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I read about this on two different sites yesterday, and even though I’m not a huge Facebook fan, it rocked my world that this could happen to someone – and so surprisingly easily. Some people are calling this the ultimate Facebook prank, but to me, it should be reserved for your enemies only. Once you do this to someone, you will create a huge pain in the ass for him or her. Always remember, they could retaliate. Okay, now that I got all my warnings out of the way, I’ll continue to explain how you can get someone’s Facebook shut down quickly.

In a nutshell, all you have to do to get someone’s Facebook shut down quickly is report that person as dead. This is how it works exactly…First, you go here on Facebook and fill out the Memorialization Request. As you see, everything on that form is easy to fill out. The only thing that might be tricky is the link to the obituary, and here’s the crazy part about that…

Katie at Buzzfeed went through this process to investigate it, and when it came to linking to the obituary, she linked to someone who lived in a different state, who was much older, who had a different spelling for the name, and who was very obviously a different person – but it still worked. Once you submit the form, you just wait a day or so, and then if you receive a notice from Facebook comforting you about the death of your friend, you know they bought into it. The next time your friend tries to log into his or her account, they will find out that the account is inaccessible. They will receive the message I’ve put in the image below.

Now for what your friend will have to do after you’ve had his or her Facebook shut down – In order to reinstate an account after this happens, they will have two options. If they find this article, they will be able to click here and go to the My Personal Account Is In A Special Memorialized State page and fill out that form. The account will most likely be reinstated relatively soon. If they don’t find this article, they will have to go to the Facebook help page and waste a bunch of time researching what to do about it. That is harsh. You might want to think twice before you have someone’s Facebook shut down.

This has to be one of the most diabolical pranks anyone could ever pull on someone. I don’t think I would ever want to get someone’s Facebook shut down. It’s just too nasty for my taste. However, far be it for me to judge you if you want to do it. Just remember, with great power comes great responsibility.

This is the msg your friend will get after you’ve axed the account.

This is the Facebook Memorialization Request Form.

Via: [Buzzfeed] [WonderHowTo]

The post How To: Get Someone’s Facebook Shut Down Quickly (This Is Harsh) appeared first on Bit Rebels.

I found this adorable piece of pragmatic relationship advice from a child on the floor of my subway stop this morning:

It reads:

Dear Daddy,

I think the relationship you have with Mrs. (removed) is not right. You guys fight. Ms. (removed) is a nice person. So are you. I think you should find somebody who you do not argue with. I am just showing my feelings. Please think it over! (LOVE).

It’s so loving and level-headed, and fair to all the parties involved. I especially love that the little girl (I’m guessing) that wrote this is not taking sides. The only thing that would make this more adorably precocious is if she had added “Daddy, I understand that you have needs, but this is not a healthy way to address them.”

I can think of a few instances in my life when a note like this would have really been a welcome wakeup call. Although if this piece of advice were all that welcome, I probably wouldn’t have found it on the floor of the subway station.

One discovery this week needn’t be a secret: it’s an app called Page Layers, and it’s already making my life easier.

Often I’ll need to put together mockups of an existing web page, and I’ll start by taking screenshots and breaking them up in Photoshop. This can take a significant chunk of time, and gets excessively annoying should the site’s content change during the Photoshop spree.

Page Layers solves both problems quickly and simply: feed it a URL and it’ll capture a screenshot like Paparazzi and similar programs. The critical difference is that it’ll allow you to save a layered PSD file, whose folder names and hierarchy come directly from the page markup. All text gets flattened, and if a particular element needs to be further separated it’s as simple as adding a span element before running through Page Layers. It’s, simple, smart, and surprisingly fast even on my mid-2009 MacBook Pro.

While there may already be a less primitive way to jump-start Photoshop mockups of existing pages, Page Layers has already been a helpful addition to my workflow. It fits a niche role, but works its reliable magic just as well as I’d hoped.

It’s available on the Mac App Store for $33.99, which I’d call pricey if the time saved didn’t more than justify the price.

When Kate visited in October, I mentioned how much I love simple home tips, and she suggested that I track down this book. All Things Wise and Wonderful: A Big Little Book of Hints was published by the Pasadena Art Alliance in 1975. The Pasadena Art Alliance is an independent organization that formed in 1955 to support the arts in southern California. From the beginning, fund-raising was an important component of the organization’s mission. They began raising money for the arts by holding Treasure Sales. Members collected, appraised, priced and displayed donated items, which were sold to the public. Between 1975 and 1994, the Pasadena Art Alliance decided to supplement their Treasure Sales with book sales. The women of the art alliance brainstormed household hints, tips and related quotations, and All Things Wise and Wonderful was born. In the first 12 years of publication, the book sold 150,000 copies. The ladies were on a roll, and they wrote five more books. Some of the advice is pretty out there: “For large parties, use a washing machine to store ice, cool beer, etc.” But it makes for good reading. And all told, the six books raised more than $500,000 for the arts in southern California. Pretty wonderful. — Amy Azzarito

See more tips after the jump . . .

(more…)

In September, 2012, I - Liza - took a trip to The Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York City to delve into my own collections. I was looking specifically for my 1976 slide show, What The Well Dressed Dyke Will Wear. I found it, and brought the slides home to digitize. 

The online magazine Dapper Q, which had interviewed me about Dyke Clothing, had requested some of the slideshow images, should I ever find them, so I sent some along for them to publish HERE. 

In my interview about What the Well Dressed Dyke Will Wear in dapperQ, I mentioned that the slides from my traveling slideshow were at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in NYC. Since then, I visited the Archives and borrowed my slides to digitize them.

In 1975 and 1976, I took pictures at various events and places around the country to show to women-only audiences. While I had permission to show the slides in this context, never in my wildest dreams, in the mid 1970s, could I have imagined the internet, or websites like dapperQ. So, I have selected a few images to share in this context, choosing only the women who have given permission or who are famous, or whose identity I think won’t be recognized after all these years. Photos by Liza Cowan unless stated.

