Yahoo! has a nice library of design patterns which can be summarized as a list of optimal solutions to common design problems.
Whenever we start to design a new website - an application, we need to decide on lots of things like "what type of pagination I will use, will I use auto-complete for forms and so.
Yahoo! Design Pattern Library aims to answer these questions with providing the generally accepting methods and information. Although tools and logics needed to be used may differ, it is a nice resource for seeing the optimum.
There are few printed publications for web designers and developers.
Website Magazine is a free magazine specially for web designers / developers that is published every 3 months. I’m a subscriber for 9 months and liked the issues until now as most of the subjects were analysed in deep. And to be honest, I like reading printed materials more.
The subscription is free but sign-ups are evaluated first and then approved. To apply for a free subscription, click here.
Although there are many different banner sizes in every website, there are some sizes which we may call the "standard ones".
Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) which represents a considerable amount of agencies and media companies for use in the creating, planning, buying and selling of interactive marketing and advertising, has the nice list of banner sizes which can be called as standard.
The list may help you while designing websites for creating the banner areas in most common sizes.
Detecting the city or country of a website visitor is an essential point in offering location based web services or content.
Loading the related language version of the website, showing different banners to visitor from foreign countries and even blocking visitors from certain locations are some examples.
IP information is the most accurate data in determining a visitor’s location.
MaxMind, a company which is one of the best in geolocation services, offers country and city IP database for free besides the paid versions. The difference between free and the paid versions are the accuracy level as free versions are updated once every month rather than every week. With a small mistake margin, they may provide what you need.
Country and city IP data comes in two versions: binary & XLS. Open source binary APIs are avaliable for PHP, Perl, Ruby & other popular languages.
Images used in websites have a serious keyword value when they are used right.
There are 3 variables, which we think of, can show search engines what the image is about? These are title, alt, and the image name. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team describing us which ones are important in this video:
What is alt attribute?
The alt attribute is used in HTML and XHTML documents to specify text that is to be rendered when the element to which it is applied cannot be rendered. In HTML 4.01, the attribute is required for the img and area element types. It is optional for the input element type and the deprecated applet element type.
Fresh is a skinnable RSS reader built entirely using AJAX running on Adobe AIR. The Fresh reader features offline RSS reading, multiple panels within a single window, tabbed browsing, and basic browser integration. Fresh is based on the YUI-Ext / Ext JS library and RSS Feed Viewer sample by Jack Slocum
Roadfinder combines two of the most popular online maps, Yahoo! Maps and Google Maps, into a single application. Search for an address by typing it in or dragging it from the desktop. There is close collaboration between these two maps as moving or zooming on either map effects the other.
Drupal, which is one of the most powerful & free content management system has a new module named Drigg for creating Digg-like websites.
Unlike other Drupal-based solutions, Drigg only needs:
- VotingAPI — a powerful Voting API available for Drupal.
- A voting form based on the VotingAPI. The forms of choice are provided by Extra Voting Forms.
- The User Karma module.
- Accessing data in the embedded SQLite database
- Updating data in the SQLite database
- Asynchronously reading text from a local file
- Creating basic custom chrome
- Connecting to the SQLite database
- Adding custom window controls to custom chrome
- Encoding a PNG using a Flash library
- Full SQLite database example (create, read, update, delete)
- Selecting a directory
- Encoding a PNG using a JavaScript encoder
- Selecting a file from the local disk
- Dragging files into an AIR application
- Applying Flash filters to HTML content
- Creating a full screen window
- Getting a list of files from the system clipboard
- Testing connectivity to an HTTP endpoint
- Save images of Yahoo! Maps to local disk as PNG
- Custom chrome example using assets from Meebo
- Selecting multiple files from disk
- Creating a new native window
- Drag complex content from AIR to native resource
- Putting files on the system clipboard
- Remembering user login with AIR encrypted local store
- Using Flash Remoting from JavaScript
- Scaling down a selected image
- Determining the dimensions of an image
- Capturing web cam images for a slideshow
- Testing connection to any socket endpoint
- Playing a sound file
- Simple stopwatch application with custom chrome
- Storing data in a SQLite database
- Synchronously reading a text file from disk
- Creating database tables in a SQLite database
- Creating a temporary file
- Dragging text from the system into an AIR application
- Extracting the EXIF thumbnail from a JPEG image
- Uploading a file in the background
- Creating a basic popup window
- Writing text content to a local file
- Reading XML data using XMLHttpRequest (XHR)
