Tag: WEBDEVELOPMENT

Lifeyo is an incredible content management system for someone just trying to put together their first website. The whole system is very web2.0, but they manage to pull off this design cliché in a way which is actually useful -- all the dialogs are sensibly laid out, and the large fonts and bright colors actually make the system less intimidating to use. Their business model is also ...

Rejex is a very handy little site for building and testing regular expressions on the fly. It's composed of four simple text boxes and a very informative cheat sheet (not shown above, but after the jump). You feed your text into the "Test String" box (the middle one), and then your expression into the top box, and immediately see the matches in the bottom box. Here I am searching for instances of ...

You know those IQ test questions, "An apple is to an orange as a ________ is to a wall"? Well, HTML5 is to HTML4 as a photon torpedo is to a snowball hurled by a sleepy five-year old. Or something. If that sounds jumbled, it's just because HTML5 is challenging my notion of what HTML even is and that's making me very confused. The HTML5 Audio Data API is just one example of what can be done with ...

MeasureIt is another one of the simple, single-purpose tools I like because they make it easy for newcomers to develop basic web design skills. It simply lets you measure screen elements in pixels -- no more, no less. Once you install it, you get a tiny icon on the left side of the status bar. Click the icon, click-and-drag anywhere on the page, and get a tiny tooltip showing dimensions. ...

I had the most interesting conversation with one of my friends the other day. Adam: "Whew... finally finished with my latest web project!" Friend (in awe): "Whoa! That's awesome! How did you make that?" Now, of course, this project of mine was a full-fledged ASP.NET web application; a simple question like "how did you make that" could easily end up with me not only explaining what I did, but how ...

In many ways, I'm pretty old school. When I learned HTML, I painstakingly handcoded my pages in the esteemed Notepad. Only when I became a master of HTML-fu did I allow myself to try Dreamweaver. (Okay, fine, the ability to buy a license with educational pricing may have had a lot to do with it, too.) I loved Dreamweaver. One of the things that always made me a little sad when I first tried Linux ...

It isn't every day that Douglas Crockford (the father of JSON and JSLint) pops up with a new tech talk. In this one he discusses the current state of Ajax development, why mashups are inherently insecure, why the standards process is broken, and how our best hope for a newer better platform may be mobile. Say what? Basically he proposes the idea that because the replacement rate on mobile phones ...

How often have you stumbled across a killer coupon or deal on the web, only to discover - sometimes too late - that the offer expired months or even years ago? If you're still counting, you might be happy to hear that a new meta tag from Google seems to be the first step in the right direction for combining and filtering time-sensitive information when searching. This new meta tag, according ...

Adobe's just-launched Apollo platform could be the ticket to a whole new world of applications according to TechCrunch's Michael Arrington. He writes of the announcement, "I honestly believe that entirely new classes of companies can be built on this platform, which takes Flash, HTML and javascript completely outside of the browser and interacts with the file system on a PC." You can pick up ...

Each day sees more and more Ajax tools, tricks, demos, and libraries come online. MiniAjax.com is a place that collects, on a very fluid and easy to browse page, all of the latest and greatest Ajax scripts that you can download and implement on your website. There is a lot of good stuff to explore here such as: GreyBox - a simple window you can use to launch another webpage within your ...

If you've been anywhere except under a rock for the last 18 months or so, you're probably sick to death of the phrase "Web 2.0," and for many people, Web 2.0 has become almost synonymous with Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails, though, has some major drawbacks for the average web designer. Ruby, while gaining steam, is still not as popular as more established programming languages. There aren't as many ...

Script.aculo.us is an amazing framework for enriching your website's user experience very easily. Built on top of the very popular prototype javascript framework, scriptaculous makes AJAX cake, and gives everyone the power to have a sexy AJAX-powered website, yes everyone. Scriptaculous is a tiny (140kb) javascript framework that gives you the power of effects, several dynamic data components, and ...

Yes, I know, bad pun. Sorry. Anyway... if you need forms of any kind for your web site but don't have the time to program one from scratch (or the money to pay someone else to do it!), Icebrrg might be the solution for you. It lets you easily create a variety of forms - surveys, contact forms, job applications, invitations - through a simple WYSIWYG interface. Icebrrg handles all the back-end ...