Archive for March 2004

Macromedia has launched its Flex Developer Center. Macromedia Flex is a server component. Flex-based interfaces Interfaces required Macromedia Flash Player for display. It uses an XML language (MXML) and ActionScript, an ECMA scripting language.

Flex also includes an MXML class library, Runtime Services, and a compiler for generating SWF files from MXML files. The developer center offers tutorials for online reading or downloading along with plenty of resources to get you started.

If you can’t get enough of JavaScript, this is THE weblog to read. Dori Smith, co-author of JavaScript for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide, is the writer behind it.

Have your images been gaining weight? Maybe it’s time to lo-carb it or, in design terms, use weighted optimization.

The article shows how to use regional compression in Photoshop. Photoshop 6+/Imageready 3+, Fireworks, Image Optimizer, JPEG Wizard, and Web Image Guru also support regional compression.

The Passivator is a tool for Mozilla-derived browsers, Safari, and Opera 7.5, with caveats that flags passive verbs and adverbs on Web sites. It’s imperfect, but it is a tool that is appreciated by writers (yes, I did that on purpose).

A friend of mine used to say things like “I sawl
it” instead of “saw.” It made me crazy, but she was and is still my best friend. My daughter occasionally slips up and I am there to correct her. Here’s a list of 100 Most Often Mispronounced Words and most of the words are big ones, not common words. One that I agree with is, “way” and “ways.” When IMing or talking slang, I’ll use “prolly” instead of “probably.”

Typophile Forums discuss the double-spacing after periods origins and whether or not we should be doing it. I don’t. It is an outdated practice. As important as it is to use short paragraphs in online writing, double-spacing between sentences breaks them up too much and the space sticks out.

We’ve all read them. MEGO copy. My eyes glaze over. They’re copy with fancy words, a lot of talk, just general yadda yadda. Read Bad Copy: An Example in the Negative to see an example of MEGO and learn how to leggo of MEGO.

mLife ran an ad during the SuperBowl, but the company forgot to do one thing… prepare for the onslaught of traffic to its Web site. Shortly after the ad debutted, the site crashed because it couldn’t handle the traffic jam. When 9/11 happened, I remember having trouble getting to a news site… any news site because they were all slow and loaded with surfers like me wanting to know what happened.

Granted, no one could have predicted 9/11 (aside from the politics with intelligence information), but mLife could have been prepared. Traffic is a tricky thing since it can shoot for the stars once in a blue moon and you don’t want to spend the extra dough just for those occasions. So what can you do?

Lay siege to your Web server is one thing you can do. Another is to keep line wide open with marketing so you know of any upcoming campaigns and prepare for them. What about the unknowns like when you’re slashdotted or gnomed? That’s where testing the server is handy. Any other tips that worked for you? [ InformIT ]

If your site is designed with CSS / XHTML without tables, you don’t have to do another thing to ensure it’s readable for the small screen including cell phones and handheld devices. Despite this, Webmonkey goes out with a big bang with The End-All Guide to Small-Screen Web-Dev.

The article walks through the world of small Web design, its related and requisite acronyms, and technologies. Get instructions on how to use Opera to do testing with small screen rendering. If you don’t want to read a bunch of articles on the topic, pick this one. [ Via InformIT ]

Keeping Found Things Found is a survey of how people track information they find on the Internet for when they needed it again later. When I find cool sites, I admit I’m reluctant to bookmark them today because I know when I want them… I won’t remember the name or where I placed it in my well-organized bookmarks file. I’m freakish about being organized, but even it doesn’t help me keep found things found like this great site about Greek mythology.