Technology news and anaysis, internet tips and advice
Monday, August 9th, 2010
Often need to incorporate multiple interactive elements on a page? Tired of different scripts conflicting or swelling your page? Look no further than jQuery elements, a collection of tools including tabs, tooltips, overlays, scrollers & forms. The best part is it’s only 4kb!
Check it out: jQuery TOOLS
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Sunday, August 8th, 2010
If you’re not using Firefox for web design, you really – really – should be. Besides being standards-compliant and supporting thousands of useful plugins, it also supports Firebug. Firebug lets you dig into your coed in real time and try out edits and changes as well as giving you a whole range of debugging tools. What’s more, Firebug also supports Yslow a Firebug plugin from Yahoo! thyat’s pure gold. It gives you accurate readouts of your page download time and has built in tools for getting more code and minifying images by using All Smush It to reduce image size without degrading quality.
FileZilla is an open-source FTP client which supports sFTP. FileZilla is stable, easy to use and fast. Don’t pay for an FTP client when FileZilla is available.
Every time you write a clever line of code, discover a unique new tool or find an elegant way to write something you should save it. In the future this will save you more and more time as you go on. You should try and keep your snippets up to date and replace them as you find better alternatives. At the very least, consult a site like CSS Tricks which has a massive, ever-growing collection of freely available web design snippets.
Consider looking at using a framework. In CSS BluePrint is a fairly well-known standard for preventing yourself from writing repetitive code. Perhaps you’d rather use something simper? There’s plenty out there. I use a modified version of WhiteBoard CSS for WordPress, a framework which I add to with snippets I collect.
The most important thing in my experience is to balance a client’s needs with your desires and their intentions. What I mean by this is that if a client needs a website selling microwaves they need it to sell, you’ll naturally want it to look fantastic and so will they, but you will be doing a better job by making a website that works rather than one that lives up the imaginary ideals of what a ‘good website’ is in your head. A good-looking, well-coded website that sells nothing is a bad website.
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Saturday, April 17th, 2010
The iPhone is undoubtedly a polarising device. It probably has more fans than detractors (or at least I like to think so), but it is primarily seen as an entertainment oriented phone, pretty much the polar opposite to the Blackberry.
So I thought I’d highlight some of the most useful tools it can provide for business.
Scheduling with Calendar and Google Calendar
I use Google Calendar not because it’s incredibly good-looking, but because it has great methods for subscribing to other applications and systems. The iPhone can subscribe to Google Calendar and sync dates and events back and forth. The magic part is being able to sync Google calendar to other apps, meaning that you can make a date on your iPhone and see it appear across your workflow (mine appear in Lighting in Thunderbird). You can add as many calendars as you like.
http://www.google.com/calendar/
Syncing files with Dropbox
Dropbox is a file-sharing program that uses peer-to-peer technology to synchronise the contents of folders across different systems. You can use Dropbox to sync files between your own PCs (or Macs) as well as choosing to share folders within your Dropbox folder with other people. The iPhone part comes into play when you download the Dropbox app and are able to view copies of your files on your iPhone. Handy, no? You can also view, download and restore files from the Dropbox website.
Dropbox is free for a starter account and gives you a whopping 2gb. If you invite friends to Dropbox you’ll get an additional 250Mb per person.
The Google App offers a quick portal into it’s services. It’s by means revolutionary and there are more complete apps for accessing Google services, but it has killer speech recognition (ie. It actually works) and a pretty icon.
The Google App links in to many of its services and can prevent a tiresome login each time you need to access a service.
2do
My favourite todo list app, mainly because you can link it without having to subscribe to an expensive system. Version 2 is on it’s way soon, with even more features. Add tasks, lists (collections of tasks), multiple sections for different types of task and sync free with Toodledo.
The interface is not only extremely good-looking, but allows for drag-and-drop, sorting, sharing and different views.
Tabs are used to great effect to separate sections and the application icon can display the number of tasks falling into a category you select.
The official website lists far more features than I can here: http://www.2doapp.com/en/2Do/tips.html
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Thursday, April 15th, 2010
Web browsers come in different shapes and sizes, (‘What’s a browser?’) but fewer people are aware that they have a range of choices with email as well.
There are just as many email programs as there are internet browsers.
Most Windows users will be familiar with some form of Outlook. As part of the office suite, outlook offers reliability and a full suite of editing tools to control your emails. Outlook also has calendars and tasks functionality.
Microsoft Outlook isn’t free though. If you run Windows 7 or Windows Vista, you’ll have a copy of Windows Mail which is essentially a very cut down version of Outlook. If you have XP or previous you’ll have Outlook Express. If you do want to buy Microsoft Outlook you can buy it standalone or as part of the Office Suite, either way you’ll be looking to part with more than £70.
Thunderbird is my email client of choice. From the same teams that runs Firefox, the world’s most popular internet browser, comes Mozilla Thunderbird. Just like Firefox, Thunderbird is free, and simple to set up.
Version 3 was released earlier this year and whilst not as fully featured as Microsoft Outlook, it is gaining features, including tabbed browsing through emails and a very fast indexed search that lets you specify dates and other conditions to filter through results. Thunderbird will also run on pretty much any platform, including Windows, Linux and OSX. An official Mozilla plug-in Lightning provides calendar functionality to rival Outlook’s.
Google Mail is a slightly different approach to email. Rather than encouraging users to set up email programs and download mail to their desktops (though of course you can) Google tries to entice you to use it online so you can access it anywhere in the world.