 

Alix Dobkin in a t-shirt from Lammas, a women’s bookstore in Washington, DC. We had all just gotten new haircuts and were happy to show them off.

 

 

Looking to do a little professional networking? A business card might help, but if your company won't pay to print them, you work for yourself, or want control over what's on your card, you'll have to print them on your own. Thankfully, there are plenty of great sites that print high-quality custom business cards without busting your wallet in the process. Here's a look at five of the best, based on your nominations. More »

It's hard to know at this point whether Adobe has just pulled off a brilliant viral marketing move or has simply screwed up. I'm speaking here of the current abillity to freely download the entire Creative Suite 2 from Adobe's site, which almost collapsed from the load once this became known. Admittedly, using software released in 2005 isn't everyone's idea of a good time and in fact you might have trouble running it at all, given the hardware and operating systems for which it was created. But still. At this point there is no official statement from Adobe, beyond moderator posts in their forums. What do you think — was this an accident?

 
Hot and spicy cauliflower bites, battered and baked and smothered with hot sauce. Serve this with skinny blue cheese dressing and celery sticks on the side for a hot and spicy meatless appetizer.

I stumbled on a vegan version of this recipe on Peta and thought they looked good so I made some slight changes and gave it a try. I tested it out on some of the cauliflower-averse people in my home, and they gave it a thumbs up.


One thing to note, if you are watching your sodium, you'll have to look for a lower sodium hot sauce, or use half of the sauce. Frank's is my favorite for buffalo sauce, but it's not low in sodium. If anyone knows of a lower sodium buffalo sauce, kindly share!


Click Here For The Recipe...

The $5 Guerrilla User Test: Funny, brilliant and short article on how to user test your website at a...

Friend:  I love this quote… “Good friends are like stars.  You don’t always see them, but you know that they are always there.”

me:  Actually, many of the stars we currently see are already burnt-out and dead, but we just don’t know it yet because their light is still traveling toward us.

Friend:  Fine.  We’ll change it.  ”Good friends are like stars…

me:  …They’re very shiny but a lot of them might be dead.”

Friend:  And once again, you ruin the romance with logic.

me:  Well some might not be dead yet.  Although technically if they’re not already dead they’re most likely currently in flames.

Friend:  *sigh*

me:  How about this?:  ”Most of your friends are dead, but the ones who aren’t dead are on fire.  It’s complicated to explain, but it’s nice to watch from a distance.  Much like friendship.”

Friend:  Yeah.  That’s almost exactly the same sentiment.

me:  It’s a gift.

I was waiting for this response.  I was waiting for people to start pointing out that children are dying all the time, in despicable and unimaginable ways, all over the world.  I knew that, as soon as I publicly expressed feelings of grief over Newtown, smug people would show up with a belittling view of my feelings, calling me sheltered and American, suggesting that my reaction has been created by the media, that my feeling are invalid, because I don't feel the same amount of sadness for everyone who has ever suffered, in all of the world.

I left this response to a commenter on my most recent Huffington Post piece, and I wanted to share it here, as my official position on being a sheltered American, full of grief:


There are biological and sociological reasons why tragedy that is closer to us, in proximity and similarity of experience affects us more than death that is happening in places and situations more remote to us, whether it be acts of war in war torn countries, desperation in places of great poverty or in abusive households in our own cities... I am hardwired, simply by being human, to respond to the sudden massacre of American kindergartners more dramatically than those events that don't resemble me so closely.

We live with acts of monstrosity all the time, yes.  And it's imperative that we expand our world view of humanity. However, even with this shooting, as time goes by, effectively creating space between us and the incident, our grieving will lessen.  That's the way it works, when you're a human being. It's scientifically and sociologically naive to suggest that I could feel the same strength of feelings for all tragedies in the world. 

When my grandmother died no one said to me, "Grandmothers die all the time.  Why don't you cry every time an old lady dies?"  In twenty years, when people read about Newtown, they won't drop to their knees and cry, like we do now, even though they will be sheltered Americans, too.  Why?

This is close to me because of my perception of my circumstances, my reality.

If your goal is to perpetuate compassion for the suffering people of the world, you'd be better served by appreciating and honoring compassion, where ever you can find it.

Whenever I get to see someone laugh this way, I fall in love a little bit.

(via lonelysandwich)

The post Martin Starr Laughing appeared first on Mighty Girl.

Photography Innovator: Ian Ruhter

Last week, one of our fans pointed us to the article on Fast Co. Create about photographer Ian Ruhter. The article featured a video showcasing Ian’s process and his incredible hand-built camera. Through some online digging I found numerous videos and articles, chronicling the photography process of Ian Ruhter. He actually built his own camera in a truck that looks similar to the ones you ran after as a kid, hoping to spend your saved lunch money on a Screwball or Choco Taco.

His handmade camera has been dubbed the largest in the world and it involves a photography process called collodion, which is a wet plate process that creates a unique look to the photographs (as you will see below) as well as the ability to develop these large scale photographic plates from any locale. This has led Ian to traverse the good ol’ US of A capturing America through his own visual lens.

American Dream from Ian Ruhter : Alchemist on Vimeo.

The Interview

The GoMediaZine was lucky enough to get to speak with Ian Ruhter about his process and what his hopes are for the future.

GoMediaZine:

How did you come up with the idea for doing wet-plate photos in a truck?

Ian Ruhter:

As my career progressed, “technological advances” in the digital image-making process replaced the “old” way of making images and I ended up spending all of my time in front of a computer editing code rather than capturing life.  I began to lose all connection to the search for the most important component of the photographic art. This all changed when I began working with the wet plate collodion process.  The silver used in this 19th Century process reflects light in a way that no other film can.

