Get SitePoint Books, Give to a Worthy Cause
Get SitePoint Books, Give to a Worthy Cause
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Every once in a while, a deal comes around that is sort of a no-brainer. This is one of those deals, so I suggest you read, act, and enjoy (in that order)!
SitePoint is a well-respected online media company that, among other things, publishes some very well written books. I received a copy of Jason Beaird’s The Principles of Beautiful Web Design for Christmas, and I couldn’t put it down until I finished it – despite the fact that I also had a shiny new copy of Mario Kart Wii vying for my attention. That’s a good web book, people.
SitePoint’s home offices are based in Melbourne, Australia – which is in the Victoria state in the southeast corner of the continent, for those of you who (like me) aren’t the best at geography. As you’ve probably seen in the news, Victoria is currently battling the worst bushfires in Australian history.
So where does the whole books/cause thing figure in?
In order to raise money for the Australian Red Cross, SitePoint is having a 5-for-1 sale on PDF versions of their books. You can purchase and download high-quality PDF versions of five of their books for just $29.95 (normally $149.75 total!). And best of all, 100% of your purchase will go to the Australian Red Cross and will help victims of the bushfires.
This offer ends on this Friday (February 13th), so be sure to act fast. I’ll be getting my five books momentarily – as soon as I can narrow down my list to my top five picks! Which five books are you picking up? Let me know in the comments.
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SlickMap CSS Lets You Create Beautiful Visual Site Maps Easily
Bored with the same old uninspiring, list-based sitemaps? If you’re like me, most likely you will find that creating better looking sitemaps can be quite time consuming. Thus, we end up having to settle for text-based unordered lists that look nothing like a map.
Well well well, worry not my friends, for now you can have a very beautiful and visual site map with nothing more than your standard unordered list and some CSS magic. Thanks to the efforts of Matt Everson of Astuteo, LLC, who released for public consumption what they call SlickMap CSS.
SlickMap CSS is “a simple stylesheet for displaying finished sitemaps directly from HTML unordered list navigation. It’s suitable for most web sites – accommodating up to three levels of page navigation and additional utility links – and can easily be customized to meet your own individual needs, branding, or style preferences.”
The first thing that really impressed me with SlickMap was the way data is visualized. The arrangment, grouping, and color coding of data makes it very easy to identify and find relevant data. The “Home link” is color blue and found at the top left most corner, immediately followed by the “Main links”, also colored blue. Level 2 and level 3 links can be found below them, each level having its own color, with a connector leading to each link. “Utility links” are grouped at the top right corner, separate from the main map.
What’s even more amazing about SlickMap is that everything is implemented in pure CSS. There is not a single line of JavaScript to be found anywhere. It’s also very easy to implement. Simply create an HTML file with an unordered set of links and import the slickmap.css file. Couple this up with an online site map tool like WriteMaps and you should be all set to rock and roll.
It supports most standards-compliant browsers, which means Safari, Firefox, and Opera. Sorry, IE but no love for you.
In the README file:
SlickMap CSS was created for web designers, and such was tested and developed for use with Safari, Firefox, Opera, and other standards-compliant browsers. Because of that, current versions of Internet Explorer (and probably IE versions long into the future) might look like sh*t.
The only downside I could think of right now is actually a strength in itself. While those large boxes would work for small to medium websites with a fairly standard site map layout like the one Astuteo has, it might do very well for larger websites with hundreds of links on their site maps. But then again there are methods to optimize and trim down those gigantic things.
It is a very well thought out and solid demonstration of the power of CSS, and for this reason I raise my glass and give my kudos to Matt Everson and the folks at Astuteo. Well done guys!
100 Raw CSS Examples
Looking for examples of CSS in action? Well you have come to the right place. The examples are very crude but function perfectly. Take a peek at the source code to figure out how it was done. There is a lot to look through. Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | CommentsCross-browser image rotation with JavaScript and CSS
Here is a cross-browser implementation of image rotation. … Order of the Day: CSS Properties. Web Development is Moving On – Are you? “” Next ” ” Previous …Take Your CSS to the Desktop with Adobe AIR!
Here is an article that you may find useful.
Designers would find it surprising that to know that you can now take your HTML and CSS skills and use it to create desktop applications. This now very much possible for anyone who is willing to explore the power of Adobe AIR. Andrew Tetlaw has a nice little article over at SitePoint entitled Take Your CSS to the Desktop with Adobe AIR!. It provides a good, short introduction to Adobe AIR and how easy it is to use your web development skills to create rich cross-platform desktop applications.
For further reading, you may wish to check out Akash Mehta’s winning article, Walk on AIR: Create a To-do List in Five Minutes.
CSS Friendly Stacked Bar Graphs
Looking for a good, CSS friendly Stacked Bar Graph implementation? Look no further as Stephen of The Wojo Group has published their implementation, which is being used in Backbone, a CMS that runs on Ruby on Rails. It is based off Alen Grakalic’s Pure CSS Data Chart, and the awesome thing is that it is semantically correct, so it will definitely look good in screen readers.
