Sprite Animations With jQuery: Spritely
Spritely is a jQuery plugin for creating dynamic character & background animations using HTML + JavaScript.
With the power of JavaScript, the animations can be controlled on events (clicks, mouseovers) easily.
Animated elements can fly over the page without effecting any other element (can be ideal for floating-type banners) & the page still remains accessible.
Specially, for the platforms where Flash is not supported, Spritely can be an alternative (like iPhone, iPad).
It works in all major browsers including IE6.
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Weebly Announces $13,000 Prized Theme Design Contest
Weebly, a very easy-to-use, popular & web-based website-builder service has just opened its theme gallery to all designers.
And, to celebrate this, they launched a design contest with $13,000 in prizes which the entries will be judged by well-known designers:
- Michael Cronan (acknowledged with the naming and identities of Tivo and Verio and naming the Amazon Kindle)
- Scott Thomas (former design director of Obama for America)
- Jason Putorti (former lead designer of Mint.com)
- Andrew Wilkinson (Founder, MetaLab)
- Dustin Curtis
- Rob Martin
Prizes are $10,000 for the winner, $2000 for the 2nd & $1000 for the 3rd position.
Creating a theme for Weebly is very easy as you don't have to worry for the HTML-CSS. Just focus on the creativity, design a layered PSD & Weebly team will convert it for you.
If the design created is not one of the winners, it may still be added to the themes database by Weebly & designers will be credited.
Deadline for submitting designs is April 30th, 2010 & it is open to everyone.
To read more and join the contest, check the contest page.
P.S. This post is a sponsored review.
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How to Choose Right CSS Frameworks
CSS Frameworks allow you to rapidly improve and speed up your development time when used correctly, and provide a powerful way to style our websites and applications with flexibility and effectiveness.
So How Do We Choose the Right One?
The first step you need to take is to make sure you decide upon a framework that has an established and accurate representation of detailed documentation. This is vital to the steps you’ll take in implementing and utilizing your framework the way it was intended. Next, you should analyze what problems the specified frameworks of your choice will solve. As you come across frameworks that you believe might “fit the bill” for the project(s) at hand, then it would be wise to compare each of them and elaborate on which framework addresses which concerns and satisfies your needs.
Also, don’t hesitate to ask other developers and colleagues which framework has worked best for them and why? This will help you gain valuable insight based on the experience of others, something that can’t be bought. Another point I would like to make is the role your chosen framework’s community plays. How big is it? Are the members helpful? Does it provide invaluable resources? Every one of these questions help you determine if your framework’s community is going to be of use. The logical point of view is, the larger and more involved the community is, the better your chances are at finding the right type of help when you need it.
Below we will take a look at 8 of the best frameworks we found to be useful for both developers and designers.
Blueprint CSS
The Blueprint CSS framework uses a grid-system that has pre-built typography and includes various plugins, built-in form styles and more. With BP you’ll also find good stable documentation, a wiki, an active discussion group, and examples of sites built on the Blueprint system.
Elements CSS Framework
Overall, the Elements framework makes it much easier and efficient to write CSS code. It’s a way to keep your files organized, benefit from a collection of present classes that can make your development process much friendlier, and it’ll automatically add respective icons for external links so that users will be able to quickly find and access them as well.
Content with Style
Content with Style is a CSS framework that helps you style and structure your website with amazing design and typographical elements. With six different layouts to choose from that include vertical navigation, two content columns, horizontal navigation with two columns of content and useful one content columns. Content with Style is an efficient way to “prioritize” the content on your site and focus on areas such as the header, main content, sub content, and more.
Emastic
This lightweight CSS framework uses PX, EM, or % widths for the process of signaling a page width, and it is also based on an elastic layout. Emastic comes with various pre-defined styles for your typography and much more. Predominantly, the grid is made up of blocks that are sized from 5 to 75em units. The default sizes can be changed at any time and the frameworks design options depend on the grid layout.
960 Grid System
The 960 grid system is a powerful CSS framework that lets us develop and prototype websites rapidly. The layouts are based on 12-16 columns and the layout templates are for Illustrator, Photoshop, Expression Design, Fireworks and more. You can also print a variety of templates for use with pen and paper if that’s what suits you best.
Yui Grids
The foundational YUI Grids CSS offers four preset page widths, six preset templates, and the ability to stack and nest subdivided regions of two, three, or four columns. The 4kb file provides over 1000 page layout combinations. Features included are support for fluid-width, easy customization, flexible template columns, and more.
Yaml
“Yet Another Multicolumn Layout” (YAML) is an (X)HTML/CSS framework for creating modern and flexible floated layouts. The structure is extremely versatile in its programming and absolutely accessible for end users. YAML is focussed on web standards and accessibility, slim framework core with numerous extensions, complete multilingual documentation, and robust, flexible layout concept (columns & grids).
