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Are you a member of all the latest and greatest social networking sites? Tired of re-entering your personal details? Need to keep your information up-to-date across a myriad of accounts, and enable your user base to do the same? You need the foundations of the social web, brought to you by Ben Ward.
You might know your Facebook from your Odeo, but most companies couldn’t give a Flickr about social media. How do we let them know the opportunities that a Web 2.0 world can hold for them? Britt Parrott explains how to develop a coherent and buzzword-free web content strategy.
Between choosing the most semantic markup, wrangling IE6 CSS bugs, and arguing which JavaScript library would win in a fight, it is easy to forget that the future of web design rests in the hands of a small group of people—those with responsibility for educating the next generation. Columnist Tom Green reports on the sad state of post-secondary education, and what it might mean for the future of effective web development.
Every week heralds the announcement of yet another handful of web startups, filling a new niche or competing with established services—but all too often they are never heard from again. Marketing expert Dave Goldenberg is here to tell us what the problem is…and it has nothing to do with sprouts.
The Web is a “show not tell” medium, but putting together effective screencasts takes time and editing. Ben Chestnut tells us he how was able to use Screenflow to produce a professional product at minimal cost.
While the days of low-quality stop animation may be a thing of the past, there is no denying that high quality video streaming is alive and well on the web today. Major media outlets stream significant amounts of their programming, amateurs are in on the game, and many users will simply expect video from certain content providers. This week, Lei Zhu brings us up to speed on the different methods that can be employed to get Flash video on to a site.
When you think of the people who use your website, where do they use it? At work or a home office? What about a mobile phone? What about even more diverse devices like Amazon's Kindle or the Nintendo Wii? Dave Shea asks us to reconsider how and where people use our websites, and how best to tackle the demands of building sites for a wide array of devices.
We know social is good, but how do we tap into that goodness? There are many benefits to harnessing user information and sharing it across sites - relationships are the key, and Brian Suda explains which doors the new Google API can help us to open.
Does your business take responsibility for its impact on the environment or the local community? And does it do enough for your employees? John Reeve, co-founder of Santa Barbara design and development shop Pelago, shares the tips and advice that can help make your business whiter than white when it comes to being green.
JavaScript libraries were the hot topic last year, and have made it easy for us to build ever more powerful applications—but are you making best use of the object-oriented capabilities of JavaScript? The latest and greatest book on the subject, from Yahoo!’s Ross Harmes and Google’s (and Digital Web author) Dustin Diaz, takes a detailed look at OO best practices and how they can be applied to JavaScript—and this week Digital Web is happy to present an entire chapter to whet your appetite: The Adapter Pattern.
In their new book, Ross Harmes and Dustin Diaz share their expertise in object-oriented JavaScript programming, and take us to new heights by demonstrating how to build design pattern conventions, all based on JavaScript’s unique flexibility. Digital Web’s Tiff Fehr takes an objective look at Pro JavaScript Design Patterns.
Opera’s legal shenanigans caused no small amount of hand-wringing last month—to the extent that we almost forgot that there was a browser at the center of it all. Firefox might get all the anti-Microsoft press, but when was the last time you had to fix a layout in Opera? Never? Read on to find out what the world’s oldest browser company has in store for us codemonkeys this year.
Whether you’re a multi-million pageview behemoth or a much smaller site, you can speed up your website by offloading some of the hosting to a different domain. But who needs the hassle of setting all that up, when you can use Amazon’s infrastructure instead? Craig Noeldner and Mike Culver walk us through the process of setting up and configuring your own little piece of Amazon S3.
If requests to place videos on your clients’ websites give you visions of endlessly wrestling with huge files, software with steep learning curves, and small, fuzzy results, the changes heralded by the beta version of Flash Player 9 will give you reason to rejoice. Clients with .mov files? No problem. High definition, multiple formats, and a range of delivery platforms? Easy as pie. There are big changes ahead, and Flash video expert Tom Green gives us a glimpse of their significance and how to easily take advantage of them.
Come January, when we look back over this year and take stock of the key advancements that have been made in our corner of the industry, one of the highlights will surely be an increased focus on website performance—and it’s mostly due to the work of one man. Digital Web’s Matthew Pennell takes a look at a book that is the result of years spent fine-tuning the Yahoo! sites: Steve Souders’ High Performance Web Sites.
The abundance of JavaScript libraries available to developers can be both a blessing and a curse: it’s great to have variety, but how do you know which one to choose for which purpose? The venerable Jonathan Snook makes it look easy with an excerpt from his upcoming book, Accelerated DOM Scripting with Ajax, APIs and Libraries.
It’s time to put away your copy of Photoshop and delve deep into the murky depths of DNS configuration this week, as new author Lei Zhu investigates an ingenious way to handle load balancing for web applications. It’s not just required reading if you’re about to launch the next Twitter or Facebook—what would happen if your site went down today?
Looking for a way to ease yourself into the world of Ruby on Rails but not sure where to begin? Matthew Pennell feels your pain. His in-depth review of Beginning Rails—From Novice to Professional, is a perfect starting point for the entry-level RoR programmer.