GoMediaZine:

How did you learn about the collodion process and what drew you to this method of photography?

Ian Ruhter:

I was searching for the old film that I had once loved. I realized that it was no longer available. When I found the collodion process I realized I would be able to make my own film and no one would be able to take that away from me again.

GoMediaZine:

I know you said in the video “silver & light” that what draws you to the collodion process is that you get to use your hands, are/were there other artistic mediums that you also practice?

Ian Ruhter:

When I started in photography I was shooting with black-and-white film. I learned to develop the film and make prints using my hands.

SILVER & LIGHT from Ian Ruhter : Alchemist on Vimeo.

GoMediaZine:

What draws you to photography as a medium?

Ian Ruhter:

As a child, I had a hard time communicating my thoughts and feelings to the world.  My dyslexia left me feeling like I didn’t have a voice.  I was treated differently than other kids.  The moment I found photography I found the missing piece I was looking for my whole life.  This was the moment I began sharing my feelings with the world.

GoMediaZine:

In your portraiture, what do you hope to capture within the person being photographed?

Ian Ruhter:

In my portraiture I tried to tell a story about the subject I’m Photographing. Sometimes I do this through a series of photos. One example of this is the homeless man I photographed in Los Angeles.  The series starts out with the photograph of the LA River. The LA River shows the geographic location of where this man is from. The bridges are used to link his story to another person’s. In this photograph there is a shopping cart in the right hand corner. Then in next photo a man is shown with a shopping cart. The last photo is an up close portrait of him. This photo allows the viewer to become more intimately connected to the subject. The idea behind the series is you look at something from a distance and you slowly become drawn in closer and closer until you meet the person face-to-face.

GoMediaZine:

I know you are travelling around taking photos throughout the US, what are some of your favorite stops so far and why?

Ian Ruhter:

Los Angeles is my favorite so far because it took me 2 years to build the camera truck. I was living in LA at the time walking around picking out locations to photograph. I didn’t even know if the camera truck would work.

GoMediaZine:

What stops are you hoping to make in the future?

Ian Ruhter:

As of now I’m focusing on the south. I would like to go to New Mexico, Texas and Louisiana. I have a few leads for good stories out that way. With the winter months coming we want to go where it is warmer.

GoMediaZine:

What do you see for the future of your photography adventures?

Ian Ruhter:

I would like to keep pushing myself to create better works of art.

GoMediaZine:

Do you ever step in front of the camera?

Ian Ruhter:

The silver in my project gained so much attention that magazine and TV networks wanted to come out and take my photo and tell my story. This has been quite an interesting experience.

GoMediaZine:

Who are some of your favorite artists?

Ian Ruhter:

Leonardo da Vinci, Chuck Close, Richard Avedon, Carlton Watkins, Robert Frank to name a few. These are the books I have laying out on my coffee table today.

GoMediaZine:

Where do you draw inspiration from?

Ian Ruhter:

I draw my inspiration from my dreams and the dreams of others.

GoMediaZine:

What are some of your favorite images that you’ve captured?

Ian Ruhter:

I’m really attached to the LA skyline photo. To tell you the truth I like them all, each image is a part of me.

Links

• Website
• Blog
• Facebook
• Vimeo

The post Silver & Light: The Photography of Ian Ruhter appeared first on GoMediaZine.

“The Web is Agreement.” Jeremy Keith’s eloquent statement neatly summarizes the balance that makes it possible for us to build amazing things. Each week, new devices appear with varying screen sizes, pixel densities, input types, and more. As developers and designers, we agree to use standards to mark up, style, and program what we create. Browser makers in turn agree to support those standards and set defaults appropriately, so we can hold up our end of the deal.

This agreement has never been more important.

That’s why it always hurts when a device or browser maker does something that goes against our agreement. Especially when they’re a very visible and trusted friend of the web—like Apple.

You see, Apple’s newest tablet, the iPad Mini, creates a vexing situation: Its device-width viewport tag defaults to the same values as Apple’s original iPad (768x1024 pixels), even though the Mini's screen is physically 40 percent smaller. That means every button, graphic, link, and line of text on a web page on the iPad Mini appears tiny—even when we try to do the right thing and build flexible, multi-device experiences.

Two iPads, one too small.

But Cupertino isn’t the only culprit out there. This is a problem that’s been brewing since we started using the viewport—and it has to do with not just pixels, but our own practices as well. Let’s take a step back and understand what’s really causing today’s woes—and what all of us need to do about it.

The trouble with pixels

Today’s viewport woes can be traced right back to pixels—yes, those tiny elements we work with every day.

The first pixel challenge is quantity. The more pixels in the display, the more information can be displayed. But as these are physical pixels whose number can’t be altered after the fact, a second factor comes into play: the screen’s physical size.

Imagine two two-inch-wide displays (about the width of the iPhone), as shown below.

Two devices, each with a two-inch-wide display. The one on the right, at 640x960, would pack four times as many pixels into the same space as the 320x480 screen on left.

The first is 320x480 pixels, the second 640x960. This gives the second display four times as many pixels as the first, but fits all of them into the same physical space. This smaller pixel size results in content that is also smaller—making it crisper, but much harder to read as well.

This is exactly what happened on the Nokia E60. In 2005, most mobile phone displays were about an inch and quarter wide, with an average of 176 pixels in that width. But the E60, which sported a “huge” 352x416-pixel display, crammed twice the number of pixels into a similar amount of space. The result: A gorgeous, crisp—but often hard-to-read—display.

The E60 also introduced a now-familiar problem: how users would manage to surf “big” sites on a tiny device. Nokia’s solution was a new browser, the Mini Map. This browser behaved similarly to today’s smartphone browsers by first rendering the full-sized page, then scaling it to fit the available screen size. Superimposed onto this rendering was a transparent red box that could be repositioned using the device’s joystick. Clicking the joystick would zoom the content indicated within the box.

