Mike Davidson has just announced that sIFR 2.0 has been officially released. sIFR provideds “Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses”, by allowing web designers to include any font via a small flash movie embedded into their web sites. The technique is mainly used to replace headings by using the JavaScript and the DOM and degrades nicely if the client browser does not support either Flash, JS or the DOM.
O’Reilly’s Open Source site has an article that offers some Open Source Alternatives to Dreamweaver Templating. In the author’s opinion, Dreamweaver offers the best templating tools currently available, but suggests that if you don’t use Dreamweaver, there are some viable open source alternatives.
I am known to say “WOW” quite often, but when I saw the Aardvark Firefox Extension, I said “FREAKING WOW!”. This is an absolutely fantastic extension that is sure to help you in debugging your CSS.
Simply go to the page you want to debug, and enable the extension by choosing Start Aardvark from the context menu. Now pass you mouse over the element you are trying to debug. The element will be outlined with a red border and you will see the element name, id and class name of the selected element. What is even better, there are a whole slew of keybord modifiers. For example press the *W* key and your selection will be made wider by showing you the containing element of the element you moused-over.
[link via mezzoblue]
XML.com has a great article that will show you how to create Very Dynamic Web Interfaces by using the xmlhttprequest object.
Photonhead has a nice Film and Digital Camera Simulator that you can use to help you Understand Setting Exposure on your digital camera.
Paul Graham offers some quick tips on Writing, Briefly.
Code Snippets is a nifty website that let’s developers store, sort and share source code. What makes this site different from other similar sites is that all the snippets are organized using tags like flickr and del.icio.us. This means that you can sort snippets by tags, people, people and tags, etc.
Information designer Mark Boulton has just begun a series of articles titled Five simple steps to better typography. Part one discusses the measure and part two introduces you to hanging punctuation.
After about a year of using the del.icio.us public bookmarking system, I’ve finally realized why I really like this service. I find that anytime I am working on a project that focuses on a new (or new to me) technology, I can lurk around the del.icio.us tags for that technology to find out what others are doing and linking to.
For example, I’ve been doing alot of DOM and JavaScript work over the past three weeks, so every night I visit the del.icio.us tags for JavaScript and DOM. This is great as I can quickly scan the bookmarks for links to pages that range from very basic information to cutting edge techniques.
Lurking in a del.icio.us tag is as easy as typing http://del.icio.us/tag/ followed by the term you would like to lurk in. For example if you wanted to lurk in the AJAX links, type http://del.icio.us/tag/AJAX. You can also filter mulitple terms by placing a plus sign between them (ie. http://del.icio.us/tag/AJAX+DOM)
Cake is a new PHP web application framework that follows MVC principals and is loosely modelled after Ruby on Rails. Still in early development, the releases are coming fast and furious, so it may be a new technology to keep your eyes on.
