This jQuery plugin generates Sparklines (small inline charts) directly in the browser using data supplied either inline in the HTML, or via JavaScript.

It’s that time of year when the trees turn golden, the sun stays close to the horizon and the early morning mist rolls down off the hills. That’s right folks, autumn is here again (fall for our American friends). The days are getting shorter and the nights longer and you’re likely to spend more time indoors than out.

In short, it’s the perfect time to “reboot” your weblog with a new design or feature set. Why not take inspiration from nature’s glorious autumnal colours and refresh your website. To help you along the way, I’ve put together this little list of website design “thingies” that you might want to integrate into an autumn reboot.
Continue Reading…

flickr Panda: More flickr goodness!

JavaScript can add a lot of special effects that can really improve the user’s experience. Here are 10 simple and clever JavaScript techniques that add an extra dose of usability to any website.

Make your WordPress-powered website even better with these great sidebar widgets.

I’ve made some (more) tweaks to the design of this website over the past few days. They’re mostly little things and, unless you visit the site often, you probably wouldn’t notice them unless I were to point them out. In fact, in comparing the design today with the template I relaunched with on the 28th June, 2008, it’s amazing to see just how much the design has changed — while still sharing a common overall aesthetic. But then this is how web-design should be isn’t it? A website evolves with small, subtle, incremental changes, yet retains its “brand” by remaining true to its original design.

While I was applying the revisions I started thinking about web-design. I considered the current state of the art, how far we’ve come (I started building websites right back in the beginning when IBrowse on the Commodore Amiga really was cutting edge), standards compliance and the W3C, etc.

The catalyst for these thoughts was my adoption of a simple little CSS3 property known as border-radius, which is used to produce the RoundRects that, depending on which browser you’re using, may or may not be visible to you when you visit this website. If you’re using a Gecko or WebKit based browser, then you’ll see this website exactly as I intended - complete with RoundRects. With other browsers you’ll only see an approximation of the design I intended.
Continue Reading…

I know I’m terribly late to the party with this but Cappuccino, an open source framework that makes it easy to build desktop-caliber applications that run in a web browser, looks pretty fscking awesome. I’m going to have to play with this.

Creating tabbed interfaces suddenly becomes a piece-of-cake when using the Tabs function in the jQuery UI library. It can be utilized to create completely unique interfaces without having to be a coding God - using only one line of code!

A theme for WordPress and an experiment aimed at exploring the possibilies of generative web-design. »gen« is not a fixed design but changes its appearance (layout, typography, colours and background images) over time depending on the content of your website. It’s not yet ready for release, so in the meantime visit www.kingcosmonaut.de/gen to stay updated. Sounds Intriguing. [via]

A jQuery plugin that raises unobtrusive messages within the browser, similar to the way that OS X’s Growl Framework works. [via]