Enter viewports

Mini Map was probably one of the first commercial uses of a dynamic viewport—a construct designed to dynamically change the size or scale of the visible screen area in order to improve the user experience. But it was far from the last.

In 2007, Apple released the iPhone, a much larger device than the E60, but one with a similar problem. Even on a “huge” two-inch display, surfing the “real web” on an iPhone meant loading large pages onto a small device. Apple chose to solve this problem through a series of carefully orchestrated enhancements.

The first was the creation of a virtual viewport similar to the one Nokia designed for Mini Map. When encountering desktop websites, the browser would render them at their full size (based on a default canvas width of 960 pixels). It would then scale them down to fit the two-inch display. Users could interact with the page to scroll and zoom in on areas of their choice.

Apple didn’t stop there. It also developed a new viewport meta tag. Sites not using the tag would be rendered using the default, legacy-web viewport of 980 pixels. But developers who opted to use the tag could declare the viewport for their sites, including setting the width to the all-important device-width value. This value tells the browser, “please pick a width that fits this specific device’s screen best.”

Other mobile browser vendors were quick to follow Apple’s lead. Nowadays just about every mobile browser supports the viewport meta tag, including the device-width value. This provides us with an even playing field: It respects the efforts of those who take the time to adapt sites for the multi-device web, while those who haven’t yet made this transition still receive a “good-enough” default experience.

Mini problems

The value device and browser vendors assign to device-width is directly related to that device’s physical dimensions. Physically smaller devices need a smaller device-width value (which will result in larger content). Set a value that’s too large, and most content will be too small to comfortably read.

And that’s why Apple’s iPad Mini has a vexing viewport. It uses the same 768-pixel device-width as the regular iPad, even though its physical size is much smaller. One would expect to see a device-width more in line with those of similarly sized tablets like the BlackBerry PlayBook or second-generation Samsung Galaxy 7″—around 500 to 600 pixels, as shown in this chart.

Because of this device-width, web pages appear 27 percent smaller on the iPad Mini than they do on the Google Nexus 7 (calculated based on the relative size of device pixels)—all because Apple decided to describe the device’s viewport as 768 pixels.

Solving for content size

One of the first places this causes problems is in text: More pixels in a smaller space means that fonts sized in pixels will look correspondingly dinky.

Of course, many of us aren’t sizing in pixels anymore—we’re using relative dimensional elements like ems, right? Only, that doesn’t quite solve the problem this time.

When we use ems, we imply a certain trust that the browser’s baseline font size at the default zoom level—1em or 100 percent in unit parlance—is sane and readable. But that’s not always the case. The browser’s baseline font-size value (1em) roughly equates to a 16-pixel square. This ratio serves as a ligament that binds absolute and relative units, but it can vary from browser to browser.

On the iPad Mini, font-size at baseline is precisely 16 pixels. That may have worked fine when fewer pixels were packed into our screens, but on a dense display with an improperly defined viewport, that’s going to be uncomfortably small.

Not all browsers toe the 1:16 em-to-pixel line, though. The Kindle Touch’s browser, for example, has a high-density viewport, but adapts by using a 1:20 ratio, kicking the default font size up a few pixels for readability.

This might not fix all of iPad Mini’s viewport problems, but at least the content would be legible.

Three seven-inch tablets. Note the difference in rendering.

So why did Apple do this?

To understand why Apple would release a product with such a vexing viewport, we don’t have to look further than our own habits.

In the wake of the iPad’s initial release, web folk worldwide scrambled to adapt sites to look good on the new tablets. Somewhere along the way many of us collectively settled upon pixel-based notions of tablet-ness, and those notions often resulted in fixed, 1024x768-pixel layouts precisely targeted at these devices.

Were Apple to decrease the device-width value for the iPad Mini on account of its smaller physical size, it would guarantee a second scramble as existing tablet-adapted sites assuming a 1024x768 viewport suddenly looked unexpectedly wretched on the new device.

The responsibility here goes two ways. Browser makers need to provide reliable baselines of viewport and text sizing, yes. But we as implementers also need to stop grasping for pixel-perfect control over our layouts (the “control” is an illusion, anyway).

A way forward

The only way for us to move forward is together. As developers and designers, we need to hold up our end of the bargain and be mindful of how we do our work—and that means letting go of the notion of pixel precision once and for all. We need to earn the trust of browser makers so they hear us out when things just frankly aren’t right. We hope this article illustrates we’re trying to do the right thing. We hope browser makers acknowledge that and follow suit.

Standards and consistency are more important now than ever before. Please let browser makers and device manufacturers, like Apple, know that we rely on consistent and reliable decisions about default viewports and their zooming. We’re willing to hold up our end of the agreement, and we need them with us.

Let’s move into the future—together.

Translations:
Italian

• Illustration by Kevin Cornell

RSS readers: Don't forget to join the discussion!

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There are so many badass movie characters that have mechanical hands. The two most popular ones are probably the original Terminator and Wolverine. But when you think about it, you don’t have to be in the movies to get some good use out of a mechanical hand. It could come in real handy in everyday life. It would be great for squashing bugs when you don’t want to get too close to them, you’d be able to scare all the kids on the block without saying a word, and you might even be able to reach your beer without getting off the couch. So why not make your own mechanical hand?

I found two different yet similar tutorials for how to make them. The first one was posted on deviantART by user Andrew Hillman (~aternox). You can click on the link below to see it in action. It’s got a steampunk style, and it’s definitely one of the best mechanical hands I’ve seen yet. He created the nifty little chart below so you can make your own. If you decide to take on this project, I recommend clicking over to his page to read the notes.

