October 2, 2007

Client Side Load Balancing for Web 2.0 Applications

Lei Zhu from Digital Web Magazine writes:

“A web server handles HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) requests sent to it by web browsers. When you type in a URL —http://www.digital-web.com, for example—your computer sends out a request to look up the servers needed to handle requests and send responses back quickly. The technique for determining how to route requests to the cluster of web servers efficiently is called load balancing.“

September 23, 2007

jQuery 1.2.1: Quick Fixes for 1.2

jQuery 1.2.1 is a bug fix release for jQuery 1.2. You can view the full list of what was fixed on the bug tracker.

September 22, 2007

jQuery UI: Interactions and Widgets

Today we’re very pleased to announce a brand new library: jQuery UI. jQuery UI is a fully themed interaction and widget library built on top of jQuery.

You’ll be able to find everything that you need to know about jQuery UI on it’s site:

http://ui.jquery.com/

jQuery UI signals the start of a whole new branch of the jQuery project which will focus on developing high-quality, reusable, components that you’ll be able to drop in your applications. Frequently, these components are coming directly to you from traditional jQuery plugins, but with strict coding, documentation, themeing, and demo standards. We hope you’ll enjoy this new level of quality as much as we do.

September 20, 2007

A CSS styled table version 2

Veerle updates her styling tables tutorial:

“In 2005 I wrote an article about styling a table with CSS. After receiving so many requests I finally decided to give in and write another tutorial. Seems like a popular topic and an interesting one to share some tricks on how you can nicely style them. This article is about the proper usage of tables, for tabular data. How you can implement them with accessibility in mind and how to make them appealing for the eye using CSS.  “

September 19, 2007

Tripoli - a CSS standard for HTML rendering

Tripoli is the result of years of coding real-world CSS projects. When dealing with multiple projects, you find yourself repeating CSS rules again and again. Tripoli adds the CSS base you need to skip the typographic basics and get on with design customization while relying on a solid, cross-browser backend.

Dealing with CSS layouts can be a pain. Most of the frustration comes from inheritance and margin issues. To make things easier, Tripoli resets all browser defaults for layout and then re-builds them again for content typography.

September 18, 2007

XRAY

XRAY is a free cross browser tool that lets you see the box model in action for any element, letting you see beneath the skin of any web page.

Just click the XRAY button to instantly answer those vital questions: where is the top and left of this element? how big is each margin? how big is the padding? how wide and high is the content box?

Firefox 2.0.0.7

Security Update: The following security issue was fixed.”On his blog Petko D. Petkov reported that QuickTime Media-Link files contain a qtnext attribute that could be used on Windows systems to launch the default browser with arbitrary command-line options. When the default browser is Firefox 2.0.0.6 or earlier use of the -chrome option allowed a remote attacker to run script commands with the full privileges of the user. This could be used to install malware, steal local data, or otherwise corrupt the victim’s computer.”

August 19, 2007

Color Inspiration from the Scottish Highlands

Colourlovers have posted yet another yummy guide to some inspirational color themes:

“The Scottish Highlands are one of the most sparsely populated regions in Europe and are popularly described as the most scenic. The winding roads guide travelers and residents alike through purple-speckled mountain ranges, tall forests, rolling hills and along lake sides.”

Color Inspiration: The Big Island of Hawaii

Some new color inspiration from the folks at Colourlovers:

“The Big Island, also known as the Island of Hawaii is an amazingly beautiful place and I was lucky enough to call it home for the first 17 years of my life. The Big Island is made up of just about every different type of landscape you can imagine… Volcanoes and Deserts… Rainforests and Grasslands… Beaches and Valleys… even Mountains and Snow…”

CSS Cachebuster

I’m sure just about every web developer is familiar with client-side stylesheet caching. You know how it goes, you’re making changes to a stylesheet and checking them in your browser and then, all of a sudden, the updates you made don’t show up. When this happens, you either click refresh like a spastic monkey or clear your browser cache and the world returns to normal.

Ideally, adjusting the server’s cache settings. As a stopgap though, or for situations where I don’t have control over the server’s cache settings, I wrote a bookmarklet that reloads all the linked stylesheets with a query string of the current timestamp attached.