This is my weekly post on some interesting bits and pieces I’ve found…
To kick off, a few good reasons by Davy Sims on why we should blog. I agree with all his points and many of them are the reason why I’ve started to proactively blog more in 2010.
The days of providing clients with a static site with no back end interface are now gone. Every client with any idea of how the web works will wants some control over their content without having to phone their web developer every other day. However, this does not mean a massive overhead of having to build bespoke content management systems. In fact, you would be very silly to try and reinvent the wheel here as there are a plethora of opens-source projects providing light weight CMS’s which can bent and shaped to suit most small scale projects. This week i discovered Silverstripe -which looks very promising indeed and I’m looking forward to giving it a whirl for my next project.
Sometimes, it can be quite frustrating to stare at a blank canvas when starting a web project. I’m always on the look out for sources of inspiration and 25 free online magazines for graphic designers is a great start. Don’t forget that some great inspiration can come from unlikely spaces, more than once I’ve found interior design magazines a nice alternative.
Despite preaching above about not re-inventing wheels, in the 9-5 job, I’m currently working on a custom admin interface and found this article on 34 Outstanding Admin Panels a wealth of useful pointers.
For any Javascript solutions, my first weapon of choice is Glow, and as such it can become very easy to put all faith in the framework to take care of everything. Christian Heilmann does a good job pointing out the 7 deadly sins of JS development and how to avoid them on Smashing Magazine.
This year marks Photoshop’s 20th anniversary, and it seems that there are as many blog posts highlighting epic Photoshop failures as there are lauding it’s successes. Do these atrocities ever pass under an editors nose?
Interested in space? There’s some pretty cool video content on the BBC Solar System website, launched earlier in the week..
Now that the iron fist of consumer law has came own on Microsoft, new users of Windows will soon be asked which web browser they want to use? I wonder how many will still click the only icon they recognise as “The Internet“. To prove my point, what’s a browser?
Shaun Inman has released a sneak peek of his soon to be released iPhone/iPod touch game. The idea that the graphics improve as you progress through the game is a nice touch. (no pun intended.)
If you write good blog content, you want it to be read. some tips on getting WordPress blogs slightly higher in those search engine result pages.
Web forms power the majority of web applications and good form design can’t be emphasised enough, especially due to the many browser inconsistencies involved. Make the user journey as smooth as possible by deploying some of these form tips and tricks.
I was on a course this week focusing on developing web applications with the Zend framework and was introduced to the art of Unit Testing.
I’ve noticed it’s become quite popular for web apps to use their own URL shorteners, helping tie their brand to the link. I wondered how one would implement this, did a bit of research and found this review of 10 PHP URL shortener apps.
Now, if only I could get http://mcg.ee – any Estonians want to help me out? ;)