The second one was posted on Instructables by user Manick Yoj. That one is also fabulous, and it has a different look to it. He took inspiration from Andrew’s build, and as you can see in the pictures, it’s a beauty. Manick included very detailed directions for his mechanical hand over on Instructables. You can click over there to get everything you need for that one. If you’re a geek looking to spice up your weekend with a wicked project, this might be just what you’ve been looking for. Of course, I couldn’t close out this article without including the link to the DIY Wolverine Claws. Love those!

Click Here To See This Mechanical Hand In Action

(Click Chart To Enlarge)

The directions for the mechanical hand below, which is a little different, can be found here on Instructables.

(Click Image To Enlarge)

Via: [Ian Brooks]

The post How To Make Your Own Gigantic Steampunk Mechanical Hand appeared first on Bit Rebels.

About this time last year, I discovered brigadeiros. The Brazilian confection is a super easy sweet to whip up and makes a great homemade holiday gift. A mix of condensed milk, cocoa powder and butter, brigadeiros are kind of like a cross between caramel and fudge in flavor and texture.

I rolled mine in toasted coconut and raw sugar, and simply topped a few more with a few grains of crunchy fleur de sel. Enjoy!


Brigadeiros

makes about 20

1 14-ounce can of sweetened condensed milk
3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
1 tablespoon butter

topping ideas
toasted coconut
chocolate sprinkles
raw sugar
sea salt

In a small saucepan over medium heat, mix the ingredients together. Stir constantly for about 10-12 minutes until you can easily see the bottom of the pan as you stir. Pour the mixture into a bowl and let it cool to room temperature. Place in the fridge for at least 30 minutes. Once thoroughly chilled, scoop small spoonfuls of the chocolate and, using your hands, roll them into balls. Roll the balls into your preferred topping and enjoy.

Designed by Emily Evans

Printed by Emily Evans at Print Club London

Gold ink? Check. Black paper? Check. Awesome illustration of a delicious sugar skull? Check. Now, if I could only lick it...

Production Details

Client
Self-promotion

Quantity Produced
25

Production Cost
$50

Production Time
–

Dimensions (Width × Height × Depth)
18.85 × 25.11 in.

Page Count
–

Paper Stock
270gsm Colourplan in Dark Grey

Number of Colors
1

Varnishes
–

Binding
–

Typography
–

This is a guest post by Jan Rajtoral (AKA Gonzo the Great), founder of gonzodesign, a Dutch design studio specialized in graphic and (responsive) web design. He also writes for the gonzoblog.nl, where above anything else, his passion for writing, technology, communication and design drives him to contribute.

- § -

In this article we’re going to take a look what has been published this last month on the Blogosphere. We hand-picked a selection with the best Resources, Tutorials, Scripts/Snippet and WordPress related Articles for you. All these design-related links have been mentioned on Twitter in the last month, and collected in this single article. So, I hope you’ll enjoy this roundup cause we think that having resources and staying up-to-date is important in your personal growth and development.

 

HTML, CSS, PhP, Coding & Resources

Front end standards - A shared understanding of front-end development best practice. It’s to help us deliver high quality content that works better, reaches more people – not only in today’s browsers &devices, but in tomorrows.

CSS3 Form Styling Cheat Sheet - I hate styling forms. I never remember them. So here are the styles I use the most. *Be mindful of browser compatibility

CSS Positioning: A Comprehensive Look - One aspect of CSS layouts that will likely be around for some time yet is CSS positioning. In this post, I’ll cover CSS positioning in detail and I hope you’ll come away from this with some more options in your CSS layouts.

10 Easy Image Hover Effects You Can Copy and Paste - Today, we’re going to follow that up with ten new effects specifically built for use with images. Each example comes with an HTML and CSS snippet that you can steal

So Long, CSS Sprites: Use CSS3 Filters To Create Icon Rollover Effects -  For everything else – in which a link requires a hover effect but is not text, nor something that can be encoded as a font – the traditional solution has been CSS sprites

Fullscreen API -  One very simple but useful new JavaScript API is the Fullscreen API. The Fullscreen API provides a programmatic way to request fullscreen display from the user, and cancel fullscreen when desired.

Getting Started With Sass: Installation And The Basics - Before we can compose Sass we need to install it. Sass is built upon Ruby. If you are working on aMac, chances are, you already have Ruby installed. If you may to install Ruby in Windows, use thisRuby Installer.

Use Box Model For Easier Widths - There is a CSS property call box-sizing which makes this work a lot easier. Using the box-sizing property with the value border-box will include the padding and the border in the width of the element.

Responsive background images with fixed or fluid aspect ratios - What’s the easiest way to scale background images in responsive layouts? We use an old technique and enhance it to fluidly change the aspect ratio of background images.

Adaptive Vs. Responsive Layouts And Optimal Form Field Labels - A responsive layout is in theory always better than an adaptive layout, but in some cases an adaptive layout is a more pragmatic solution.

Why Ems? - I’ve long sized text only in px. Even when it was patently uncool to do so – the days in which smart people cared about the fact that text set in px couldn’t be resized in IE 6-8. I’ve switched over to using ems now. I haven’t moved every single project over yet, but my mind has switched. Why?

CSS Preprocessors Compared: Sass Vs. LESS - To decide, we will compare the two in seven factors: the one that performs better gets one point; in the event of a tie, both will be awarded one point.

Stop Designing Mobile Websites - In my opinion, it’s time to stop designing mobile websites. Dramatic, I know… but my thoughts are not unfounded. Despite the popularity of mobile, we can no longer say “mobile browsing is on the rise.”

Understanding The Viewport Meta Tag - The viewport meta tag tells the browser how to behave when it renders the webpage, you can tell it how big the viewport will be.

Optimizing Typography in Responsive Web Design - In this article, we will be discussing typography vis a vis responsive web design. Our focus will be on typography strictly in relation to responsive web design only.

CSS Transitions - There are two ways to create animations with pure CSS:  CSS animations and CSS transitions.  CSS transitions provide a simple method for animation one or multiple properties from one value to another.

