blog.paulgueller.com

I recently discovered an interesting applet developed by Aharef in 2006 that uses the Processing programming language to graph the element tree of a given web page.

For instance the current markup on this site gets rendered like this:

According to the documentation and examples, the colors represent:

• blue: links (the A tag)
• red: tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
• green: DIV tags
• violet:  images (the IMG tag)
• yellow: forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
• orange: linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
• black: the HTML tag, the root node
• gray: all other tags

Processing is an open-source programming language and development environment used for prototyping and producing images, animation, and interactions within a visual context. The code-graphing applet requires Java, but processing.js has made the language more widely accessible and available for experimentation.

Every web developer that I know is sick and tired of making compromises and hacks to accommodate Internet Explorer 6 and other browsers that are not standards compliant. While graceful degradation (or progressive enhancement, depending on which philosophy you subscribe to) will continue to be a par for the course for the forseeable future, it would be great if we could fully take advantage of the available technologies and minimize crosss-browser tesing costs in our project budgets.

To this goal, Nick Stakenburg released a script that gently alerts the user that their browser could use an upgrade. Pushup detects the version of the client and briefly flashes a notice with a link to download an update. The entire package is fairly lightweight (only 11kb, zipped) and includes the images, sylesheets and JavaScript files to run. Implementation and customization information is provided on the download site, in addition to ports of the function for dojo and jQuery.

This doesn’t really help users whose IT departments prohibit them from updating, but if it helps those who are unaware that there is a better web experience to be had then it is worthy of praise and support.

If you haven’t heard of it already, sIFR lets you appease all those designers by integrating custom fonts onto your standards-compliant web page without turning them into images. On its own, it’s not a small or straightforward undertaking, requiring a number of additional CSS and JavaScript files to function. However, the recent release of the sIFR jQuery plug-in should make it more accessible to developers:

First, jQuery makes finding the item(s) that you want to replace as easy as using CSS. Then, the jQuery sIFR Plugin does all the work of figuring out the text, files, sizes, colors, and any other configurations needed for the conversion. The jQuery sIFR plugin is fully configurable and can choose how little or how much you want to customize the display of the sIFRed text. Finally, the jQuery Flash Plugin does a most excellent job of embedding the sIFR flash into your web page. After all is said and done, you should have beautiful sIFR replaced text with consistent behavior across all major browsers.

All the resources are available for download from the developer’s site, as well a simple API and usage examples for easy customization.

Among the many interesting things discussed in the interview with Sitepoint, John Resig again brought up a project titled Sizzle. No, he’s not talking about adding POW BANG SHAZAM to our web layouts; it’s an initiative to create standardized and easily-implemented CSS-based selectors for JavaScript. Aside from its lightweight and extensible nature, jQuery’s ability to easily assign behaviors and attributes to custom-created arrays of elements without much hassle is one of its most appealing features. Using a similar scheme for other libraries, frameworks or even in stand-alone cases would not only simplify programming (goodbye document.getElementsByTagName “for” loops!) but would improve the language as a whole by making scripts more readable and accessible.

Only three months since its initial release, the instantly popular browser from Google has had the “beta” tag removed from it. Check out the official posting from the developers.

It’s still officially only available for Windows, but can be run elsewhere with a few hacks.

If you’re reading this, you probably have them: social networks. Del.icio.us, Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, Virb, and countless others that supposedly keep us in closer contact with those close to us. A quick Google search returns over 34 MILLION results for the phrase, and it’s the holy grail, golden hammer, or panacea depending on who you talk to. But once you’ve decided which to participate in, how do you update them without wasting oodles of time?

Reviewing my Recent Posts, I have tried many times to begin a posting regimen to share information about my personal life as well as topics and links for fellow web developers with limited success. I attribute it to a combination of a lack of blogging discipline (as well as time and content) and the intimidation of having to post and update to the various services that I belong to. After performing a little research, I think I may have  painless solutions to connect and cross-link them. WordPress is the blogging software this site uses. The features that drew me to it are that it is open-source (free!), has regular updates, and is fully customizable. There is a vast library of themes and plug-ins to extend the functionality of application, and here are some of the ones I am utilizing to work toward my goals:

• WordBook notifies Facebook whenever a new blog article is published. With an easy-to-integrate API, it creates a wall post with a distinctive icon to inform all my friends.
• Twitter Tools not only lists recent tweets in a sidebar widget, but also provides the option to send post headlines to Twitter.
• FlickrRss displays photos from your profile or recent items from your photostream RSS feed.
• Digsby is not just the best new multi-client chat application that monitors e-mail and social network accounts, it also lets you create customized live chat widgets that can be placed on the page with WP-Digsby
• BONUS: If you are looking for a social network aggregator check out netvibes, which features innumerable widgets and views to keep on top of all the feeds, posts and entries on your social network. It doesn’t have a WordPress plug-in that I am aware of, but it does a kick-awesome job of being the one-stop-shop for  information updates.

Addendum: WordPress 2.7 was released today, and in conjunction with the BuddyPress plugin, appears to give developers a framework to create their OWN social network tools. Facebook beware!

I posted a link to Getting Real About Agile Design to the studio message board recently, and it set off quite a discussion internally. A number of people were hung up on the phrase “software development” and weren’t able to see the applications of planned flexibility for the greater business model. Admittedly, it is quite challenging in contrast to the waterfall model of project workflow, but Agile practices seem more fitting to the attitude and goals of this business.

From the article:

Agile is here to stay. The economic difficulties of the past months have finally put waterfall out of its misery; now more than ever, long requirements phases and vaporous up-front documentation aren’t acceptable. Software must be visible and valuable from the start.