Aside from the great round up of 30 AJAX tutorials – really a must-read for anyone interested in deploying AJAX – which I mentioned not long ago, here is a neat site which helps you to quickly create your very own AJAX loader icon!
Popularity: 2%
Internet
30
Aug 07
Office 2.0 setup
For those of us dealing with Information Technology daily, the web is an indispensable source of information. However, apart from Gmail, many people may be unaware the availability of many Web 2.0 applications – some free, others using a subscription model – which basically will allow us to work from anywhere as long as we have access to a web browser. Well, here is a good list of Office 2.0 setup.
Of the ones listed, I regularly use
- del.icio.us for managing bookmarks
- Gmail and RoundCube webmail clients
- Google Docs and Spreadsheet
- weblogs like WordPress and Joomla
- and trying out SugarCRM
Popularity: 2%
27
Aug 07
Grids are good
During my recent sojourn into the world of designing (specifically for the web) – not so much in the graphics design department but more of the structural approaches -I happened upon some articles highlighting the benefits of an approach known as grid-based design. In a way, I suppose it is quite natural for a pen-and-paper or print layout technique to be eventually transferred to the web domain?!
However, the caveat is that grid-based designs are probably (my interpretation) more suited to conventional websites that need to follow the normal visual design standards and may not necessarily apply to artistic web sites where the goal is to be “different”. The theory is that the human eye sees a web page in a certain way, roughly from the top left to the bottom right, and the eyes can be guided to see elements in a pleasing and distinctive way when grids are used for the placement and alignment of all visual objects on the web page.
In fact, I bought the idea so much that I converted my Tango blog to one of the grid-based templates. Here are two links providing many hours of fun reading if ever you are interested in the theory and application of grid-based layout!
Popularity: 2%
23
Aug 07
Still around
For the past few months, work has been pretty busy. Well, being tired and stressed is a combination that is certain to kill off any creative juices… 
Anyway, as a result of needing to rapidly put together a simple web portal and web application, I have had to scour the internet for inspirations. The fortuitous by-product of this process is that I have managed to find many websites which carry (and good quality) free templates (for WordPress or otherwise). To cut a long story short, after sticking with fUnique theme on this blog for the past few, dormant months, I have switched to something simple and elegant – Moo-Point. This is based on Sandbox, which according to its author, is
… a theme for themers. It has the ability to be easily skinned… More experienced designers will drool at the rich semantic markup and profusion of classes, dynamically generated by a few functions.
Incidentally, the Barthelme theme which I have been happily using for my Tango Blog was created by the author of Sandbox. As far as customisations go, I have so far implemented the slick Javascript drop-down box from IAMWW w2 DnD theme and also added some automated features by pulling my bookmarks from Del.icio.us, an example can be seen here (obselete http://www.yyquest.net/web/recommended/).
Popularity: 6%