CSS and Round Corners: Build Boxes with Curves [CSS Tutorials]
Turn the corner – gently – with CSS! … to assign our bottom right corner to this … Naming this bottom-right image br.gif, we’ll insert a new CSS rule: …SitePoint " CSS Gradients, Transforms, Animations, and Masks
SitePoint.com – ” CSS Gradients, Transforms, Animations, and Masks … screenshot, I’ve used a CSS transform to rotate the entire page of sitepoint.com two degrees. …WordPress 2.7 Released, Initial Impressions
For those who haven’t noticed, wordpress 2.7 has officially been released. While I have played around with the release candidates I am always eager to see the full release of new software, so I have already installed the update onto this site to get some initial impressions.
Obviously this is a big interface change from previous versions, and while many have hailed wordpress for having a simple and easy to use interface I never have fully agreed. Sure it is easier than some of the other CMS and blogging platforms out there, but it always had a lot to be desired in my opinion.
The Dashboard
The reorganization of the dashboard improves it’s functionality ten fold. With a quick post bar, easily to scan stats about your blog, and the news no longer takes up 75% of the page. Where previously I would instantly skip over the information on the dashboard as it was not easy to gain value or I had to hunt for what I was looking for— I now find myself glancing at the little bits before making my next action.
The New Menu
Despite some nice aesthetic improvements, the primary change that has improved the user experience is the navigation. Some of their initial menu and design decisions make sense considering the platform was originally built to be a blogging platform, and has evolved into what it is today (more of a framework). The new version really is an evolution of the platform itself to better fit the flexibility that it has adopted.
Better Labeling
While the previous versions of wordpress had fairly good labeling, the labeling of navigational elements has improved significantly. What was “Design” is now “Appearance,” and “Manage” has been forgone for a simple “Edit.”
Much Better Organization
The organization of the navigational structure has been improved leaps and bounds. Now that wordpress is used as a CMS more often pages and posts have been separated, which should make clients lives a lot easier. Both categories have logical sub categories of edit, add new, categories, etc. Media has been separated into it’s own section, no longer do you have to hunt for it in the ambiguous “manage” tab.
The administration navigation has been vastly improved, now in an area you can actually spot it seems much easier to use. A nice touch is the addition of the “tools” section, which will serve as an excellent spot for plug in settings and controls. Previously it seemed authors stuck plug in controls in any section, where this will be a bit more convenient and logical.
The New Editing Interface
The editing interface of both posts and pages has been vastly improved. Again this looks as if the changes were made to improve the capability of WordPress as a CMS. Previous versions of wordpress had what I called “option soup.” Where boxes of all sorts of options simply appeared… well… everywhere. Sure with plug ins you could turn off a lot of the options that didn’t seem to matter, but it was a hassle and certainly didn’t make wordpress easier on clients that were not tech savy.
The layout and labeling of the editor interface is much more intuitive. The more complicated items such as custom fields are located below the fold where most users can safely ignore them, and logical workflow boxes are placed where they should. For example excerpt is under the post, where tags and categories are to the right.
On the pages editor you have a handy “Page Attribute” section that allows you to select the page parent, template, and order.
Additionally in both editors you have easy options to turn on / off any section that seems unnecessary.
The Bad
The only area I have had significant trouble with is the image uploading interface. When I used the flash loader I seemed to be able to select files but not upload them, weird? Inserting the image into the post was a bit hidden, having to “show the image” and see the details in order to find the insert image is a bit clunky. Let’s face it, being able to put pictures into a site/blog is extremely important to most clients. This being as difficult as it was is not insignificant.
Overall…
Overall the upgrade is a huge improvement, especially looking from a clients perspective. The main areas I would love to see improvement is some ability to create custom write panels with out doing hacking, and easier linking interface (if you want to link to another page on your site you have to copy and paste it? come on now!) and better navigation control capabilities.
I am sure that in future releases these will be improved and wordpress will continue to excel as a framework.
UPPERCASE – Welcome
UPPERCASE books. UPPERCASE magazine. Design & Typography. Illustration … Made by UPPERCASE. Eclecto Papergoods. Eclecto: Prim & Proper. Eclecto: Read & Write …3D perspective drawings – with CSS?!
What ’til you see this thing. Craziness, I tell you! James at Brothercake has created a 3D dungeon model through clever manipulation of CSS and the DOM. It even has correct shading – done on the fly! – to effectively convey perspective. How did he do it? The solution builds off of Tantek Çelik’s Study of Regular Polygons (which is fascinating in its own right), adding some Javascript to accomplish the shading. Check out the examples at Brothercake and appreciate CSS borders in a way you never thought possible. (You can even navigate through the CSS-based underworld!)Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments