Keep your left-aligned text less ragged with wp-Hyphenate
Web typography has historically been a struggle. There is little support for fonts outside the go-to typefaces like Times, Helvetica and Verdana and other elements of typographic style are even more difficult to implement. Wp-Hyphenate brings us one step closer to good web typography by offering a hyphenation plugin for Wordpress that helps eliminate ragged text, makes justified text look better and makes sure words aren’t widowed alone on their own line. I’m using it on this site and so far it’s worked as advertised.
Jeff Siarto is a user experience designer, open courseware evangelist and aspiring author living in Chicago. He builds simple web interfaces and teaches others to do the same.
Panic releases Coda 1.6
From the folks that brought you Transmit and other beautiful apps for the Mac, Panic today released the newest version of their one-window web development app Coda. New features include a plugin architecture, quick file opens, smart spell checking and support for Cappuccino, an Objective-J web development framework. Worth a look if you haven’t tried it out.
Obama Transition Project launches Change.gov
A beautiful site for the Office of the President-Elect. I think this was done by Blue State Digital, the firm Obama used to manage his online campaign for the general election. They do great work, and no doubt played a role in helping him get elected.
Just Vote
November 4, 2008Vote Democrat. Vote Republican. Vote Libertarian, Constitution, Green or Socialist Workers. Vote on the issues. Vote your conscience. Vote for the candidate you’d like to have a beer with. Vote for education. Vote for healthcare. Vote for something you care deeply about. Vote because you can. Vote because it’s your right. Vote because some people that came before you couldn’t. Vote for your children. Vote for your family. Vote for the future of the great experiment that is America.
If you’ve already voted, call someone and tell them to vote. Drive your friend to the polls so they can vote and remind everyone you see today to just vote. Don’t be lazy. Don’t be apathetic. Don’t complain unless you plan to vote. 537 people decided the 2000 election—still think your vote doesn’t count? Our democracy rarely asks much of its citizens, but today—November 4, 2008—it’s asking you to just get out and VOTE!
Slides and commentary from Jeff Croft
I highly recommend the Elegant Web Typography presentation.
Boxes and Arrows discusses prototyping with XHTML
It’s impossible to be aware of all the dynamic aspects of a web page when working in static illustration software. However, when prototyping with XHTML, you can leverage the power of rendering your design in the same way that it will be seen by users, and incrementally evolve page presentation based on this immediate and rich feedback.
ALA reader tips for working from home
A List Apart has compiled a great list of tips for people working from home. Readers were asked to submit their tips, and the best ones were compiled for an article in issue 270. The advice ranges from hiring your mom to watch your children to wearing your work shoes around the house to get your brain into “office mode.” This is an interesting read for anyone who is thinking about, or is currently working from a home office.
Use your GMail account to login to OpenID-enabled sites
Google has become a provider of OpenID login services, launching an API that allows developers to build services that use Google accounts to validate users (using the OpenID 2.0 protocol). Currently Zoho and Plaxo support the new feature with more to come in the future.
RSS pumpkin carving
A little Halloween geekery…
Rackspace Acquires Slicehost
October 23, 2008Yesterday, Slicehost announced that they had been acquired by Rackspace—a managed hosting provider based out of San Antonio, Texas. Slicehost has made a name for themselves by providing inexpensive VPS hosting and an amazing user experience. No contracts, no BS, just a fresh install of Linux, a blinking shell prompt and reliable tier 1 bandwidth.
I’ve been a Slicehost customer for over a year now and couldn’t be happier. Their interface is simple, they have great tutorials and “books” and the user community is top notch. As it stands right now, all of this should stay the same. According the acquisition FAQ, Slicehost will be a subsidiary of Rackspace and continue to do developer-focused hosting. There will be some cross linking between the sites (and Rackspace will defiantly be leveraging some of their technology) but for the most part, Slicehost will stay the same. Right now, I think that’s true. In the long run, however, I’m not so confident Slicehost will remain the boutique, kick-ass hosting company that they are today. I hope they prove me wrong.
Screenshots of Wordpress 2.7 Visual Design
The user interface is complete for the upcoming release of the Wordpress blogging platform. The three column design is clean and polished but I’m curious as to why they are moving away from the Happy Cog interface that was done for 2.5.
Typetweets
Up to the minute discussions about typography on Twitter.
Opera MAMA study reports only 4 percent of websites validate
These are some disappointing (yet, not surprising) findings for anyone that pushes standards-compliant design on the web. Opera’s report pointed to a variety of reasons for the pathetically low numbers including poor output from content management systems, invalid user-generated content and web hobbyists who just want to post pictures of their kittens.
Firefox 3.1 Beta released
New features include added support for CSS 2.1 and CSS 3, <audio> and <video> HTML5 tags, W3C Geolocation and SVG transforms.
Apple announces new MacBooks and MacBook Pros
At today’s press conference Apple unveiled new updates to their MacBook and MacBook Pro lines. Both notebooks feature solid aluminum enclosures, LED displays, new trackpads and beefed-up graphics processors. The computers themselves look stunning and again Apple has proven to be a leader in great industrial design. I have only two concerns: First, the displays are only available in a glossy finish (the matte is no longer being offered) and second, it is not yet clear if the RAM is self-serviceable. These aren’t exactly deal-killers, but are far from optimal. Let the reviews begin…
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