Mastering SVG use for a retina web, fallbacks with PNG script - Consider your options for SVG use, and then realise the full power of them; logos, icons, navigations, patterns, repeating backgrounds, all fully scalable to any size.

Should You Use Inline-Blocks As A Substitute For Floats? - They aren’t exactly the same of course, but the inline on the outside and block on the inside characteristics are sometimes all we really want and either a float or an inline-block might be appropriate.

Learning Principles for Improving Your CSS - This article will cover some basic principles and tips on how to learn and become better at CSS, based on personal experience.

Start your projectright with Modernizr - Modernizr is a popular feature-detection JavaScript library that, since 2010, has helped web designers and developers take advantage of HTML5 and CSS3 despite uneven cross-browser support.

Essential JavaScript:the top five MVC frameworks - Picking the right JavaScript framework for your needs can be tricky. The massive growth in rich, JavaScript-heavy web applications has lead to a huge array of frameworks designed to help you build apps.

Responsive Menu Concepts -  The resources seem endless. That’s why I’m going to show you four main concepts and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of all of them. Three of them are made with pure CSS and one uses a single line of JavaScript.

Responsive Web Design is So More than Just a Few Breakpoints -  Layouts became completely broken at widths that weren’t defined breakpoints. In a world where devices are changing at a rapid pace, we need to make sure that our designs don’t break at any widths.

Responsive Image Techniques & Resources - When creating images for responsive layouts you don’t need to spend a whole lot of time coding. There are just a couple of techniques which, if followed properly, will allow you to scale your website very quickly.

Code smells in CSS - I’m going to share just a few things (there will, no doubt, be things that I have missed) that I look out for in CSS that will give you and idea as to its quality, its maintainability and its integrity…

Use Tomorrow’s Web Standards Today With CSS ‘@Supports’ - Modernizr is great when you need it, but did you know that soon the browser itself will be able to give you the same information?

CSS :target - The :target pseudo selector provides styling capabilities for an element whose ID matches the window location’s hash. Let’s have a quick look at how the CSS target pseudo selector works!

15+ Comprehensive Responsive Web Design Tutorials - In this post I would like to share 18 useful responsive design tutorials to help you get started with responsive designing including fluid grids, fluid images and media queries.

How to get started with Sass - This article will walk you through the basics, and help you over the prep work required to get Sass set up, so you can use it in your own projects.

Responsive Column Layouts - Today I’m going to share a very simple CSS trick to create a responsive column layout using nth-of-type pseudo class. It doesn’t require any first or last class and the number of columns can be adjusted base on the viewport.

Fluid Grids in Responsive Web Design Tutorial - It’s your decision to choose between a fixed or fluid grid to design the layout. Throughout this tutorial we are going to focus on fluid grids and their importance in responsive design.

The ultimate “target retina screens” media query - In terms of CSS, to specifically target this group of devices, unfortunately there’s no easy way to say “apply this set of rules to all devices where physical pixels are not equal to CSS pixels”.

 

Tutorials

Gamma Gallery: A Responsive Image Gallery Experiment- Gamma Gallery is an experimental responsive image gallery that attempts to provide an adjustable responsive images approach taking its grid layout and the full slideshow view into account.

25 Useful CSS3 Menu Tutorials - It is must for a web designer and a web developer to stay updated with latest techniques used. You can try these tutorials to code professional looking navigation menus, ..

Baraja: A Plugin for Spreading Items in a Card-Like Fashion - With this jQuery plugin items can be spread in a card-like fashion and displayed in an unusual way. Several parameters allow many different spreading results, allowing a unique pattern.

Creative CSS Loading Animations - In this tutorial we’ll show you how to make some creative css-only loading animations also known as activity indicators.

How to Create a Responsive Image Slider in jQuery and CSS3- Today we will code a responsive image slider from the Impressionist UI. We will code it using the FlexSlider plugin for the functionality and style it using CSS3.

Sass Tutorial: Building An Online VCard With Sass & Compass - Today we are going to continue our discussion on Sass and this will be the final part of our Sass series. This time, rather than a theoretical approach, this is going to be a bit more practical.

Responsive CSS Timeline with 3D Effect - A tutorial about how to create an experimental CSS-only timeline with a 3D effect. The idea is to expand a content area when the associated radio input is selected.

Adaptive Thumbnail Pile Effect with Automatic Grouping - An experimental jQuery plugin that will group thumbnails by a shared data-attribute into a pile. When clicking on the pile, the thumbnails that belong to that pile will be spread into a grid using CSS transitions.

Simple Effects for Drop-Down Lists - Today we want to share some simple drop-down list effects with you. The idea is to transform a normal select input into something more appealing with a jQuery plugin.

Single-Page Ajax Portfolio Update Panel with jQuery - In this tutorial I want to explain how we can build a simple portfolio update panel using jQuery. This will make it easier to embed a similar page widget into any portfolio layout.

CSS3 Image Gallery with Dynamic Caption Text - For this tutorial I want to show how we can build a standards-compliant HTML5/CSS3 image gallery with fading captions. We will be using CSS3 transitions to create the animated effects.

Flawless clickable drop-down navigation - In this tutorial I’ll show you how to create a superb clickable drop-down navigation, using jQuery and of course complete with CSS fallbacks.

Animated 3D Flipping Menu with CSS - CSS animations aren’t just for basic fades or sliding elements anymore — CSS animations are capable of much more. Today’s we’ll create a simple but awesome 3D flipping menu!

Calendario: A Flexible Calendar Plugin- Today we want to share a flexible calendar concept with you. Calendars can be a very tricky thing when it comes to their layout and responsiveness.

 

Tools (web applications, bookmarklets, frameworks etc.)

Cedvel - An application for designing grid systems. Cedvel aims to ease the grid design process and help you explore more alternatives.

