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Deborah’s Weekly Links: February 4, 2012

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This week’s roundup of resources includes summaries of the annual Interactions conference in Dublin, accessibility updates in the release of Firefox 10, proposals for removing browser prefixes in CSS, and more. Enjoy!

CSS

  • * { box-sizing: border-box } FTW: Finally, a way to style boxes that makes sense. You want a box that’s 200px and you don’t want to have to subtract pixels for padding? Yep, you can do it. Thanks to Paul Irish for sharing how to use box-sizing for modern browsers, and including link for fallback support for IE6/7. Check the comments for great discussion.
  • A Proposal to Drop Vendor Prefixes: Tired of bloated stylesheets from all the browser prefixes you need to add? I know I am. Felipe Gomes offers suggestions on how to drop the vendor prefixes. Good discussion in the comments.
  • Star Ratings With Very Little CSS: Chris Coyier offers a way to present star ratings with Unicode, pseudo elements and adjacent siblings.
  • CSS3 3D Transforms in IE10: Time to celebrate! When IE10 is released, 3D transforms will be in Chrome, Safari, Firefox and IE.

HTML

  • The Best of Times: Dropped from HTML, and then brought back, Bruce Lawson summarizes the new time element in HTML5, which offers durations along with human and machine readable time.
  • How Lanyrd Uses HTML5 for a Great Mobile Web App: Don’t you hate it when you attend a conference, and you can’t get a data connection? No way to confirm which sessions you want to attend? Read how Lanyrd took advantage of offline caching for their new mobile web app.

WordPress

  • Responsive Plugin: Not released yet, this plugin written by Marios Lublinksi, has gained a lot of attention from developers and designers who want to make their WordPress sites responsive. It’s not clear whether the plugin will be free or premium. The site has little information about the plugin. At this time (Feb 2012), you can subscribe to the mailing list for updates.
  • Digging Into WordPress 3.3 Update: Updated for versions 3.2 and 3.3, the book has a new look and feel, updated graphics and links, and new bonus versions of the PDF.
  • WordPress Answers (StackExchange): If you haven’t found it already, WordPress Answers is one of the best resources for WordPress developers and administators. And it’s free.
  • Daily Tip: Find WordPress Design Freebies and Resources at Design Curate: Free (over 3000!) and commercial design resources for WordPress developers and designers.

Accessibility

  • New in Accessibility in Firefox 10: Fixes include a whole slew of bugs related to focus reporting, info about the map tag, tables, and more.
  • WCAG Next: After three years of implementing the WCAG 2.0 guidelines, Jared Smith offers his suggestions on changes and improvements to the guidelines.
  • Web Accessibility Testing: Do Automate Testing First: Do automated testing before you do manual, use case or usability testing, says Karl Groves of Deque Systems. Karl recommends you never pay a person to uncover errors that automated testing can find.

User Experience

  • Wireframing in PowerPoint? It Works!: I had no idea how many people used PowerPoint for wireframing until I tweeted this link. Why not use PowerPoint? It provides excellent grouping, aligning and distribution capabilities, as well as dynamic, linear and non-linear interactions.
  • Integrating UX into the Product Backlog: From Boxes and Arrows, an excellent article by Jon Innes on improving user experience in the product backlog. Great matrix and good advice on using the matrix to have informed discussions, prioritize story lines, track progress and set goals for your product or service.
  • Adaptive Images in Responsive Web Design: Christopher Schmitt explores strategies for serving the right optimized image across devices, and offers his own suggestion, based on a twist on the old school “LOWSRC” attribute.

Interaction Design

  • Interactions 2012: Day 1: Thanks to the great staff at Johnny Holland for posting the summary of day 1 keynotes and presentations at the annual Interactions 2012 conference.
  • Interactions 2012: Day 2: Highlights of Day 2 of the Interactions 2012 conference included the keynote by Jonas Löwgren: Exploring, Sketching, Other Designerly Ways of Working , Designing the Mobile Wallet Experience, Core Principles of UX Management, and more.
  • Great UX Debate: Fascinating first person account of the debate at the IxDA Interaction 2012 conference in Dublin by Pete Trainor, one of the panelists. Pete was joined on the panel by Giles Colborne, Abby Covert, Jeff Gothelf, Kieron Leppard, Dave Malouf, Jason Masut, and Andrea Resmini.

