Hack zero: Switch to Gmail
This is not a joke: Gmail is a fantastic and nearly spam-free platform. Notably, you can hook it up with a custom domain name so no one knows you are part of the Goog machine like everyone else.
Hack one: Greylisting with Postfix on Ubuntu
A mail transfer agent using greylisting will “temporarily [...]
If you need a professional application server, particularly for rails, I’m recommending Rimuhost these days.
Their VPS plans are a reasonable deal, but, as always, the support is what is always most important when choosing a host unless it’s a super small static site, in which case the big guys like mediatemple, dreamhost, bluehost are [...]
There’s this great movie called A Beautiful Mind that I saw once, and in the last few months I’ve been quoting it a few times when talking about my programming career. Overall it’s a great story, but the one scene that really gets me is when he (John Nash, famous mathematician) is standing in front [...]
Three videos for your Sunday afternoon enjoyment. (The first two are for the hippies, the last one is for the geeks.)
The Corporation
“Among the 40 interview subjects are CEOs and top-level executives from a range of industries: oil, pharmaceutical, computer, tire, manufacturing, public relations, branding, advertising and undercover marketing; in addition, a Nobel-prize winning economist, the [...]
I’ve been following the recent debate about the future of web standards and whatnot. It’s been making me think a bit about what I really want to see in the future of web standards. And I can’t get this great California zine Cometbus out of my head. (Well, ok, by “following the recent debate” [...]
In light of the litigious, melodramatic backwater that the CSS spec has fallen into, I thought it would be worth writing up a teensy, non-brilliant-but-incredibly-useful DIY hack for stylesheets.
In my mind, there is really no way of getting around CSS if you are working on the web. CSS makes your site ugly or beautiful, rendering [...]
6/25/07 UPDATE: I am obligated to point out that this little script has graduated from interesting to useless — thanks to the new Google Analytics, which is hands down the best tool for understanding web traffic. And it’s bloody free. You probably knew this already. But, just in case, here’s a great new tutorial. That [...]
Just had a really great first experience at Qunu asking obscure questions about our email server. It was an obscure subject, but I needed generalized advice, so I didn’t have a listserv (such as a particular software group) to turn to immediately. I was able to connect to a geek in a few minutes and [...]
If you are interested in keeping up with the best practices of mime types, content types, character encoding and doctypes ….
A very nice survey of document types from the best developers on the web:
http://www.elementary-group-standards.com/archives/site-standards/why-xhtml.html
Last I checked, only about 2 percent of developers were women.
Just now read this:
The GNOME Foundation received 181 applications for the Google Summer of Code (SoC) program, but not a single application was from a female developer. The lack of women participating in GNOME, and free software in general, has spurred the GNOME [...]
Great advice on crafting a home page from A List Apart. In short: build it last, and work first on the details (the smallest, ubiquitous elements of your site). A great homepage with poor search results or product page will only lead to disappointment. So if your site is shallow and ugly on the [...]
Wow. Steve at Slayeroffice.com has an amazing color palette generator based on the design technique of Andy Clark.
You enter a hex code value for a color, then another to mix it with, and out comes a beautiful png graphic of the color scheme. Extremely nice work, Steve. This is a great resource for brainstorming color [...]
Finally some useful help from the “celebrity engineer” Matt Cutts, one of the few people in the world that has had intimate relations with the Google Pagerank algorithm. (EDIT: He also happens to use Wordpress, not Blogger. Hmmm.)
This is a description of how to best reference your urls in order to ensure that Google [...]
The reason I love web design so much is that anyone can do it. The web is just full of tutorials, examples and geeks on call.
Here’s a massive resource of good links. It’s well organized and through, but it also manages to focus on reputable sources of information. Put this one in your bookmarks [...]
R. Johansson says it best. This is the single most important tool any web developer can have.
Web Developer Extension 1.0
for Firefox, Flock, and Mozilla has been released. There are many new features and bug fixes, so upgrading is highly recommended. The Web Developer Extension is a definite must have for any web professional, so [...]
Not that I have followed any of this advice yet, but here’s a thoughtful article about preparing websites for an international audience from Molly Holzschlag:
Despite the fact that the Web has been international in scope from its inception, the predominant mass of Web sites are written in English or another left-to-right language. Sites are typically [...]
Web Designers everywhere are taking a break.
Sometime about 5 years ago people began to realize the frustrating limits of web development because the existing standards were so poorly followed by existing browsers. It was something like what Frost said about “poetry without rhyme is like playing tennis without a net.”
Which is to say, [...]
Learning to use CSS can make you insane if you don’t have a good instructor. And who does?
Some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten about web communication relates to debugging your code: you have to learn to problem solve efficiently.
Enter Mezzoblue’s CSS Crib Sheet, may it’s url never expire.
You will no doubt [...]
If you need a free place to host your website, make sure you check out AmbitiousLemon. They look very good at what they do; they at least have a very capable open source software setup on their server, with Ruby On Rails, PHP, Perl, Apache etc. :
We are not a company. Our aim is [...]
Drosphilia researchers have a leg up on web designers.
Well, at least they’ve got a decent explanation of colorblindness. A short paper on colorblind audiences was written a few years ago for researchers presenting their findings on the very latest in the world of flies. The guidelines are easy to understand, and the changes are [...]
From Digital Web Magazine (a reliable regular read), this article discusses the thought process behind designing a website. Written from the perspective of the web developer, it’s also a good introduction for clients.
This is a good article for nonprofit-type folks who are thinking about getting a website.
Here’s a bit:
“Interestingly enough, most of [...]
An excellent new collection of advanced javascript for putting that new car smell back in your site.
Enjoy it here: script.aculo.us - web 2.0 javascript
Easy to misuse (1997, anyone?) but a wonderful way to add some useful usability features to your site if you are up to it.
Create usable content? It doesn’t sound like a difficult goal. But upon reconsideration, it is clear that the web (in particular) has become a waste of your time. The visual aspects of the internet are all distractions without quality content. And that means content that is useful and clear.
Is your website full of [...]
I recently picked up a copy of the “for Dummies” CSS tutorial book and was disappointed to find the following in a section about using named vs. hex color values (like cornflowerblue instead of #6495ED):
“… my advice is to just assume that pretty much everyone who’ll see your web page uses IE [Internet Explorer]. Why? [...]
Even if you’re new to web design and Javascript spooks you, you’d do well to look into some of the techniques that are described in the attached article.
My Favorite Javascripts for Designers: Blakems.com
Here’s a bit of the article:
Are there certain javascripts that you seem to always use from project to project? Lately, [...]
There is no shortage of webmasters desperate to get their hard-won site noticed. After spending many sleepless nights coding and debugging a site for a nonprofit, it only makes sense that you would want it to actually show up when someone is searching for your organization’s keywords. But, like much of the web-authoring career, you [...]
If you or your nonprofit is concerned about your pages being readable to people with limited sight or non-graphical browsers, you should check out this classic book on accessibility. Building Accessible Websites explains in clear, detailed steps how to get your site up to speed. And it doesn’t have to mean a major foray into [...]
Well, this is perhaps not a definitive guide, but a good one nonetheless. I like his method of including the CSS link in the commented rule, and I appreciate his concern that IE7 (the next release of IE) will have bugs resolved — making the hacks a problem.
Read on:
The summary of our latest [...]