tables to represent tabular data. With some good styling and enriched with javascript, you can even turn them into powerful data management interfaces. This article from aext.net, will show you different plugins to help you improve the capabilities of your tables. In terms of layout, grids are now all the rage, and if you would like to better understand the concept of a grid, and use them in your layout, there's an entire section on them within the article as well.
CSS3 support for Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8
Unfortunately, the handiest properties introduced by CSS3 aren't supported by IE for the moment, (hopefully IE9 will do better). There are a few alternatives here and there that allow you to get some similar results, thanks to javascript mainly. The shame is that IE does have some built in mechanisms in place to render rounded corners or shadows, but they are just not CSS3 compatible, it is called VML, Vector Markup Language. VML is an IE-specific vector drawing language and supports things that are missing from IE's CSS implementation like rounded corners and blur effects. This demonstration from fetchak.com shows you how you can add a script in your application, and then some extra properties as easily as you would do with CSS3.
How Accessible is Your Website? 8 Tools to Analyze Your Website's Level of Accessibility
Testing on other aspects of your website are important, however, a lot of us seem to neglect our websites accessibility. This can ultimately lead to the loss of a wide range of users and poor elements of design. But not to fear, in this article from spyrestudios.com are compiled a set of tools that will help you combat poor accessibility. Every tool is free to use and has been chosen because it's easy to use and offers quality testing.
Improve Your CSS Skills With Pure CSS UI Components
Accordion, charts, graphs, image galleries, an tabs are now some common interface elements, hugely made popular thanks to their ease of use when associated with javascript libraries. Nowadays, you just have to include a few lines of code, and it works for you. But you would surely be amazed if you'd realize that you don't need all those (sometimes heavy) scripts. A similar result can actually most of the time be obtained with pure CSS, and even more so now that CSS3 is out. If you think I'm mad or if you'd seriously be interested in discovering how, then you should definitely have a look at this post from w3avenue, and try to become a CSS master.
15+ Great Ways to Find Web Design and Development Work
For web designers and developers looking to take on new projects, the Internet offers a great number of online resources that can help them find work. Though the competition for jobs is fierce (and on a few of the sites listed in this page, that competition is the whole point), whether you're looking for a full-time career, a contract project, some quick freelance work, or something else, the web offers designers and developers a wealth of job opportunities - if you know where to look.
The Top 15 Google Products for People Who Build Websites
Google has the power to build powerful tools, that are extremely handy, useful, and most of the time are free. This is very good for web developers, because it helps us to make better websites. It can for example analyse our sites performances and show us where things can be improved with Google Page Speed. It provides us accurate metrics with Google Analytics and the webmaster tools. It serves us the latest and most widely used libraries from its Content Delivery Network and so on. But there are also a few other resources that you may not be aware of, according to the length of the google product featured in this article by sixrevisions.
ValidForm Builder
ValidForm Builder is in fact an API that helps you generate some form markup in an easier way than coding it yourself from A to Z. There a 2 particularly interesting things in this API in my opinion. First, the input fields that you generate, will be validated inline in the client side, as the user types, which is quite good in terms of feedback and user experience with the form. The second thing is that when submitted, the form is validated on the server side as well, handling attacks such as SQL injections. Finally, it makes use of jQuery, and produces standard compliant forms.
WordPress SEO The Definitive Guide To Higher Rankings For Your Blog
Search Engine Optimisation is not a straightforward process. If you would like to get efficient result, there are numerous things you'll have to consider. This guide, provided by yoast.com, is very complete if you are looking for a good SEO reference article. It lists and categorizes the different things you'll have to do, from simple changes like using permalinks, to advanced SEO techniques like conversion optimisation. It's titled as a WordPress guide but I believe that most of the concepts are true for any site that is taking this SEO seriously.
Pirobox jQuery Plugin
There are two modal windows that I particularly like, the fancybox, for its neat appearance, great when used with videos, and the lightbox, which is very stylish when used with pictures. Recently, I discovered the pirobox, which I personally think is a beauty. I love the transparency and resizing effects, and I appreciate very much the overall content, title and loader presentation. Well it's a very nicely presented plugin indeed.
How to Add Twitter @anywhere in WordPress
Twitter recently launched its @anywhere platform, which basically allows you to integrate some Twitter functionalities inside your blog by including a prepared javascript file, and a few javascript lines. After you've included the @anywhere source, you'll be able to add twitter links within your tweets and to associate a Twitter hovercard with each of them, exactly like on the Twitter website. @anywhere also helps you to integrate smart 'follow me' buttons on your site, making it easier for visitors to stay in touch with you. It's quite interesting really so if you would like to know more about it, you should have a read through this tutorial.
prettyLoader
Where in your interface, you allow a user to trigger an Ajax request, you have to let them know that something is going on behind the scene. If they click a link, and you don't give them any visual feedback, they'll not know if the click was successful or not, they might not know if this link is working or not. So it is important to visually represent this Ajax interaction from its start to its end. Usually, this is achieved by showing / hiding a loading indicator. This is exactly what pretty loader does. It reacts to Ajax calls, and displays a nice spinning circle next to the mouse cursor and hides it once the ajax call is complete.
The Ultimate Guide To Wordpress Hacks And Customizations
Wordpress is a very popular platform. It has a very strong backend, with plenty of functionalities, which means that if you would like to implement a feature on your site, there's probably a solution that is already available, saving you the fact to code it yourself. If not, you might find in this article from 1stwebdesigner, a little snippet, or hack, that will help you a lot. There are plenty of hacks in Wordpress, so it is nice to have a guide that sorts and lists most of them.
Using Twitter's @Anywhere Service in 6 Steps
Recently, Twitter released @Anywhere, which, with only a few added lines in your code, can bring all of Twitter's platform functionalities into your website. @Anywhere can allow for anything, ranging from converting a simple @username into a clickable link, to even creating new tweets directly from your personal site. This very nice article from Nettutsplus will show you everything you need to start enjoying the benefits and the power of the @anywhere platform on your site.
