The Web as a Database
One of the things that’s great about the Internet is that it’s open to everyone. There are a million sites, all different, and everyone is free to invent their own way of doing things. Of course, that has left us with a legacy of systems which don’t always work well together.
When you are using a web browser things mostly work because everyone adheres more or less to web standards, or at least the bits major browsers support. When you want to get data from the web to use in your app things aren’t quite as simple. Enter YQL (Yahoo Query Language).
Almost every developer knows about using SQL for getting data from databases. We wanted to do that for the Internet. YQL allows you to access all kinds of information from the internet in a very similar way to the way you would get data using SQL.
HTML5-Powered CSS Framework: Less
Less Framework is an HTML5 powered CSS framework for building flexible multi column website layouts for varying screen widths. It contains an eight-column grid optimized for a line-height of 24px, as well as a set of typography presets based on the golden ratio that fit into the grid’s vertical rhythm.
Less Framework layouts work perfectly in Chrome, Safari 3.0+, Firefox 3.0+ and Internet Explorer 7+. Your layout will collapse into a single column in legacy browsers and on small screens. The frameworks allow you to use HTML5 tags with the help of HTML5 enabling JavaScript file.
Google Translation PHP wrapper
Google translation is an interesting service. Not only can you do language translation, you can also detect the language of a particular text. I recently needed to create a Wordpress plugin to translate post titles from one language to another. As the translation API is only available for Java and Javascript, I decided to create a quick one for PHP. In this post we will see how to translate text from one language to another in a simple and quick way using the created class.
Using HTML5 elements in WordPress post content
Nicolas Gallagher:
Here are two ways to include HTML5 elements in your Wordpress post content without Wordpress’ wpautop function wrapping them in p tags or littering your code with line breaks…. Both ways rely on hand-coding the HTML5 markup in the Wordpress editor’s HTML view.
Use BuddyPress, Keep your Theme
If you want to use BuddyPress (a massive plugin that basically adds a social networking layer to WordPress sites, think, forums, profiles, user blogs, etc) but you’ve been hesitant to try it, now is a better time than ever.
BuddyPress 1.2 now works with stand-alone WordPress installs (before you had to use MU) and you can even keep your existing theme.
Google & Microformats: Drive More Traffic
Anyone that has spent time trying to improve their click through rates (CTR) from search engine results pages (SERPs) will tell you that Google algorithmically picks the snippet displayed for a given page; it’s not something you can always control. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t always display the snippet that will give you the best conversion rate.
Why Providing Value in Your Job is Important
One of the first things that they taught me at Blogging School was how to flog my blog erm, I mean, how to promote readership. There are many ways to get people to your site, but the not-so-secret way to get them to stay, and willingly come back, is to provide them value. There has to be a compelling reason for them to take time out of their incredibly busy day to spend five or ten minutes reading whatever you wrote.
Whether it’s a comedic post, tips on how-to be a better whatever, or a discussion about a mutual love of Pez dispensers, providing content that lets the reader justify why they bothered going to your site is critical.
jQTouch Makes Web Development on the iPhone and iPod Touch a Snap
jQTouch is described on the site as a jQuery plugin for web development on the iPhone and iPod Touch. But it’s more than just a plugin; its simplified development approach helps you create and theme the various screens of your web app and apply animated transitions between them.
It will help in all manner of ways, but app development using jQTouch is quick if you follow a simple recipe. You create a series of div elements (one for each screen in your application), give each one an id, and give the home screen the class of current. You then place an unordered list within the home screen div. In each list item you place an anchor tag with a href that links to one of the other divs.
Free Web UI Wireframe Kit
Sometimes you don’t need to build interactive wireframes, or may not feel all that comfortable in Visio or OmniGraffle. I know here are times I just want to open up Photoshop and start laying things out.
This web UI template kit is made completley with shape objects and in some cases converted into SmartObjects. So they’re totally scalable. There are no usage restrictions but if you find them helpful give us a shout. We love hearing from you!
