Archive for Web Development
· July 21, 2008 at 5:11 am · Web Development, Writing Advice
Tags: brands, FeedBurner, help, multiple, options, readers, subscribe
When getting started building a brand Online, a lot of people ask what should they do first? Well after you get your content flowing, you need a way for people to follow that content. That is where RSS and all the various feed readers out there come into play.
Everybody has their own way of doing things though, so you need to make sure you meet everybody’s needs. Thanks to services like FeedBurner, this is pretty easy. From inside their web site you can generate tons of those subscription links, as well as your standard big orange button and even e-mail newsletter management. It is by far the best option out there.
As a rule of thumb, you want to give people the ability to follow you via:
- Your Domain (visiting your web site)
- Via RSS (using the feed reader of their choosing)
- and a newsletter (which you can easily setup with an RSS feed with FeedBurner)
Also it never hurts to let people know your RSS feed over and over again. Such as how I am right now begging you informing you to subscribe to this feed if you want more informative posts just like the one you just read:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/mitchelaneous
· July 16, 2008 at 5:33 am · Web Development
Tags: 2.6, blogs, cms, fixed, install, updates, upgrade, WordPress
Thus far I have to say that WordPress 2.6 looks like a pretty awesome upgrade. Just did a few upgrades myself, but haven’t had time yet to play with everything that is new…
I’m happy to announce that version 2.6 of WordPress.org is now available, almost a month ahead schedule. Version 2.6 “Tyner,” named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5.
Also here are some of the improvements, updates and upgrades:
- Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
- Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
- Bulk management of plugins.
- A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
- Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
- Plugin update notification bubble.
- Customizable default avatars.
- You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
- Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
- Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
- You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
- Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.
- Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
- You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
- A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
- Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.
- Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.
You can read more (and watch a video tour) from WordPress.org about it here:
http://wordpress.org/development/2008/07/wordpress-26-tyner/
You can download WordPress 2.6 here:
http://wordpress.org/download/
Also looks like somebody has already found the easter egg in it too.
For those of you using cPanel/Fantastico to manage your install and upgrades, the upgrade for you might not come for a couple of more weeks. Are you excited about WordPress 2.6 yet?
· July 15, 2008 at 5:19 am · Web Development
Tags: demos, development, features, javascript, meteora, mootools, scripts, tools
The team behind Meteora have set out to do something different and cool. They have launched a lunch box filled with rich and customizable web applications that you can use right here, right now. No pages of documentation to be read, and no need for excessive programing knowledge.
Here are a few more details from the developers:
Meteora is built on top of MooTools and the package comes with a full version of that framework. If you’re already a MooTools user you may read Quick start for mootools users, if you have not used MooTools before just keep reading.
After you have uncompressed Meteora, you’ll notice that it’s around 1.1M in size, this is mainly because of all the images it contains, also because it’s distributed with a full version of the MooTools framework. But do not worry about loading times, with Meteora’s automatic dependency resolution your browser will download only the javascript the page needs and nothing more.
I do have to say, some of this looks even easy enough for me to wrap my head around. These tools would be perfect to slice into your recent project or web page and offer a lot of eye candy and functionality to the mix.
Not convinced yet? Check out the demos to see this powerful set of tools at work.
· July 14, 2008 at 4:51 am · Online Tools, Web Development
Tags: backgrounds, create, free, generator, graphics, patterns, web-dev
Need some tiled bliss to lay on the background of your own recent web creation? BgPatterns.com is the background generator that you want to use. Not only does it have dozens of designs to pick from, you can also set the color, size of the design, and also the level that it is rotated at.
I promise you, once you get started you will see this is just more fun to figure out if you play with it some… change your colors up, and try to get as creative as you can. Want to see an example of the end result? I used the first background I made on my Twitter profile.
Snazzy right? Check it out and make your own at BgPatterns.com.
· July 8, 2008 at 6:52 am · Web Development
Tags: developers, editors, free, open-source, tools, wysiwyg
Not often do you see applications out there aimed less at the users and more at the developers. OpenWYSIWYG is about to change that. They are delivering an open source, cross browser editor they want developers to use.
Some of the features of OpenWYSIWYG include:
- Bold, italicize, or strike text
- Align text: left, center, right, or justify
- Create superscript and subscript
- Indent or outdent text
- Create ordered and unordered lists
- Hyperlink text
- Cut, copy, and paste
- Undo or redo
If your needing a powerful text area in your next Web application you may be developing, here is one piece to the puzzle that is already ready to go at http://www.openwebware.com/.
· June 24, 2008 at 5:18 am · Web Development
Tags: 2.6, beta, bookmarklet, news, previews, WordPress
With Firefox 3 out, now I need something else to look forward to in the area of tech. Hmm, WordPress is already working on version 2.6 you say? I like WordPress, and the hinted at list of new features looks to be building on an already solid 2.5.
Here are a few things to look forward to in WordPress 2.6:
-
Post Revisioning
- A “Press This” bookmarklet for tumblelog style quick posting
- A new image editing dialog that offers lots of control over the images in your posts
- Theme previewing as seen on WordPress.com
- Built-in word counting in the post editor
- The ability to relocate your content directory
- The ability to move wp-config.php out of your web root
- Drag-and-drop sortable galleries
- Bulk delete, activate, and deactivate for plugins
- Check box range selection with shift-click
You can check out the full list of goodies over at Ryan’s blog and also pickup the beta 1 if you have a place you’d like to play with it.
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