March 13th, 2010
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Web Design
(Analytics, Reviews)
Social bookmarking widgets are absolutely everywhere, you see them on blogs, news, online retailers and even on government web sites. They have become one of the defining features of Web 2.0 design.
There are three major players in the social bookmarking widget world, AddThis, ShareThis and AddToAny. These three services together are seen by almost everyone on the internet every single day.
This begs the question, which one is best? As usual it depends on what your needs are and how you will be using it. However I’ll try to take away the dartboard selection process that you’re using now by providing some reviews and a performance comparison for these different services.
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February 20th, 2010
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Web Design, Web Development
(Accessibility, CSS, Rants)
We’ve all seen them, most of us have used them, almost every CSS framework is built on one and you instantly know one is present when you open Firebug and see a hundred levels of CSS inheritance declarations. Reset cascading style sheets (a.k.a. reset.css).
The idea of the reset style sheet is to globally target every markup element and set all of its possible attributes to zero, default or inherit. This gives the developer a “clean slate” with no browser default styles. Many say that this is the first thing you should add when you start building a web page, but I firmly disagree.
I’m sure that I am one of the small minority of web developers who’s saying this, but reset style sheets are bad practice, and it’s time to stop using them.
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January 27th, 2010
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Web Design
(CSS, Firefox, JavaScript, Tools)
Mozilla Firefox is by far my favorite web browser. It is secure, feature packed, and very well maintained with a great community behind it. It is also the web developers’ best friend, with tons of built-in tools and user created add-ons to help people creating web sites. In my opinion, because of the array of tools available and the quality of the product, every web developer should already be using Firefox as their main browser.
This is an arbitrary list of my favorite Firefox add-ons for web development. These tools have fundamentally changed how I design and develop web pages. With these tools I can accomplish tasks in minutes that would have taken me hours just four years ago.
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January 21st, 2010
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Web Design
(CSS, Internet Explorer)
As most web developers know, CSS level 3 is in the works, and has been for quite some time now. Unfortunately it is still just a working draft and cannot be adopted in full by the standards compliant web browsers. But that doesn’t mean we can’t start benefiting from the technology today.
CSS3 offers a wide array of very important and useful features. All of which will give web developers increased productivity, better maintainability and better design practices. There are so many new features that you will have to do some serious reading to get caught up.
But I can tell you about the ones that I’ve fallen in love with and offer up some theory and advice on using them in the wild world of the web.
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