Devon Govett is a fan of the new CSS3 property text-overflow:
There are a few CSS features that Microsoft pioneered and has had available to developers in Internet Explorer for a long time now. One of those features is the text-overflow property, which is now in CSS3 and has implementations in Safari, and Opera. Firefox still does not support this feature, but I have heard that it will in Firefox 3.1.
Here is a rundown of what the property does. When text overflows an element’s box, the text-overflow property helps leave a visual hint to the user that there is more text. When a value of ellipsis is used, three dots will be shown before the text is clipped by overflow: hidden.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, c…
I wanted to be able to use this feature in all browsers, so I wrote a small jQuery plugin in order to support Firefox. To use, just call ellipsis() on a jQuery object. For example:
$("span").ellipsis();
The Qooxdoo gang have created tests for Taskspeed with some surprising results:
On IE qooxdoo is by far the fastest framework.
Across browsers and frameworks, qooxdoo gained the highest ranks on all versions of IE (i.e. 6, 7 and 8), and made its lowest mark coming out third on Firefox 3.0. This exceptional IE performance also leads to the best overall score. The IE results are a big surprise and we’ll try to investigate, what we do different (better) than all the other JavaScript libraries.
As always performance tests should be taken with a grain of salt. It’s hard to judge whether all implementations are really equivalent. For example in the jQuery tests John Resig implemented all tests in a pure jQuery way. There are obvious optimizations he consciously omited, but it apparently reflects the genuine jQuery coding style. There is no official qooxdoo way to work with the DOM yet, so we modeled our tests closely after the Dojo and jQuery tests.
Fabian Jakobs analyzes why they’ve performed so well, speculating that because they built a GUI toolkit they’ve been optimizing DOM operations since the beginning to keep it fast–and because they use Sizzle, their lack of attention to CSS optimizations didn’t kill them.
Fabian also mentions that these results encourage their intention to make qooxdoo’s DOM API available stand-alone:
These results show that we have a good base and encourage us to move forward in this direction.
You can check out the tests for yourself, though as Fabian mentions in his post, they require a trunk build of qooxdoo.
Sometimes I get an inspiration to improve my blog with new element or plugin and that’s where problem starts. Sure I can hard code new snippet directly into template file or spend couple of hours trying to find suitable solution on WordPress website.
There is a very good chance that feature I want to include on my blog has been already implemented by someone but I have no idea how he named this plugin or which section he posted it in.
Last time I got lucky thanks to the Pixel Shoppe with his recommendations on plugins that I can use with WordPress blog.
They were describing AdSense Manager plugin which supports multiple ad networks and that’s exactly what I was looking for. In addition this plugin gives you full control over ad placements without need to modify styles or source files.
I found more good recommendations on other WordPress plugins, tweaks and template modifications. General tips for bloggers section they have is also interesting read…
I can’t write about all the good stuff I saw on Pixel Shoppe blog but you can find articles about web design, SEO and marketing, wordpress and blogging, money making tips.
For bloggers, internet marketers and especially for newbies who is just starting out on the internet it’s definitely worth few minutes of your time to read Pixel Shoppe articles or watch some of wordpress video tutorials.
Have something to say regarding the subject in my post? Post your comment and I will be happy to thank thank most active commentators with direct link!
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You probably noticed “Live Traffic Feed” widget that I have in the right sidebar and today I took a deeper look what else I can get from it… Turned out this little widget is quite more powerful than it looks from outside.
In the basic view FeedJit display visitors in real time with the link to the referring page so you can check who sending you traffic right from your front page. If you click on “Watch in real time” link on the bottom of the widget it will forward to the FeedJit website where you can see more extended results.
For example if visitor was referred by the search engine – there will be exact search term he used to find your site. Also it shows browser and operating system visitors are using and if they left your site by clicking on one of the links – you’ll see which link it was. Two more options – visitors map and statistics for most popular pages.
This little widget could be a very nice analytical tool but the drawback is – it does not provide any historical data. All you can get is real time 20 or so results. If at some point developers decide to add some historical traffic results it can be very useful tool, probably even better than Google analytics which is far from being accurate.
Good thing I noticed – this widget loads very fast (much faster than Digg of Feedburner) and does not affect speed of your pages. Everything is external – all you do is insert small code snippet (can use sidebar text widget).
So if you want to have some fun watching who is knocking in the door and how they found you – go check out FeedJit.com and let me know what you think of it. Widget is free to use and does not require registration.
Have something to say regarding the subject in my post? Post your comment and I will be happy to thank thank most active commentators with direct link!
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There are a ton of web design galleries available on the web, and we’d like to know which web design, CSS/XHTML, Flash gallery you frequent the most to get inspiration and your creative juices flowing.
Two prizes to give away!
To make things interesting, SnobbySlice, a top-notch PSD to XHTML service for coders and by coders, is offering two lucky winners a 2-page PSD to XHTML/CSS conversion service, a $498 value. Two participants of this survey will be selected at random to win their excellent PSD to XHTML service. You can see the SnobySlice prices here.
How to vote
To vote, simply leave a comment below in the following format:
vote: http://urlofwebdesigngallery.com
For example, my personal favorite is The Best Designs, so my vote would be: vote: http://www.thebestdesigns.com/
The details
- You must leave a valid email address when filling up the comment form so that we can contact you if you’ve won.