Unroll.me - A free and easy way to end unwanted subscriptions and rollup the rest into an organized overview made just for you. Simply select the emails that are overloading your inbox, and we’ll automatically unsubscribe you all at once.

Viewport Resizer - Viewport resizer is a browser-based tool to test any website’s responsiveness. Just save the bookmarklet, go to the page you want to test, click on your created bookmarklet and check all kinds of screen resolutions of the page.

Easel - A in-browser web design application targeted at small teams. Designing in the browser is the only way to ensure pixel perfect execution. Use modern tools like web fonts and CSS3 but without the interruption of shifting back and forth between your text editor and your browser.

Smart App Banners provide a unified method of promoting apps when viewed in mobile Safari. Presented as a fairly unobtrusive banner at the top of webpages they show details of the app, it’s icon, ratings and price information.

Remote Preview - Preview any URL on large number of mobile devices simultaneously. Just enter a URL, hit Enter, and new URL gets automatically loaded on each device. Works on platforms like Android, Blackberry, iOS, Maemo, Meego, Symbian, Windows Phone and WebOS.

Dashing - A Sinatra based framework that lets you build beautiful dashboards.

34Grid - A Responsive Grid System based on an “equally distributed columns” layout. In contrast to other great grid systems, 34Grid provides equally distributed columns for each row and also column complements for inequal distributions.

Emmet - A toolkit that can help improve your HTML & CSS workflow by taking your snippets to a whole new level: you can type CSS-like expressions that can be dynamically parsed, and produce output depending on what you type in the abbreviation.

Duri.me- A super simple dataURI tool, among other reasons it is primarily to save HTTP requests. A Data URI is a Uniform Resource Identifier scheme that provides a way to include data (in Duri.me’s case images) in-line in websites as if they were an external resource.

Eyedrop.me - Lets you create color swatches from your favorite websites.  Eyedrop.me is a lightweight, beautifully designed iPhone app for picking, editing, and saving color swatches while on the go.

Ratchet - Prototype mobile apps with simple HTML, CSS and JS components. Ratchet was developed to support iOS 5+ for iPhone.

Method Draw - The purpose of Method Draw is to improve the usability and user experience of SVG Edit. It removes some features such as layers and line-caps/corners in exchange for a more simple and pleasant experience.

Ai->Canvas - The plug-in provides drawing, animation and coding options such as events so that you can build interactive, well-designed canvas-based web apps (for Windows and Mac).

Ivory - A simple, flexible and fully responsive grid based framework. It takes you all the way from 1200px down to 320px.

Viewport resizer - A browser-based tool to test any website’s responsiveness. Just save the bookmarklet, go to the page you want to test, click on your created bookmarklet and check all kinds of screen resolutions of the page.

Font Custom - Generate custom icon webfonts from the comfort of the command line. Output multiple font formats and a bulletproof stylesheet with one command. Works on modern browsers, quirky mobile flavors, and even your old friend IE8.

 

jQuery Plugins, Javascript, etc.

batman.js - A framework for building rich single-page browser applications. It has been written in CoffeeScript and its API is developed with CoffeeScript in mind, but you can use plain old JavaScript too.

jq-tiles - A jQuery image gallery plugin that comes with many differenttile-based CSS3 effects. The tile effects can be customized in various ways: number of tiles in x/y axis, fading for them, their speed and more.

Carousel -A  jQuery plugin takes simple HTML and CSS-only carousels and progressively enhances them with features such as page lists, scrolling, class-toggling, timers, timer offsets as well as touch and keyboard events.

Liffect - A web-based generator that provides lots of different effects for list elements. It makes use of CSS animations and requires jQuery for applying the delay in effects.

SheetClip.js - Copy/paste from your HTML5 web app to a spreadsheet. Tiny library that transforms JavaScript 2-dimensional arrays to clipboard strings compatible with spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel, Google Docs, LibreOffice and OpenOffice

Crumble allows you to quickly and easily build feature tours for your website or app using small bubbles. The tour itself is defined as a standard ordered list in your html, making it accessible.

Remote preview - A tiny JavaScript based tool which I built for our test lab. It allows you to preview any URL on large number of mobile devices simultaneously.

bootup.js - Cache and load static files from local storage. This makes it easier to manage Javascript and other files for offline use, or just to improve the startup time of your web app.

Garlic.js - Allows you to automatically persist your forms’ text field values locally, until the form is submitted. This way, your users don’t lose any precious data if they accidentally close their tab or browser.

Sly - A jQuery plugin for one-directional scrolling simulation with item based navigation support.

jGravity - Adds gravity to either all or specified elements within a page. Using the plugin is as easy as $('body').jGravity() which will use default settings to apply the gravity effect, which I think you will find quite similar to how Google presented ‘Google Gravity’ in an earlier Google easter egg.

dōmo.js - Write HTML markup and CSS styles in JavaScript syntax, in the browser and on the server. dōmo is a simpler, easier, and more reliable alternative to template engines and CSS pre-processors, and works well with all the tools you already use.

Jim Knopf - A  JavaScript library for creating SVG-powered knobs. The library doesn’t require any JS frameworks and it comes with various built-in knob types.

jHERE - Maps are cool, but map APIs are complicated. jHERE solves this problem by offering a simple but powerful map API in the form of a jQuery (or Zepto.JS) plugin.

SocialCount - A small jQuery plugin for progressively enhanced, lazy loaded, mobile friendly social networking widgets. The problems with social networking widgets are they’re heavy and slow to load especially on high-latency mobile connections.

Remote preview - A tiny JavaScript based tool which I built for our test lab. It allows you to preview any URL on large number of mobile devices simultaneously.

Responsive Img - A solution to all which combines a jQuery plugin with a PHP image pre-processor. The plugin enables the page to change the src attributes of the images in parallel to the container width and the PHP file auto-creates the new/resized images.

pickadate.js  - A lightweight jQuery dateinput picker

JavaScript Library Boilerplate - An easy boilerplate for rolling your own JavaScript Library like jQuery, Zepto, Prototype, etc. The code is written in CoffeeScript, TypeScript and pure JavaScript.

