Asphalt Roads

I’m looking for a sidebar widget capable of delivering the content of just one tag of my del.icio.us feed. Does it exists?

In the begining there was only your eyes and the option to inspect the source code of each web page. Then came Firefox (was called Firebird at the time but dropped that name since a DB had it before) and with FF we got plugins — add-ons that can enhance the browser to each one’s desires.

One of the handiest plugins is/was Web Developer Toolbar. With it you can inspect code, do real-time edition, check sizes, validate, outline divs, show names… Very convenient. Then came Firebug, a kind of web developer toolbar. It has the same set of basic features that WDT but they are much more «visual». You can see all the parameters you’ll need and then some.

For the time, and it was recently updated to version 1.04, it’s my favorite tool.

Clients gladly request dynamic sites, with CMS capabilities so they can update their content when it’s needed without having to phone the designer for a quick fix.

But the same hypothetical client has been using MS Word for years and wants the same functionality. He or she expects full control over fonts, colors, layouts. And at the moment he/she realizes it’s not as it was on Word, quickly says “hey, but Word has that save as HTML button somewhere”.

Yes, it has happened to me several times.

When you work on a css-based web design basically you just work your way from the content to the aesthetics of your site. This is easy to say but difficult to understand.

At MBoffin.com I found a really nice GIF animation of the whole process. It’s mesmerizing, I shouted “that’s the way it’s done” when I saw it for the first time. Enjoy.

Create a PDF with free tools is rather easy. Going a little bit deeper requires more knowledge, time and money not directly proportional to the expected results. And that’s just for users that are prone to research on their own. The vast majority of users doesn’t want to be bother with installing new applications, learning different ways or just slowing down their workflow.

Peter Forret has a great idea — let the PDF exist in a space similar to what YouTube is for videos.

He goes a long way explaining the inner workings of this system, and wisely avoids the copyright problem.

The service of his dreams would be relatively easy to set up, he lists the following features:

• The difference between automatically downloading or opening a document can be controlled with the Content-Type HTTP header.
• the JPG preview of a PDF file can be created with ImageMagick + GhostScript (free)
• you could easily add the same services for remote PDFs, i.e. the customer gives a URL instead of uploading a document. There is a whole copyright minefield there that I will wisely ignore.
• Since we will have stored or cached each PDf file, it’s easy to let users add PDFs to their own PDFviewr storage account.
• A connection to a remote print and bind service like Print(fu) is very easy to make. It’s a pity Print(fu) does not ship to Europe yet, because I would surely use them to have e.g. the DCI specs (176 pages) printed in a nice booklet.
• The equivalent for Youtube’s video format conversion (Quicktime, MPEG4, AVI … to Flash video) is our PDF conversion to HTML, JPG.
• Since documents are normally formatted in portrait orientation (higher than wide) and computer screens are normally in landscape orientation (wider than high), they are no natural match. To view a PDF document on screen, one could use a two-facing-pages layout for large screens, or a half-a-page-at-a-time approach for smaller screens.
• In all our web 2.0 enthousiasm, we could add folksonomy (tags), comments, ratings … so that “good content” would float up.
• Monetisation? Well, add a payment system for commercial documents.

That, at least for me, sounds good. If he gets working on this possibly he can have a succesful start-up company.

A vector-based paint program? Yes, but this time it’s a web tool. Great.LiThA - Paint {Alpha}

Transparency in images is something graphical designers have enjoyed for years but HTML design lacked this feature. W3C have published some specifications for it, but in my experience it wasn’t usefult since it was on CSS3 and, to the extent of my knowledge, support for it on major browsers was quirky at least.I was wrong, at least Firefox, IE and Opera already support it in a somewhat usable way. It came into my attention following closely the develop of techniques such as Lightbox.js and its descendants that make a dark shade appear over your viewport, similar to the Dashboard function in the recent versions of MacOS.

Now I found this explanation-tutorial at Mandarin Design, it shows some nifty uses fot this opacity property. I’ll be testing it very soon.

I found this while googling for a DOM inspector replacement. This is a good compendium of web developer tools available in Firefox. Link.

"[D]el.icio.us has more RSS than HTML traffic"

Joshua Schacter - del.icio.us - Things we’ve learned

Picture by Larsz

Here’s the example.

First, different header pictures on each page. That’s an easy one. Just edit the img tag on each one. What I’ve still haven’t figured out is how to implement that on WordPress. Main page will be index.php but different sections will be made with the so-called “static pages” function. I think that’s the CMS part of WP in action, but how do I control the header images on each one independently? My first approach will be making a page template file (page.php) without header information. That way I could edit each one on the Manage area.
Second, a navigation menu made up with images and with hover changes. This is not as easy and thus, at the moment it’s not reacting to hover action. My first thought is to use Flash for it, but I’m sure there must be another way. I’ve already search list-a-matic for a similar example but couldn’t find any lists based on different images. It could be a sliding background image, but I can’t think of some way to expand an empty list item so it can be clickable. There must be an obvious solution but right now it escapes my head. My last resource would be to use javascript and DOM in a way similar to what Dreamweaver calls behaviours.

Last problem — h2 tag color different for each section. That could be solved with a template that doesn’t include those h2 tags but since they come from the WP’s loop it’s rather hard to mess with it.

Anyway, happy birthday to me.