- You can only cast your vote once.
- Contest ends on April 13, 2009, after which comments will be disabled.
- Winners will be selected at random using a MySQL query similar to other contests.
- Format your vote as specified or you risk the chance of not being able to participate.
About SnobbySlice
SnobbySlice takes your design, in many formats, and then converts it into “code” which makes it ready for the web (XHTML/CSS). They promise high-quality, rapid, timely, and very competitive prices for all projects they partake in: here’s where you can learn more about their services.
Google Ventures seeks to discover and grow great companies, they believe in the power of entrepreneurs to do amazing things. Google Ventures is broadly interested in startups in industries including consumer Internet, software, hardware, clean-tech, bio-tech, health care and others.
They invest anywhere from seed funding to tens of millions of dollars and embrace the challenge of helping young companies grow from the garage to global relevance. They’re looking for entrepreneurs who are tackling problems in creative and innovative ways. Are you one of them?
TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions. TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks.
When you submit an image to be searched, TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or ‘fingerprint’ for it, then compares this fingerprint to every other image in their index to retrieve matches. TinEye can even find a partial fingerprint match.
TinEye does not typically find similar images; it finds exact matches including those that have been cropped, edited or resized. I have found TinEye very useful, you can easily find out who has stolen your images from your website or portfolio. You can see how powerful TinEye is by checking out their search examples.
Protovis is a visualization toolkit for JavaScript using the canvas element. It takes a graphical approach to data visualization, composing custom views of data with simple graphical primitives like bars and dots. These primitives are called marks, and each mark encodes data visually through dynamic properties such as color and position. Although marks are simple by themselves, you can combine them in interesting ways to make rich, interactive visualizations.
To facilitate this, Protovis supports panels and inheritance. A panel is a container for marks; the contained marks are replicated for each data point on the panel. You can vary the panel position to create small multiple displays, or you can overlay panels. Inheritance lets you derive new marks from existing ones, while sharing some or all of the same properties. This is the same principle as cascading in CSS, or prototypal inheritance in JavaScript.
Please note: Protovis is in its early stages of development. At the moment, they only support Firefox 3, but they plan on adding support for Chrome and Safari 4.
While many bloggers maintain a blog for personal or social reasons or to generate an income, there are other bloggers who utilize their blogs to promote a cause. These blogs may be aimed at targeting a specific political or social cause depending on the interests of the blogger as well as blogger’s opinion that the blog can produce the political or social changes they are seeking. Blogs which are committed to promoting a particular cause may face more adversity than blogs with a lighter theme but they can also be very effective. However, blog owners who opt to maintain this type of blog should be aware of the ramifications of this type of blog. For example blog owners may receive negative comments from readers of the blog who disagree with the cause. This article will offer a few tips for choosing a cause for a blog and for promoting the blog to interested visitors.
Choosing a Cause for a Blog
Choosing a cause for a blog can vary in difficulty from extremely easy to incredibly difficult. The difficulty in making this decision will depend largely on the personal beliefs of the blog owner. A blog owner who is already committed to a particular cause will likely find this decision to be rather simple while blog owners who either have no strong social or political convictions or who have a wide variety of causes they wish to promote can find making this decision to be rather difficult. There are, however, a few factors the blog owner should carefully consider before selecting a cause to promote in a blog.
First and foremost a blog owner should select an issue for which they are either already quite knowledgeable or for which they are willing to do a great deal of research. This is important because the blog owner should post blog entries on a regular basis. These blog entries should be accurate and informative to the reader. Therefore, the blog owner should be well versed in the subject matter or at least interested in learning more about the subject matter.
Blog owners should also carefully consider the potential for influencing blog visitors regarding the topic of the blog. Although it will not be possible to convince all visitors to the blog to believe in the cause promoted by the blog, the blog owner should select a subject with which he is confident visitors to the blog will be influenced to agree with the viewpoints he presents in the blog.
Promoting the Blog to Interested Visitors
Once a blog owner decides on a subject for the blog, it is time to figure out how to promote the blog to the target audience. This can be accomplished in a number of different ways. For the sake of brevity, this article will discuss promoting a blog through search engine optimization and promoting a blog through participation in relevant forums.
Search engine optimization is a very effective way for promoting a blog. This practice involves making efforts to increase the search engine rankings to ensure interested Internet users are directed to the blog. This can be done in a number of different ways including careful use of appropriate keywords, appropriate use of tags such as title tags and image tags and generating back links to the blog. All of these efforts can help to improve search engine rankings which should also improve blog traffic.
Blog owners can also promote their blog by participating in relevant forums and message boards. The blog owner may simply participate in these forums and offer relevant input while including a link to the blog in his signature. Other forum users are likely to click on the link if the blog owner is well respected within the forum. The blog owner may even be able to incorporate a link to his blog in the message body of forum posts if it appropriate and acceptable according toe the message board guidelines.
WebKreation has showed us how to create a Sliding Login Panel using Mootools. Recently, he has improved both the design and functionalities of the script and released a Nice and Clean Sliding Login Panel in jQuery this time. The panel overlaps content instead of pushing the content down. Although the script is really simple with the basic jQuery “SlideUp” and “SlideDown” effect, the design of the panel looks really neat and pretty. You may find it useful on some of your projects.