SenCSs
SenCSs stands for Sensible Standards CSS baseline, (pronounced “sense”). It supplies sensible styling for all repetitive parts of your CSS, and doesn’t force a lay-out system on you. This allows you to focus on actually developing your website’s style. SenCSs isn’t a framework like other CSS frameworks, it doesn’t include a layout system littered with silly classes and pre-set grids, so what does SenCSs do? SenCSs does everything else: baseline, fonts, paddings, margins, tables, lists, headers, blockquotes, forms and more.
CSS3, Please! – The Cross-Browser CSS3 Rule Generator
CSS3, Please! is a web-based & simple-yet-effective cross-browser CSS3 rules generator.
As every browser may require different prefixes for the CSS3 properties, this tool makes it so easy by providing them all with an editable & well-commented way where the output can be seen instantly.
Currently, it helps you write the rules for: border-radius, box-shadow, linear-gradients, rotation & @font-face. Some other transforms like skew & scale will be added soon.
For some transforms, that Internet Explorer can support via IE filters, they are mentioned too.
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Open Source And Live Web Analytics: SlimStat
SlimStat is an open source web analytics application that collects & presents statistics information about your website.
It is built with PHP-MySQL & can be integrated into websites with JavaScript (like Google Analytics) or PHP.
For the given period, the application can display:
- the number of visitors/pageviews
- referrer URLs, domains
- search terms
- browsers, OSs, countries, screen sizes
There is also a "paths" feature that shows a user's browsing path page-by-page.
You may be asking, "why to use SlimStat instead of Google Analytics?" The best answer would be "live stats".
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Win 5 Must Read Web Design Books
Today we have a very special giveaway for our precious readers – five of the best and most popular design books currently available. Just have a look at the line up of books we have, the books are: A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web, jQuery: Novice To Ninja, Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog, Digging into Wordpress and finally, Rocket Surgery.
Who wouldn’t want these on their bookshelf. Read further on in this post to find out how to enter and, hopefully, win these fantastic books.
Here is an overview of the books you can win:
A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web
A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web aims to teach you techniques for designing your website using the principles of graphic design. Featuring five sections, each covering a core aspect of graphic design: Getting Started, Research, Typography, Colour, and Layout. Learn solid graphic design theory that you can simply apply to your designs, making the difference from a good design to a great one.
jQuery: Novice To Ninja
jQuery: Novice to Ninja, from sitepoint.com, will show you how to unleash the amazing power of jQuery. In this easy-to-follow guide, you’ll master all the major tricks and techniques that jQuery offers—within hours.
jQuery has quickly become the JavaScript library of choice, and it’s easy to see why. This JavaScript framework dramatically improves how you add interactivity and animation to your website.
Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog
Smashing WordPress shows you how to utilize the power of the WordPress platform, and provides a creative spark to help you build WordPress-powered sites that go beyond the obvious. You will learn the core concepts used to build just about anything in WordPress, resulting in fast deployments and greater design flexibility.
Inside, WordPress expert Thord Daniel Hedengren takes you beyond the blog and shows you how WordPress can serve as a CMS, a photo gallery, an e-commerce site, and more.
Digging into Wordpress
There is much to learn about the World’s most popular publishing platform. From your first steps of learning about WordPress all the way through maintaining a site throughout the years, this book is packed with truly practical information.
Rocket Surgery
Rocket Surgery, written by Steve Krug, it’s a how-to book that explains exactly how to do your own web site usability testing.
How can you win these books?
To Enter the Competition:
- Join Design Reviver Answers and ask or answer a question.
- Tweet this message: Win 5 must read web design books from @DesignReviver http://bit.ly/aFYQ1L RT to enter the giveaway!
The winners will be announced next week.
Awesome Speech Bubbles With Pure CSS3
Nicolas Gallagher is sharing a creative way on creating good-looking speech bubbles with CSS3.
There are no images or JavaScript in the implementations but uses the :before and/or :after pseudo-elements to produce basic shapes.
The HTML remains semantic however we should remember that CSS3 is not fully supported by all major browsers & we may again require JavaScript to add this support (like IE7.js).
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Traffic Light Feedback Giveaway – Winners Announced (And 50% Lifetime Discount)
Last week, a post was announcing the giveaway of 3 annual Traffic Light Feedback accounts ( £180 GBP/account) to WebResourcesDepot readers.
Today, the winners are selected. But before that, let's remember:
What is Traffic Light Feedback?
It offers a very simple way of getting feedback from users: asking a question & having 3 clickable responses (green, yellow and red) where users don't have to fill anything.
You can import customers lists easily & auto-send them the feedback forms with customized/branded templates. After all, it is possible to get reports.
And the winners are:
The winners are selected randomly with a database query and here they are:
- krull (comment #115834)
- Tuan (comment #116839)
- Inwebdeveloper (comment #116257)
Congratulations to the winners and thanks to everyone for contributing.
50% Lifetime Discount Code
Traffic Light Feedback offers a special discount code to all WRD readers that enables you to get the service with 50% lifetime discount (the offer ends on: March 31st 2010).
