Posts Tagged ‘CSS’

Posted on January 29, 2009 - by Khaled

Fresh news from SitePoint

SitePoint.com, the Australian online media company, has been very active during the last days. First of all they have released a new Mozilla FireFox extension (Add-on) called FireScope that integrates with Web developer tool “Firebug” to extend it with references for HTML and CSS. I checked it out and I really loved it. I think it is a lot more useful than the other SitePoint FireFox Add-on: Dust-Me selectors (That finds unused CSS selectors).
Something else is new and very useful in SitePoint. I’m talking about the JavaScript reference that completes the SitePoint References collection (with the HTML and CSS references). I was really waiting for this one myself and it turned out to be even better than what I wanted.

Finally SitePoint are looking for 4 Part-time Bloggers that will have to post 5 times per week with a minimum length of 300 words per post (The optimum being 400-600 words). So if you think you can be one of them go ahead and apply!
More hot news soon! Don’t forget to subscribe to be notified via RSS or E-mail. Or just follow me on Twitter

Posted on January 7, 2009 - by Khaled

Top 10 Web Design / Web Development Podcasts

 

 

Nowadays, Podcasting is gaining a ceaseless increasing interest. The word podcasting was created by blending the words “iPod” and “broadcast”.  This is due to the fact that the first podcasting scripts were developed for Apple iPod portable media player. However, an iPod is no longer required to listen to podcasts. Most Media Players will do the job! I prefer iTunes though as it allows searching podcasts, subscribing to them (free and paid podcasts do exist) and of course listening to them. iTunes offers really cool features for this.

Podcasts are generally a series of audio or video files which are diffused on the web via syndicated download, through Web feeds. So they are a perfect combination of RSS specification and the MP3 compression algorithm.

Over the few last years I gathered a nice collection of podcasts that I like to watch/listen to. I am going to share with you the top 10 podcasts that I favor when it comes to Web Design and Web Development.

 

1.      BoagWorld.com

Paul Boag’s Podcast (co-hosted with Marcus Lillington) started since August 2005. It has, as of today, 147 episodes. Episode 148 will be released within a week or so. Paul deals with different subjects related to the web design business. He usually invites some big names to the show. The live streaming recording is a nice bonus too!

 

2.      SitePoint.com

A fairly new, yet excellent Podcast, that started last November (2008). The Hosts are Brad Williams, Patrick O’Keefe, Stephan Segraves, and Kevin Yank. The SP Podcast is about The Web industry.  This is an outstanding show with different point of views. 5 episodes till now but the 6th is in its way soon!

 

3.      Photoshop User TV

An excellent Podcast to watch for Photoshoppers! Hosted by the Photoshop guys: Dave Cross, Matt Kloskowski, and Scott Kelby from the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP). The Photoshop guys share each week some very nice Adobe Photoshop tutorials, along with some very cool tips and tricks that will hugely increase your Photoshop productivity. 167 episodes for now.

 

4.      Web Design TV

This podcast is produced by .net magazine. This podcast deals with different web design aspects and presents several software tutorials and tips (CSS, Graphic design, Flash, Photoshop…).  The podcast started back in March 2008 and 28 episodes were released till now.

 

5.      Adobe Creative Suite Video Podcast

The Adobe Creative Suite Podcast features tips and tutorials mainly about Photoshop, Indesign and other Adobe CS software. It is hosted by Terry White. This is a 2 years old podcast that started in 2006 and still active till now.

 

6.      The Rissington Podcast

Hosted by famous web designers John Oxton and Jon Hicks. Deals with Web geeky stuff. Started in late 2007. 19 podcast episodes were released.

 

7.      php|architect’s PHP Podcast (P3)

A bi-weekly radio-style podcast full of news, events and discussions about PHP. It is probably one of the oldest Podcasts on the net as it started since 2003.

 

8.      Appclinic

A video Podcast with tutorials for graphic designers hosted by Adam Hay.

 

9.      Rookie Designer

An audio podcast about web design as a job/career hosted also by Adam Hay. This podcast wasn’t very active lately but the early episodes are great.

 

10.  Rails Podcast

A nice rails podcast.

 

Now even if some of these are less active these days, listening to older episodes is really a good thing that will help learn tons of things. Most of them are available for subscription via Apple iTunes which the media player I really recommande for podcasts.

Posted on December 22, 2008 - by Khaled

Internet Explorer 6: less painful?

Yes, Web designers hate Internet Explorer 6. This old browser was released back in 2001 but still quite frequently used by many people despite that it is really insecure, buggy, slow and far from being standards compliant. There was even an “Internet Explorer 6 Uninstall Day” held, thanks to a facebook group, on the 27th of August, 2008 which corresponds to the 7th birthday of IE6.

But that initiative was not very successful.

But lately things are changing. MSIE6 is still painful, but thanks to the efforts of Dean Edwards the situation is now really better!

Dean created a new Scripts library, IE7, available on Google code that will make Internet Explorer behave like a standards-compliant browser as It fixes many HTML and CSS issues and makes transparent PNG work correctly under IE5 and IE6. Still the transparent PNG image can’t be tiled nor can it be positioned using respectively background-repeat and background-position.

Thanks Dean!!