webdesignrepo is a curated collection of helpful links from around the web. Primarily the repo is for webdesign links, but there is a large overlap with web development and graphic design.
Huge collection of all kinds of links related to webdesign, sorted in “Daily Visits, Blogs/News, Inspiration, Learning, Tutorials, Snippets, Plugins, Architecture, Tools, Resources and Community”. Definitely something to bookmark!
URL rewriting can be one of the best and quickest ways to improve the usability and search friendliness of your site. It can also be the source of near-unending misery and suffering. Definitely worth playing carefully with it – lots of testing is recommended. With great power comes great responsibility, and all that.
A beginner’s guide to URL rewriting, with plenty of examples
It’s hard to believe this article is 13 years old!
The web’s greatest strength, I believe, is often seen as a limitation, as a defect. It is the nature of the web to be flexible, and it should be our role as designers and developers to embrace this flexibility, and produce pages which, by being flexible, are accessible to all.
The Twelve-Factor App is a set of principles to build Web-Apps which can be applied to apps written in any language. Inspired by an article about taking Twelve-Factor to Drupal, Scott Walkinshaw translated those principles to WordPress development. This is what he has to say about Version Control Systems:
Using version control is the single best thing you can implement for any software project. It will make things easier and eventually save your ass. It’s also the difference between professional and amateur developers. You shouldn’t be charging people if you aren’t using it.
Even if there’s a lot i didn’t completely understood, i still really enjoyed reading this short series of posts.
As more and more people will access your final work on Tablets, Phones and even Laptops with less-than-optimal speed, it is important to test your pages performance on slower network connections. There’s a very handy little tool in Apple’s Developer Tools, which let you set the Connection Speed of your Mac to simulate the average 3G or Edge Network.
To install this preference pane you need to open Xcode, go to the Xcode Menu and choose “Open Developer Tool” and then “More Developer Tools…”, this will take you to the Apple Developer site. Login and then download the “Hardware IO Tools for Xcode” which will download a dmg which contains the Network Link Conditioner, amongst other tools.
I was pretty impressed when i first saw how Ghostlab enables us to remotely debug a design on a mobile device. While Ghostlab can do many other things, remote debugging on an iOS device is also possible directly from within Safari. I’m honestly not sure if this is a new feature or not, but it’s very cool and pretty easy to use.
1. Connect your device via USB
2. On your iPhone, go to Settings / Safari / Advanced and activate “Web Information”
3. On OS X, open Safari and activate the dev tools
4. Open any website on your iOS Device
5. Now you should see your device(s) in the Menu “Developer” in Safari form where you can access the Web Inspector for any open site on your iOS device.
As far as i found out, this is only possible with iOS 6 and up and Safari on a Mac. There’s a similar function in Chrome to remotely debug on Android devices, which i haven’t tried yet, but looks exactly the same.
Great presentation from Yuri Victor at WordCamp San Francisco about how and why they use (and love) WordPress at the Washington Post.
If you design or develop for mobile devices you might know the hassle to get a local installation on different devices.
My testing usually covers IE7-9 on Windows via Parallels Desktop, FireFox, Chrome and Safari on Mac OS X, iPhone, iPad and Chrome on a Nexus 7 Android Tablet. To get the same site on all those Systems is possible but not what you would call convenient.
Thats where Ghostlab comes into play. It generates a local “server” which you can access via a local IP address and it works perfectly to view (for example) my local WordPress development installation live on all my devices as well as on Windows under Parallels Desktop. On top of that it syncs your actions, whether they are on your desktop or mobile, so everything you click, scroll or touch will be synced on all devices. Cool stuff.
“Ok, but setup a server on OS X to test on several devices locally isn’t THAT hard, and i don’t need this fancy syncing stuff”, you might say. Yes, but it doesn’t stop there, it also gives you the ability to use Web Inspector with your Mobile Devices. Yes, you heard it right! Inspect your CSS Styles. On your Mobile Device.
Oh, and as a bonus, Ghostlab shows you a QR-Code so you don’t have to type in the IP address manually on your mobile devices, which may be the first example of a QR-code which does something more than wasting space.
The App is developed by Vanamco AG in Zurich and can be bought for 49$ from their website, which is a very fair price if you consider how much time and nerves this little thingy will save you. Of course you can also download a demo version, which i suggest you to do now.
Great Presentation by Brad Frost talking about bullshit in our information overflowed world today.
This looks pretty smart. I never really got used to slicing my designs from Photoshop so normally i just create all assets manually. Not very professional, i know. But maybe it’s time to give it another try.