Katmilk Design Nearly Complete
Posted by admin | Filed under Code, Design, Fun
I’m pleased to announce that the design of katmilk is nearly complete!
This weekend, I finally sat down and started to really crank in out. I had the design all ready to go for some time now, but just kept putting it off and focusing on other things. Well, after much nagging from friends and loved ones - it’s finally done. Just need to tweak a few things, and it will soon be up an running.
I’m excited about showing it off, as I have tried new techniques and approaches with my CSS. I will elaborate more on those once it’s all up, that way you may view my code and better understand what I am blabbing about.
“Delay always breeds danger and to protract a great design is often to ruin it.” - Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
∂ meow
Getting My Feet Wet With jQuery
Posted by admin | Filed under Code, JavaScript, jQuery
For those that are not familiar - jQuery is “a new type of JavaScript library.”
For some time now, I’ve been reading and hearing about how great jQuery is and how I need to learn it. And so, yesterday I officially downloaded the current release (1.2.3) and started playing with it. Naturally, considering the fact that I am not crazy versed with JavaScript (I only know the basics), I started with the first tutorial on the jQuery website - you know, just to get my feet wet.
I must say, I had fun!
The first tutorial, also called “How jQuery Works” by John Resig himself, was a great introduction. Even though a lot of it I’ve already heard of or seen in use, I read every word. Building a solid base is essential, and so I wanted to make sure I got a good solid understanding of the bare basics.
From the introduction, I learned the proper way of launching the code on (document).ready instead of window.onload. The reason behind this is quite simple. By using window.onload, the code does not execute until all of the elements on the page are downloaded, which includes images, banners, etc. With (document).ready the code gets executed as soon as the document is - well, ready. What that means is that as soon as all of the HTML is loaded into our document, or in other words, as soon as the HTML tag closes, the JavaScript is executed. The beauty of this is that there is no waiting for all the elements on the page to fully download.
The other thing that makes jQuery really awesome is it’s CSS implementation. Finding this out got me pretty excited as - CSS I know; and so, this part of jQuery makes total sense. It makes it really simple to target an element. It allows you to addClass or removeClass from an element. Better yet, jQuery not only lets you pass CSS selectors, but also works marvelously with pseudo-classes!
There’s also a good amount of built in events that make the code simpler and concise. The whole list and a bunch of other options can be found in the jQuery documentation. The best part is that all of these events and methods can be chained together, which shortens the code even more. For those a bit more advanced or eager to experiment, please check out this list of 37 More Shocking jQuery Plugins. I came across that just yesterday, and it’s partly what officially inspired me to dabble into jQuery myself.
Consisting of just one, single JavaScript file, jQuery is quite an amazing library. That’s right. All of this in just one file, and I am just touching the surface. However, don’t be fooled! It is anything, but simple. The single file contains massive amounts of goodness and everything you need to get started and rolling, and well beyond with JavaScript.
∂meow
Tags: JavaScript, jQuery
CSS Naked Day
Posted by admin | Filed under CSS, Code, Design, Fun
It’s here - April 9th - the Third Annual CSS Naked Day!
So, what is CSS Naked day and why does my blog look so naked?
CSS Naked Day is a tribute to the beauty of CSS and a propaganda for web standards. For one day, the participants simply remove the stylesheet of the website or blog - the result is a naked HTML site.
For more information and participation visit: Dustin Diaz Naked Day website.
∂meow
Tags: CSS, dustin diaz, naked day
Google Search Tricks and Hacks
Posted by admin | Filed under Code
Google - How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
There are many reasons to LOVE Google - mainly for the services it provides. I do not know what I would do without it. Like an addiction, I spend countless hours on Google searching, exploring and further educating myself.
As most of you might already know, there are tons of great ways that Google allows us to target and narrow our search in order to find what we are looking for much faster. In other words - making our search queries efficient. After all, time is money! If not money, then a precious resource that is continually exhausted. If looked upon as a resource, it becomes incredibly valuable, as time cannot be bought, grown, manufactured or turned back. Thanks Google for making every minute worthwhile!
With time being very valuable, I looked for ways to speed up my searching and found several really handy dandy hacks and tips for Google. Most of these are quite common and used daily by Google lovers. However, for those that might not be familiar with this feature of Google, I would love to share a few of the basic search hacks I use on a daily basis.
“Drowning in information and starving for knowledge.”
One may find a simple Google search to be quite overwhelming. When looking for something specific it is really time consuming filtering through all the information, aka - search results. The most common way to narrow our search is through the use of quotation marks (”"). When put around a phrase, quotation marks restrict the search to include all of the words in the phrase and thus giving us more precise results.
Example:
“phrase goes here”
In times where I am looking for a specific file such as a PDF, DOC, PPT or any other type, I do a simple search using filetype: just before or after the name of the file.
Example:
filetype:pdf einstein
einstein filetype:doc
Below is another nifty trick I use daily to search specific sites for information. Just a simple site:domain limits the results to just that particular site. This can also be used to just search a particular domain, such as .gov sites for forms or .edu sites for information, DOC or PDF files for research. This can be combined with the filetype: tip above to further narrow your search results.
Example:
site:digg.com leonardo da vinci
site:edu filetype:pdf leonardo da vinci
Combining several of these and other hacks/tips you can really limit and pin-point your search dramatically. PCMag had a great video explaining an intitle technique. There are many other more advanced techniques and different combinations, so please do experiment and find ones that work for you.
As for the intitle technique discussed - it consists of using the intitle: hack, which as you can tell by the name, searches the titles of pages to match your criteria. The index.of allows us to search just the index/directory of the websites, which is really efficient. The dot (.) between the index and of represents any character such as comma, colon, a space, etc. It is sort of like a wild card taking on the shape and characteristics of that text character. The type of file is what follows afterward inside of quotation marks. To separate different file types, you can use a vertical bar (|). The next set of quotation marks in this example is the title of the file. In the example below, I used the dot (.) to take the place of a space between the words. It is not necessary, but I like to use it. After that, you list the page extensions you would like to search, such as htm, html, php, etc.
Example:
intitle:index.of + “mp3″ + “the.way.we.were” -htm -html -php
intitle:”index.of” + “mp3|aif” + “the.way.we.were” -htm -html
“The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it.”
Of course there’s tons of other hacks that are just as helpful and I really encourage you to try them all. Take a look through the Advanced Search Operators of Google Help Center to find other shortcuts that work for you. I recommend flipping though O’Reilly’s Google Hacks
Hope you’ve enjoyed this post and possibly even found it helpful. Happy searching!
∂ meow
Tags: google hacks
