Here’s a very nice CSS grid, that scales well all the way down to mobile devices.
The 1140 grid fits perfectly into a 1280 monitor. On smaller monitors it becomes fluid and adapts to the width of the browser.
Beyond a certain point it uses media queries to serve up a mobile version, which essentially stacks all the columns on top of each other so the flow of information still makes sense.
Scrap 1024! Design once at 1140 for 1280, and with very little extra work, it will adapt itself to work on just about any monitor, even mobile.
This is a great article by Seth Call on the many problems that plague the Facebook API. As someone who spends a lot of time working with the platform, I concur that it’s a bit of a mess. It’s definitely gotten better, but it is still a moving target of things breaking, not working, documentation being wrong, and just general confusion. I still maintain that I would gladly pay for a developer support option provided by Facebook.
Seth wrote:
Using the Facebook API is the one of the worst experiences as a developer I have ever had. This past week has been a real trial, and a true challenge to keep my energy and spirits up so that I remain efficient.
But perhaps one of the interesting points is a comment left by Carl Sjogreen:
This is Carl Sjogreen, I lead the PM team for the platform at Facebook. Just for some background, I recently joined Facebook after spending 2 years building on the Facebook platform, and suffering through many of the same frustrations as you. Its clear that we have some problems (many of which you’ve clearly laid out here), but its certainly not the case that we don’t care — in fact, revamping our documentation, cleaning up a confusing set of technologies that have been layered over time, and generally improving the quality, stability, and performance of the platform is a big focus for us over the coming months.
We’ve got a lot of work to do, but we’re listening, and will have some very concrete progress to show soon. If anyone has other specific feedback, you can email me at carlsjogreen@facebook.com
The whole thing is worth a read, and I can’t concur enough with what Seth wrote.
Here is a listing of all websafe fonts you can use in your CSS. Websafe fonts are ones that are common to almost all operating systems–meaning that almost everyone should have them and be able to see them.
abcdefghijklmonpqrstuvwxyz
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font-family: ‘Palatino Linotype’, ‘Book Antiqua’, Palatino, serif
abcdefghijklmonpqrstuvwxyz
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font-family: font-family: Impact, Charcoal, sans-serif
abcdefghijklmonpqrstuvwxyz
1234567890
font-family: font-family:Tahoma, Geneva, sans-serif
abcdefghijklmonpqrstuvwxyz
1234567890
font-family: ‘Lucida Sans Unicode’, ‘Lucida Grande’, sans-serif
abcdefghijklmonpqrstuvwxyz
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font-family: Century Gothic, sans-serif
abcdefghijklmonpqrstuvwxyz
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font-family: ‘Arial Black’, Gadget, sans-serif
abcdefghijklmonpqrstuvwxyz
1234567890
font-family: ‘Times New Roman’, Times, serif
abcdefghijklmonpqrstuvwxyz
1234567890
font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif
abcdefghijklmonpqrstuvwxyz
1234567890
font-family: ‘Arial Narrow’, sans-serif
abcdefghijklmonpqrstuvwxyz
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font-family: ‘Trebuchet MS’, Helvetica, sans-serif
abcdefghijklmonpqrstuvwxyz
1234567890
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif
abcdefghijklmonpqrstuvwxyz
1234567890
font-family: Georgia, Serif
abcdefghijklmonpqrstuvwxyz
1234567890
font-family: ‘Comic Sans MS’, cursive
abcdefghijklmonpqrstuvwxyz
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font-family: ‘Bookman Old Style’, serif
Facebook has decided to make it easier to allow administrators to contact users who have liked something…
Back in July we revealed that Facebook had begun enabling developers to contact any user who had liked an object anywhere on the web. Recently, Facebook has begun testing an interface to make that communication and the monitoring of those likers more efficient with an “administration interface”.
Although this is fairly simple, I kept struggling trying to get my brain around the notion of determining the percent change between 2 numbers. Once I did finally get it working, I thought I might as well share the PHP function so I don’t forget it later. So here is is, a PHP function to determine the percentage change between 2 numbers:
function percentChange($oldNos = 0, $newNos = 0) {
$scratchSheet = ($newNos + 0) - ($oldNos + 0);
return round((($scratchSheet / $oldNos) * 100),2);
}
I’ve been doing a lot of work recently with twitter’s new @anywhere JavaScript API. While it’s quite nice, it is also at this point very beta. There aren’t a ton of features, and access to the @anywhere objects is very limited. When a user authorizes your application, @anywhere sets a cookie on the users’s browser:
Once the user has authorized the host site, @Anywhere will set a cookie named “twitter_anywhere_identity” that contains the id of the logged in user. You can read this on the server side to learn the user’s ID.
While the cookie contains a super limited amount of data, it’s fairly easy to use a little reg-ex to extract the UserID of the user:
$cookie = $_COOKIE["twitter_anywhere_identity"];
preg_match("/(.*):(.*)/", $cookie, $matches);
<span>Then $matches[1] is the user's id and, $matches[2] is the signature. You can validate the signature to make sure that the data is coming from Twitter by then doing a simple call:</span>
<pre class="php" name="code">
if(sha1($matches[1] . "consumer secret") == $matches[2]) {
//Valid Match
}
It’s that simple.
Twitter recently redesigned their sign-up process to boost new user engagement. Though the new sign-up process added one more screen, conversions went up 29%. How? Gradual engagement…
When done right, gradual engagement communicates the core essence of a service with a few lightweight interactions…
Very interesting. Definitely worth a read.
Interesting article from the CEO of Wesabe, who closed down his business while their main competitor Mint (who launched after them) sold for millions.
Design matters a huge amount, without question, and Mint’s design was exceptional, but if other, stronger forms of lock-in are in place first, design alone can’t win a market, nor can it keep a market.
Interesting way to pick up 30 millions users.
We’re excited to announce that WordPress.com is now the default blogging platform for Windows Live Spaces users. We’ve worked with our partners at Microsoft to create a simple migration service for Spaces bloggers to easily bring all their posts, comments, and photos to WordPress.com.
Over a six month period, beginning today, Windows Live Spaces users will have the option to move their blogs to WordPress.com… New Windows Live users will also be offered a WordPress.com blog when they choose to create a new blog.