If we whetted your appetite for hacking with our recent APIs and Mashups For The Rest Of Us article, you’re in luck—author Gareth Rushgrove is back with the final part of his series on APIs, designed to get you up and running and building your own API-powered web applications.
We’re rapidly getting to the point where most web developers have a decent grasp of what it means to use semantic markup—but how many of us really grasp the implications of the ‘capital-S’ Semantic Web? Keith Alexander walks us through the theory and practice of RDF on the web.
Maybe you’ve approached a website design with the burning desire to do something that’s altogether different. Perhaps you’ve attempted to build a site, CMS, or hot new app that meets management’s vague goals to somehow turn our current thinking upside-down. Or, could be you’ve considered a new IA project and thought, “there must be a new way to approach this.” If so, then you’ve wrangled with the concept of innovation. Few understand innovation—its challenges, and how to harness our abilities to pull it off successfully—as well as Scott Berkun, author of the respected Art of Project Management, does. His new book, The Myths of Innovation, attempts to take a fresh look at the subject. Did he succeed? Read Digital Web staffer Tiff Fehr’s review to find out.
Innovation is both a buzz word and an elusive goal these days for many companies and web professionals. After writing her review of
Scott Berkun’s new book The Myths of Innovation, DW staff member Tiff Fehr decided to dig a little deeper by asking him these five pertinent questions.
If you’re hard at work day in, day out, chipping away at the rock face of professional web development, it’s sometimes easy to get lost in the details—and when we’re talking about an organization that moves as slowly as the W3C, you can be forgiven for taking your eye off the larger picture. David Andersson gets us up to speed on what may soon be coming our way in the world of HTML.
With speedier connections becoming more prevalent, and software creating smaller files sizes, we now have more options for presenting instructional material on websites. Screencasts, which capture movies of all the action on your computer screen, are popping up all over the place in all sorts of tutorials. Ken Westin previously reviewed Adobe Captivate for PC here at Digital Web, but if you’re a Mac person and you have a limited budget, Miraz Jordan’s article is just what you need.
In the fourth and final part of his series on start-up companies, Dirk Knemeyer, of Involution Studios, hands us the keys to sustainable success: sales, service, and management. This is Dirk’s last piece for his outstanding Innovating the Web Experience column. For nearly two years, his insightful columns have enlightened us and stimulated lively conversations about the web.
You’ve heard the buzz about microformats, and you’ve probably been meaning to use them on your sites—perhaps they’re sitting somewhere near the bottom of your list of things to do. In his new article, John Allsopp gives us a snapshot of what’s happening with microformats today, and he challenges us all to move them closer to the top of the pile.
Communication happens when behaviour changes – when the message you’ve carefully designed is not only received, but understood and acted upon. Join Jon Follett as he explores how we can best communicate on the web where low resolution monitors and tiny mobile screens are the delivery methods for our missives.
The most beautiful thing about the Web is that it never stops changing. To make Web sites well, designers must keep up on new techniques and new mediums. If you haven’t yet thought about how to build for mobile phones, now’s the time. Dip your big toe into the water with this primer from Brian Fling.
Daunted by that multilingual site project around the corner? Designing and developing for multiple locales is a complex task. Get your head around the basics of internationalization in this primer.
This week, take a walk with Chris Mills behind the curtain of the book publishing world and learn how you too can become a published author.
Bewildered by acronyms? Confounded by labels? You may be a victim of the “tech speak” that has long been a part of our experience with interfaces. Jonathan Follett spells out why it’s time for this to change.
Stop blindly following the letter of the Web writing law. Gurus touting liberal copy chopping don’t realize you, the high-quality Web craftsperson, know your audience well. Shake out those corporate-language cobwebs and stir up your spirit with an old-time Web writing revival!
So, microformats sound intriguing and useful, but you’re not sure what exactly they are. If you’re conscious of Web standards and already writing semantic code, it’s probably time you got the scoop on this workload-reducing practice.
You won't catch Jonathan Snook telling you to pay no attention to what's behind the curtain. In his first column on the hidden intricacies of Web programming, Snook runs down one of the basic elements that makes the Web work: the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP). Find out what your browser says about you, and learn a simple way to test server communication when developing a Web application.
New to Web design? Fresh out of cash to pick up the software you need to get the job done? Brian Reindel dives into his top 17 picks for free time-tested, user-approved tools for Web designers—from antivirus software to VoIP. Best of all, they’re also free of adware and community supported.
The Web we know and grow is in the throes of a renaissance—evidence of Web 2.0 is everywhere. In their first installment of Web 2.0 Design: Bootstrapping the Social Web column, Richard MacManus and Joshua Porter present six important trends that characterize the future of the Web for designers.
Paul Tero gives a brief introduction to using a database to make short and easy time of updating your site.
Mena Trott shares the latest developments at Six Apart, including the growing team, sticking to their roots, the future of TypePad and Movable Type 3.1’s hot new features.
With the release of Mozilla Firefox 0.9, developers, designers, and even
casual users have been given a powerful toolbox that continues to grow.
Paul Scrivens reviews Bradbury Software's RSS reader, FeedDemon, and lets you know if you should give it a try.
Dirk Knemeyer returns to talk about the future of web design, and share how web designers can better prepare for it.
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