Hammer.js - A JavaScript library for multi-touch gestures. It’s easy implementation of touch events in your website.  It’s a lightweight focused JavaScript library weighing in at only 2kb (minified and gzip).

simpleCart(js) - A free and open-source javascript shopping cart that easily integrates with your current website. No databases, no programming, no headaches. A simple javascript shopping cart that you can setup in minutes.

jQuery Transit - Super-smooth CSS3 transformations and transitions for jQuery

Presentz- A javascript library for synchronizing videos and slides, as it merges things like Vimeo, Youtube, Slideshare and Speakerdeck. But you can use images and video files as well, unleashing the HTML5 video tag power.

JQVMap - A jQuery plugin that renders Vector Maps.  It uses resizable Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) for modern browsers like Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera and Internet Explorer 9.

pentizr.js - A simple jQuery plugin which uses the unofficial CodePen API to show pens on a personal website. pentizr uses the unofficial CodePen API to fetch the data and creates some nice output for you.

Filtrify - An Advanced tag filtering with HTML5 and jQuery. Advanced because you can search tags within tags and filter items by multiple tags from different categories and get a live feedback on the number of items containing related tags.

Numeral.js - A javascript library for formatting and manipulating numbers. Numbers can be formatted to look like currency, percentages, times, or even plain old numbers with decimal places, thousands, and abbreviations.

 

WordPress Related

Pods - A framework for WordPress that allows you to create, extend, manage, and deploy customized content types and fields. Pods allows you to add context to content. Forget managing all of your content through simple posts and categories

WordPress Bootstrap theme can be used as-is or as a starting point for theme development. It has been built on top of the Bones theme framework and based on v2.1.1 of Twitter’s Bootstrap.

The Complete Guide To Custom Post Types - A custom post type is nothing more than a regular post with a differentpost_type value in the database. The post type of regular posts is post, pages use page, attachments use attachment and so on.

How to Display Metaboxes According to the Current Post Format - Today I’d like to show you how to go further with custom metaboxes and specifically how to use them according to post formats.

Understanding and Applying WordPress Shortcodes - Known as shortcodes, this feature actually allows developers to bundle entire pieces of XHTML or PHP code into a small variable that can be placed throughout the installation’s posts, page content, and even its template files with a little trickery.

WordPress Custom Post Types Debate – Functions.php or Plugins? - In this article, our founder Syed Balkhi will debate whether WordPress Custom Post Types belong in functions.php file or in plugins.

Common WordPress Development Mistakes and How to Fix Them- I’m going to go through some of the most common development mistakes and how you can easily fix them, and going forward make your code better!

Debugging Tips for WordPress - There comes a time for every developer when things break and it’s time to set to debugging. Mario takes a look at different techniques you can use for plugins, themes, and servers.

Building a Downloads Gallery WordPress Plugin - In this tutorial, we will create a Downloads Gallery plugin for your WordPress website. We will be keeping it plain and simple and shall focus more on WordPress core instead of PHP logics.

Understanding and using WordPress Shortcodes - In this article we are going to see what all support does WordPress provide to create a shortcode and how to use WordPress shortcode api’s and create your own shortcodes.

WordPress SSL setup tips & tricks - This posts documents my mistakes and issues with my WordPress SSL setup. With all these tips, there’s really no reason anymore why you couldn’t run any page where a user submits private data on SSL

jQuery Lazy Load Images on Scroll without Plugin - This jQuery tip reduces a lot of external requests while loading the page, ultimately helps your wordpress blog load faster. While using this trick, you should also use Cache Technique for simplifying the page loading.

Customising and Simplifying the WordPress Admin for Your Clients - When you’re building a website for your client, sometimes there are parts of the WordPress admin that you don’t need them to be able to access.

What’s New in WordPress 3.5: The Developer’s Perspective - The final version of WordPress 3.5 is coming closer – the first release candidate has already been presented to the public. It means that we should have our hands dirty with testing.

Registering Custom Post Types- Registering Custom Post Types is a breeze, really. You just need to set all the variables that are going to govern how your custom post type should function, and put that code in either a plugin, or your theme.

Understanding and Using Featured Images in WordPress - WordPress also lets you add a special kind of the image to the post called as a featured image. This featured image is not a part of the content but can be used in the various places in the theme to display the post.

How to Find a Backdoor in a Hacked WordPress Site and Fix It - Time and time again, we have helped users fix their hacked WordPress sites. Most of the time when they reach out to us, they have already cleaned up the site, and the hacker was able to get back in.

 

.. and don’t forget these!

Socialico - A package of 74 social media icons, combined within a single wieght font and designed by Jelio Dimitrov a.k.a. Arsek. Every single icon matches a particular key on your keyboard

Batch - A lovingly designed and crafted suite of 300 icons for web and user interface design. Each icon is a single Photoshop shape layer, meaning they can be scaled up—and down—without loss of quality.

Step-by-Step SEO: How to Setup Google+ Authorship - In order to help more website owners take advantage of this technique, I’ll first cover what Google+ authorship is and how it can improve your online business results, ..

Top 5 Tips for Recovering From a Low-Quality Backlink Profile - So if you happen to be suffering from a backlink profile rife with low-quality entries, here are just a few tips to help you recover and get back in Google’s good graces.

Don’t Build a Startup, Build a Business - The world of startups has attained such mystique that people are scrambling to get involved. The word alone can sell a book, even if that book is about something only tangentially related.

15+ More New and Superfresh Fonts - Good typography, appropriate and readable fonts are the main ingredients for effective communication. These relatively new fonts that have been published in the last couple of weeks, and are designed to be well suited for web as well for print.

 

 

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