The discount code is: AD8FGWEBRE .
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Instant CMS For Static Websites: Phpns
Phpns is an open source news/content management system that will enable you to add dynamic content to any website with one line of code.
The application is not a complicated or a full-featured CMS. Rather, it is a simpler one which is very suitable for managing basic websites.
It comes with variables like adding pagination, displaying summary or the full content, RSS generation & much more.
Phpns is multi-user, can create SEO-friendly URLs & optionally, helps you create/manage templates.
The application is built with PHP, uses MySQL for storing the data & comes with a web-based installer.
Special Downloads:
Ajaxed Add-To-Basket Scenarios With jQuery And PHP
Free Admin Template For Web Applications
jQuery Dynamic Drag’n Drop
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Keeping Your Web Servers Running Smoothly
As designers and developers we generally worry about the aesthetics and behavior of a website. But what about the server it runs on that has made it all possible for this site to operate swiftly? In order to provide your clients with the best possible service you should ensure that their websites server is running smoothly on a regular basis, and what better way to do so then with intelligently designed tools that can notify you of any disturbances or irregularities that your websites server may encounter.
The following tools manage and monitor various levels of quality relating to the uptime and security of your servers. These tools will help you identify any problems so that you’re able to resolve the issues as quickly as possible. Take a look at the ones we’ve compiled below, and then test whichever ones appeal to you the most in terms of functionality and reliability.
Webmetrics GlobalWatch
GlobalWatch is an interactive tool that allows you to monitor a variety of web applications and sites. It digs deep into the root of the problem and quickly identifies and diagnoses any downtime errors, and poor performance levels in detail reports and customizable alerts. With this tool you’ll always be informed of any of your websites irregular performance.
Pingdom
Pingdom ensures that your website is accessible and responds accordingly consistently. It’s able to monitor uptime, various levels of performance, multiple applications, FTP servers, email servers and any application that’s accessible from the Internet. Pingdom provides you with detailed email and SMS alerts if anything is wrong. It also lets you read results in the form of charts and tables that are extremely legible. This tool is also available as an iPhone application.
McAfee Secure
McAfee Secure strategically monitors any and all of your severs that may be at a potential security risk. This powerful tool will protect your servers against security breaches, the end-users from being subject to identity theft, credit card frauds, viruses, scams, and your dose of annoying spam. Your site will be in good hands since McAfee will test it and certify it on a daily basis. McAfee currently monitors and certifies over 80,000 websites ranging from a wide scope of business sizes and structures.
Nimsoft Monitoring Solutions (NMS)
NMS actively monitors your servers and any applications found on the servers. Everything from CPU to memory, server resources, even logs and more are accurately monitored and recorded. Being quick and easy to install is just the beginning, NMS is also a lightweight application that has the power to monitor thousands of servers at a time. NMS is also very easy to use, alerts and details are always clear, and it also visually shows you your servers interconnected, color-coded indicators, and the response times from server-to-server. It’s a great choice no matter the size of your servers.
Simple Server Monitor
Simple Server seems to understand the importance of having a valuable application that can effectively monitor your servers. It’s designed for those on a small budget and offers a free 30-day trial. Useful features such as the monitoring of uptimes, performance levels, and FTP/HTTP/POP/IMAP servers (to name a few) are included. It’s ideal for those who wish to receive updates and alerts within their desktop in the form of pop-up messages, SMS format, and charts.
Solarwinds Orion Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Orion’s NPM tool monitors all of your servers and ensures that their running without any problems every minute of the day. It also monitors all of your routers, switches and wireless access points within your network as well. It comes with a fairly easy set-up and the support of 100’s of expert network engineers. It’s extremely easy to use and Orion can be up and running in less than an hour right after it’s been downloaded!
ENVIROMUX Server Environment Monitoring System
Nagios hit the ball out of the park when they developed powerful tool that monitors your servers temperature, humidity, liquid presence, motion, intrusion and vibration all to ensure that your server’s in tip-top operating capacity. You’re able to create custom alarm signals, monitor and manage security conditions over IP, monitor/ping up to 64 IP network devices, and manage your servers using a single attractive web interface for all systems connected.
SiteUptime
SiteUptime works like clock-work by monitoring your website 24/7 365 days a year. SU provides free and advanced remote monitoring services that notifies you when your servers are down via email and or SMS text messaging. This will ensure that the errors are sent to you with priority and speed so that you’re able to quickly fix any problems with your connections. SU allows you to view detailed statistics about your website’s availability and server response times anytime you’d like. Overall, it’s a very useful multiple monitoring tool for servers that runs tests on specific intervals (every couple seconds).
Further Resources
- How to Easily Monitor your Web Server Using PHP
- Setp-by-Step: Monitoring and tuning your IIS Web servers
- Optimizing Apache Server Performance
- How to Monitor Server Availability