StraTechnologist

Once upon a time, there was a company called Netscape who was investigating a new market: portal sites and content syndication. The idea was simple: a variety of websites produce relevant content in a (nearly) continuous flow. Portals would be designed to aggregate news and content from those sites and present it to the user all in one page…

Thus, Netscape invented a format called RSS, which stood for “Remote Site Syndication”. This spec allows content producers to publish their news/content in an “RSS feed” (an XML based document) and content consumers to periodically check those feeds for updates.

When Netscape lost interest in developing portals, they abandonned their original (and complex) RSS 0.9 spec as well as their efforts in creating a more appropriate and simpler version. At that time, UserLand picked up the simpler 0.91 spec and applied it to its blog tools. RSS had become “Really Simple Syndication”.

fplanque: IT world - Syndication, RSS, RDF and Atom in a Nutshell

A demonstration of what can be accomplished visually through CSS-based design. Select any style sheet from the list to load it into this page.

css Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design

A techinque to present the comment form always fixed related to the scrolling content. Jonathan Snook presents a short explaination on how to implement this comment-stimulating web page layout. The technique is based on fixed positioning using CSS.

Comments: Behind the Scenes - snook.ca

Here lies one of the great ironies of the web.

To a small business owner, driving interested customers to your site can be a daunting task. After investing in an online brand strategy, slick site design, shopping cart software and hosting service, it’s typical to be nervous about the prospect of drawing enough customers to recuperate costs and make a profit.

How is it, then, that your average high school nerd can take a short break from Everquest, write a one paragraph blurb about something of nerd interest, and two days later be forced to deal with so much traffic that mom’s dsl router overheats and reboots itself.

In this article, I’ll show you how easy it is to get slashdotted and what this means to the average web business.

Read more to get slashdotted.

How To Get Slashdotted | Virtuoffice

In my Modular CSS article I documented the possibility of breaking down stylesheets into components that could be reused across projects. All well and good. The next logical step is to extend this to become a CSS framework, allowing rapid development of sites with pre-written and tested components. All that’s really required to produce this is a set of naming conventions and a flexible base template…
Who is this for?

If you’ve been creating sites with CSS for a while you may be getting frustrated with having to recreate and retest basic layouts on a regular basis. In this article I’m trying to illustrate a simple way of skipping the tedious startup on your average project, letting you get to the interesting stuff as quickly and efficiently as possible. I’ve not attempted to explain the layouts included here so it may not be suitable if you’re a CSS beginner. Sorry about that… Feel free to dissect them yourself if you’re interested; I’ve kept them as simple as possible.

Content with Style: A CSS Framework

What is the box office?
“The Box Office” is another handy tool which makes us web developers even more lazy.
It automates the time-consuming job where one would have to manually create transparent div’s so that a certain piece of text would go around the contour of an object inside an image. (Just read on, it’ll get more clear)

The Box Office 0.2 - Quick-’n-Dirty PHP Version

Vitaly Friedman kindly suggested to StraTechnologist his enormous resource for Web developers and I happily report his work here for you:

“Web-Dev-Bookmarks” is a list of essential web-sites, tutorials, references and examples (related to CSS Navigation Menus, CSS- & HTML-Techniques, Layouts, Accessibility, Usability, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) etc.) which make the life of web developers easier.

The list includes over 200 manually selected resources, is updated weekly and is compiled by Vitaly Friedman.

Essential bookmarks for web-designers and webdevelopers | CSS, Color Tools, Royalty free photos, Usability etc.

Netscape on Thursday launched version 8.0 of its Web browser, promising better security and the ability to switch between rival browsers Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Netscape was once the dominant browser but is a shadow of its former self, in terms of market share. It is owned by America Online, a division of Time Warner Inc.

Netscape 8.0 aims to restore the browser’s reputation, in part by combining rival technologies. It uses the new Firefox, a collaboratively developed browser program, to handle less secure sites, and Internet Explorer, by Microsoft Corp. , to open trusted ones.

“The browser is like a hybrid car that combines the usability of Internet Explorer with the security of Firefox,” said Andrew Weinstein, a spokesman for America Online/Netscape.

The new Netscape checks sites for security, integrates Web search and offers advanced features like RSS feeds, which typically link to major news providers.

Internet News Article | Reuters.com

In large tables it’s often hard to focus on one row, making it hard to extract data from the table. There are various scripts (client–side as well as server–side) floating around the net that provide the ability to style odd/even table–rows to aid readability of tabular data.

Almost a year after my comment at A List Apart, I still get quite a few hits for zebra.txt; my enchaned, more generic version of David F. Miller’s Zebra Tables script. My script wasn’t perfect either so I improved it and decided to elaborate on my changes.

If you’re not interested in how this works or what’s improved go and see the script in action or download it.

validweb: Better Zebra Tables

There is no doubt in my mind that RSS is here to stay. RSS is a simple and effective means of communicating your message to your visitors without invading their privacy or spamming them. It has many benefits over email and there have been many reports of the death of email due to the continual rise of mass spamming and non delivery due to spam filters. By no means is email dead, it is still the best personal communication method besides picking up the phone. It’s just that RSS does some things much better than email.

How to use RSS correctly