Rather than using folders, Google has tags for your email to help organise things as well as a range of other features, including filters to process mail automatically when it arrives, beer goggles to stop accidental emailing immediately after a gentlemen’s snifter of sauce and many more experimental features besides.
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Monday, January 11th, 2010
If you’re up to date enough to be running the new Firefox 3.6 release candidate, then you’ll be able to take advantage of a groovy new feature, Personas for Firefox.
Personas are basically skins, but with a better system for installing and previewing them it’s become a breeze to switch what clothes your version of Firefox is wearing.
Please note: The new release candidate may not yet be entirely stable or compatible with your plugins. if that’s the case, just wait a few weeks until Firefox 3.6 is released officially. If you’re impatient like me though (I’ve had no problems with this Firefox release), get downloading, the links are below.
Get the new Firefox release candidate here: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.6/whatsnew/
Get Firefox Personas and the personas plugin for faster switching here: http://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/
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Category Firefox, Internet, Reviews, Software, Technology, Web browsers | Tags:
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Saturday, January 9th, 2010
I sometimes get a little tired of having to have my iTunes library on each computer, when I just want to chuck on some music and get on with work I go to Grooveshark.com and choose some music from their library.
Even better, is Grooveshark radio – simple select a song or songs you like and then hit the radio button, Grooveshark will then create a playlist based on the songs you have selected and you can either ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ songs as you go along, refining your playlist predictions.
Try Grooveshark out at: http://listen.grooveshark.com/
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Saturday, January 9th, 2010
If you’re anything like me, you have a wide array of ways to network and chat with your friends and contacts. From email, web-mail and private messages, to Facebook wall posts and Twitter to real-time chatting on Windows Live Messenger and online messaging systems like Facebook and Google’s chat.
Digsby collates all of your networks into one easy way to log in and communicate from one interface.
You need to create a Digsby account which then stores all your login information. They claim their servers are secure, and I’ve not had any problems over the past few months I’ve been using Digsby.
Another very nifty feature is to generate a widget to place on your website or blog that lets you chat in real-time with visitors to your site.
It’s still a relatively new program and seems a little bandwidth-intensive when checking POP email, but the development continues to progress rapidly and new fixes are being applied all the time.
Check out digsby at: http://www.digsby.com/
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Friday, January 8th, 2010
A quick, easy way to highlight your current page in WordPress if you use the wp_list_pages() function to generate your navigation menu (you really should, you can customise this far more than you might think).
WordPress will apply a CSS class of .current_page_item to the link to whatever page you’re on. Simply style this differently in your stylesheet (Appearance > Editor > Style.css) and your visitors will always know what page they’re on.
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Thursday, January 7th, 2010
First things first, you don’t need to be technically minded to build a website, the most important quality you can have is to be a good communicator. As long as you can get your message across to your audience, a good hosting package will take care of everything else.
A good hosting package should offer several of the following things, a great hosting package will offer all of them.
Do I have a recommendation though? Yep.
The entire point of this article is not as a puff piece, but lists the features I have found useful – essential in fact, to have in place to be able to effectively build and maintain a website. Having said that, one company stands out in my experiences, offering all the features listed above as standard even on their most economical of packages.
VidaHost are based in Bath, with a data centre in London as well as international hosting options. Their cheapest packages start at £17 + VAT a year and this includes a free domain. Check out VidaHost, they’re happy to answer questions and their tech-support is stunningly fast as well as stunningly free!
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Saturday, January 2nd, 2010
If the above is a question you’re not sure of the answer to, then why not take 5 minutes to stop and improve your internet experience?
An internet browser is what lets you navigate the web and view and interact with websites and web applications. Some people are peripherally aware of browsers, though they may not be familiar with the term, others have a decent idea of the differences between the options available to them.
Here, for your delight and delectation is a quick run-down of the most popular options:
Most people’s first experience of the web comes through using Internet Explorer. This browser is included with Microsoft’s Windows operating system and new users often [wrongly] presume this is their only option for browsing the internet.
Many people are using an out of date version of Internet Explorer, which means less compatibility with modern websites as well as more security vulnerabilities. If you don’t want to change browsers, the very least you should do is update to the lateste version, Internet Explorer 8.
Download the latest version of Internet Explorer at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/
Pretty much the most popular browser overall in Europe, used by approximately 47% of people online, Firefox is fast, strong and easily adaptable. If you currently use internet explorer, Firefox can import all your bookmarks and settings to make the transition seamless.
You’ll find many addons for Internet Explorer also have Firefox versions, so it is unlikely that you’ll encounter any problems at all in switching over. Best of all, Firefox has a massive repository of addons that you can install in one click: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/
Download firefox at http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/firefox/
Opera is a browser with a rich history, originally created in 1994. Over the past few years Opera has become totally free, eliminating the browser adverts that originally came with it. Opera has long been standards compliant, adhering strictly to internet design protocols, but remaining user friendly and fast.
Download Opera at http://www.opera.com/
Safari comes pre-installed on Apple computers. Versions are available for Windows computers as well. Safari performs well, though lacks the range customisable features in Firefox and Opera.
Download safari at http://www.apple.com/safari/
Chrome is the most recent addition to the web browser market, created by Google. Chrome has a slightly different modus operandi to the other popular browsers and is optimised for fast speed with web applications, most notably Google’s own online office and email applications.
Whilst Chrome is probably the fastest browser on this list, it is still in its early stages and lacks the ability to customise it to any great extent.
Download Google Chrome at http://www.google.com/chrome
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