What I Found Interesting

  • The Future Belongs to the Curious : Short two-minute video that encourages you to keep listening, pushing to find your passions, and chasing after them.
  • Learn To Program: Have you wanted to learn jQuery? Or are you interested in learning to program with Python? Check out this great collection of online sites, many free, to move your skills beyond HTML and CSS.
  • To-Do Lists Don’t Work: Harvard Business Review is recommending we get rid of our to-do lists, and living in your calendar. According to the author, to-do lists set us up for failure. Do you agree?
  • Beautiful Web Type: Brilliant. A showcase of the best Google fonts. Thanks Nick Denardis for sharing the link on Twitter.

Deborah’s Weekly Links: January 28, 2012

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Two of my favorite links in this week’s roundup are the HTML5 Please site by Opera developer Divya Manion and the 30 Cheat Sheets link. Hope you find some of the resources helpful for your projects, too.

CSS

HTML

  • Jumpstart Your Web Project With HTML KickStart: Created by Joshua Gactke, the HTML KickStart framework allows you to quickly create web page prototypes.
  • The State of HTML5 Video: Longtail Video, the developers of the popular JW Player, share what HTML5 video can and can’t support in this report detailing market share of browsers, media formats, tag attributes, and accessibility.
  • HTML5 Please: Thanks to Opera developer Divya Manion for creating this new site for how to use HTML5 responsibly. The search filter allows you to quickly see what browser support is available. View code snippets,working demos, great collection of links and developer resources.

WordPress

  • WordPress Move: Free plugin that allows you to backup your WordPress installation, restore it at any time, change the domain name and move it to a new server.
  • Restoring WordPress After A Crash: It happens to everyone, but do you have a checklist of what to do the next time WordPress crashes on you? This post provides valuable information on troubleshooting and restoring your WordPress installation.
  • The Ultimate Quickstart Guide to Speeding Up Your WordPress Site: The guide provides step-by-step instruction on plugins, database optimization, image optimization, CSS sprites and more to help make your site speedy.

Accessibility

User Experience

What I Found Interesting

Deborah’s Weekly Links: January 21, 2012

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With two major events this week, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and SOPA Blackout, there was an abundance of great resources and posts. Here are some of my favorites:

CSS

HTML

  • W3Clove: Great timesaver. Validate HTML markup on your entire website with one click.
  • IE10 Compat Inspector: This Microsoft JavaScript-based utility analyzes your site as it runs. It quickly identifies if platform changes in Internet Explorer affect your site as you migrate to IE9 or IE10.
  • Marking Up a Postal Address with HTML: From definition lists to microdata to hcards to the address element, there are many options for formatting postal addresses. Good discussion in the comments for other options.

Accessibility

WordPress

User Experience

  • Faceted Overload: Simplifying the Sidebar Navigation: Save user’s time and effort with faceted minimization to display navigation above the fold.
  • Designing for the Next Step: An excerpt from Joshua Porter’s forthcoming book Make Them Care! highlights a case study of a New York Times email message. Joshua explains important items missing from the email, provides design solutions for resolving the missing items and explains how to design for the next step.
  • Deconstruction of Smashing Magazine’s Responsive Redesign: Excellent review of the new Smashing Magazine redesign, with explanations of what worked and suggestions for improvement.
  • Designing Search (part 1): Entering the Query: In his first post of a mini-series, Tony Russell–Rose explores search box design, focusing on scoped search, search within, advanced search and non-text queries. I appreciate his list of best practices at the end of the post.

What I Found Interesting

  • PIPA and SOPA Co-Sponsors Abandon Bills: Would love to know how many phone calls, email messages,and faxes the bill co-sponsors received on SOPA Blackout day.
  • Fight Back Against SOPA/PIPA: The Day the LOLCats Died: My post about SOPA/PIPA with a great video protesting SOPA/PIPA (based on Don McLean’s American Pie).
  • Apple, America, and a Squeezed Middle Class: Long article from the New York Times, but worth it. Apple may be one of the best-known and admired companies, but jobs at Apple held by middle-class workers have faded away. According to the article, a current Apple executive said:

    We shouldn’t be criticized for using Chinese workers. The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need.

    Ouch.

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