Mar06
Only a few years ago, if something was animated on a website it was automatically assumed to be Flash. However, this is not the case today. With the growing popularity and wide spread use of JavaScript frameworks, sometimes you have to take a closer look to find out what is powering all of those smooth animations.
With several JavaScript frameworks available, jQuery is quickly becoming a favorite. If you are interested in using jQuery for animated effects, here are 13 excellent tutorials to get you on your way.
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\\ tags: jQuery
Mar06
1. Hack the max half-open TCP connections
If you’re on XP sp2, your TCP connections are limited to a maximum of 10. This might hurt your downloading speed because it wont let you connect to as much peers as you want. It is supposed to slow down viruses because their spreading strategy is to connect to a high amount of ip numbers, but it could cripple your torrent downloads.
A nice way to fix this is to download this patch.
Note: Some people report that their antivir reports the patch to be a Virus, This is not the case. Check out http://www.lvllord.de/ for more details on this
The patch allows you to set the maximum allowed connections to any number you want. Any number between 50 and 100 is ok (more is NOT always better).
Next you need to configure your torrent client to allow 50-100 max half-open TCP connections
uTorrent: Options > Preferences > Advanced options > net.max_halfopen
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\\ tags: BitTorrent
Mar06
Achieving beautiful typography with CSS on the web is no easy feat, and there are many limitations to what can done with type on the web. However, there are generous people out there that have taken the time to build tools and write tutorials to help you overcome these limitations and create websites with beautiful typography.
Here are some that I find most useful:
Tools
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\\ tags: CSS, CSS Tools
Mar06
Since this year is coming to a close, I wanted to take the time and look back at all of the giving that was done by the web design community. I’ve hand picked some of my favorite freebies from 2008. In this post you will find goodies ranging from icons to web apps that should all be of help to you in your upcoming projects.
A beautiful and cleverly named free font.
A large collection of 128 icons that are of the highest quality.
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Mar06
A great designer is one who can create great designs long after the latest trends have passed. When in doubt always go back to basics & the fundamentals you learned when starting out. Here are some steps I personally take that have helped me become a better designer. My hope is that this will remind you of the little things we sometimes take for granted. Please feel free to add to the list if you have tips – interacting with the community & sharing the knowledge is what it’s all about.
1 . Trends
Keeping up to date on the latest trends is important – however “trends” does not mean “copy”. Get inspiration and create your own style. See this highly effective post of 2008 Design Trends.
2. Learn & Develop
Great designers are always learning and stay fresh on the latest styles. A great resource for finding specific collections for interface design on the web is PatternTap.
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Mar06
Today most web designers do more than just design the look and feel of a web site. They often play a major part in writing the front end code. This means that a big part of the SEO or Search Engine Optimization responsibilities should fall on the designer. However, there is a large number of web designers that don’t understand this subject well enough to create a site that is fully optimized for search engines.
This article is here to provide some important tips that will aid the average and even above average web designer in improving their SEO skills.
1. Make the code prettier than the design
When building the front end of your site, make sure to use semantic code. By using descriptive tags to structure your pages, search engines will be able to read and have a better understanding of your content. This will also make the process of styling your site much easier and cleaner.
2. Use but don’t abuse your keywords
Keywords are the words that describe your content. It’s important to have them appear in strategic places throughout your page, such as: URL, title tag, and main heading tags. It’s also important to have it appear often in the body of the content, but not too often, which might cause your content to be penalized for keyword stuffing.
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\\ tags: Seo, seo tips, Web Designers
Mar06
A well rounded web designer’s day is spent immersed in multiple graphic design programs and writing front end code. All of this moving from one environment to another can make it hard to memorize such things as hot keys and shortcuts for each. This is where cheat sheets come into play. A cheat sheet is simply a printable reference or guide to a particular software package, language, framework, etc.
Here are 14 of my favorite cheat sheets.
Photoshop
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Mar05
Generally, IM Chat clients like AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Gmail, MSN et cetera are blocked in school, colleges and offices, but still you can catch up with your friends and chat without downloading or installing IM chat softwares using web based messengers. Below is the list of popular Instant Messengers that you can use anywhere, provided you are already holding an account with AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Gmail, MSN et cetera.
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Feb27
A designer’s creativity is often showcased in the little details and touches that he or she incorporates in a design. Using common, familiar objects as design elements to accent and ornament a web page is a wonderful way of showcasing one’s attention to detail.
For inspiration, I explore the trend of utilizing paper clips by providing excellent examples to showcase how designers make use of them.
Realistic paper clip used as a design ornament.
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Feb27
There are many available tools to help make web development projects quicker and more productive. Aside from a handy text editor or WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver, you can find plenty of tools and utilities that can greatly increase development speed, reduce debugging and testing time, and improve quality of the output. The tools described below are a variety of utilities, optimizers, testing, and debugging tools aimed towards helping developers create websites more efficiently.
CSS Grid Builder is an online GUI for customizing the YUI Grids CSS – a lightweight CSS framework developed by Yahoo! that comes with over 1000 page layout combinations. The CSS Grid Builder allows you to rapidly generate a CSS-based, web-standards compliant page layout in a matter of minutes (or even seconds). Once you’ve got the page layout the way you want it, all you have to do is press “Show Code” and it generates the HTML for you.
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