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SQL joins explained as Venn diagrams
A handy illustration explaining how left and right joins work in SQL, presented as Venn diagrams. For some examples with actual data, check also this article by Jeff Atwood h/t Ilya Grigorik, Data Visualization (on G+)
How to fix the new G+ layout with Stylish
// Well, “fix” is a relative term. You might like the new look and feel of Google+ so you can stop reading now. But while I’ve initially loved it, I have been mounting up some serious problems with it. So much, that while I’m not a big fan of the various solutions to customise the [Continue reading]
Free eBook for web designers
// Smashing Magazine is promoting it’s Smashing Library service and they are offering a free eBook with a collection of some of their best articles. Contents include: - Designing For The Reading Experience - Logical Breakpoints For Your Responsive Design - Sketching A New Mobile Web - Towards A Retina Web - Avoiding The Pitfalls Of [Continue reading]
OMG, it’s full of cubes!
// More three.js awesomeness: here’s how to stretch test your graphics card: a three.js, WebGL demo by Ben Adams featuring up to 600.000 rotating cubes! How many frames per second do you get? (Firefox/Chrome only) See it in full screen
No, this isn’t Flash either
// Scary (in terms of the data) / awesome (in terms of the development part behind it) example of three.js, a javascript library for creating 3D scenes. See it live here
Fillerati: Jules Verne and more instead of lorem ipsum
// If you’re tired of using a lorem ipsum text every time you want to fill up dummy text, here is a simple solution. Fillerati by Michael McMillan offers you: - choice of 6 classic authors like Verne and Wells - choice between plain text, list, title and paragraph html - choice on the amount [Continue reading]
Jazz up your web page with Spritely
// Apparently, programming, like life, is sometimes going in circles. Almost 30 years ago I was doing my first steps in programming, coding sprites on my MSX2 in some lame attempts at game development :) Today, I’m revisiting the technique for a whole different purpose. Below you can see an elegant approach to a hover [Continue reading]
This is not how HTML/CSS should be used! Part II
// Is this getting silly? I’d say probably not, we need to push the boundaries of tech, even if it means we end up in hyperspace :) Following “Tunnel Vision 3D” by Peter Westendorp, here is another example of HTML/CSS mastery by Noah Blon. Enjoy this in full screen! http://cdpn.io/GKflw
Logstalgia: Visualising Apache logs
// Argh! The moment of anger when you find a cool weekend project but realize you don’t really have a free weekend sometime soon :) Logstalgia is a website traffic visualization that replays or streams web-server access logs as a pong-like battle between the web server and an never ending torrent of requests. Requests appear [Continue reading]
Blog Redesign, Part II
// I’ve been refining the redesign of this blog (see previous post about it for a screenshot of how it looked in the past) and here is the summary of recent changes: All pages: Full page width! Home page: - More space between boxes - Very very white background on boxes instead of gray - [Continue reading]
Newton’s playground: Javascript physics engines
The awesome animation below is actually the recorded output of a real-time #Javascript-powered physics engine. There has been quite a lof of progress in this field lately using technologies like #canvas and #WebGL, here are some recent developments: The “dragable/tearable cloth” demo comes from lonely-pixel.com. Play with it live and get the code here http://bit.ly/15wyK0F There are more demos on the developer’s website, [Continue reading]
Blogger and the Holy Grail of unified comments
// So yesterday Google announced a further integration of Google+ comments and Blogger. If you enable the related setting, if your Blogger post is shared on G+, any comment on the G+ post with your post will also be shown in the page of the Blogger post in the comments section. This is a Holy [Continue reading]
Now this IS parallax!
// I’m not a big fan of parallax scrolling sites. Mainly because it is CPU-intensive which means that you will have people with a bad experience and by definition you are constrained to a small number of "pages" which means that you can only use it for small sites and you can’t upgrade such a [Continue reading]
This is not how HTML and CSS should be used!
// Some fun coding by Peter Westendorp: "Tunnel vision 3D" with CSS. As Peter writes: "This is an experiment to demonstrate the power of CSS and modern browsers. This is not how HTML and CSS should be used." :D See it live here http://bit.ly/10SvqbK
This is the Internet!
// Openly accessible data + open source development + open technologies = awesome :)The people at Teehan+Lax have developed a method to create timelapse videos using imagery from Google Street View. They call it Google Street View Hyperlapse and you can see the amazing video that you can produce as well, along with links to [Continue reading]
Just because you can: GUI icons with pure CSS
// Inspired by an elegant piece of CSS code by +Lea Verou, creating the WiFi code (see it here http://bit.ly/wificss), I searched for other examples of this and found this little gem: A demo of 84 icons created with just CSS by +Nicolas Gallagher. Nicolas calls it’s a "technical exercise" but given that this was [Continue reading]
Charts with Javascript: even more ways to kill Flash
// Javascript-powered chart solutions is a favorite topic of mine, so here are a few more options for you- NVD3 (http://nvd3.org/) builds upon the powerful D3 library and currently supports 11 different interactive chart types - Rickshaw (http://code.shutterstock.com/rickshaw/) also built on D3, can be used for live-data time graphs with 4 customisable chart types _ [Continue reading]
Draft: cloud text-editing for any anything anywhere
// I’ve written about #Draft already a few days ago http://bit.ly/g-draft when it was “just” a web-based text #editor for #Dropboxand Google Drive with version control and collaboration features.But I need to write again as a #Chrome extension was released that redefined how you can use Draft. I’ll just copy the developer’s (+Nathan Kontny) description: [Continue reading]
Twitter Cards: Engage!
// Just 6 days after my submission for inclusion on the #TwitterCards program, I got in and in the screenshot you can see the result: whenever someone tweets a URL of my blog, an “expanded view” will be available with a title, short description, thumbnail, my name and #Twitter handleIt also works on the mobile (iOS [Continue reading]
Improve links to your site on Twitter with Twitter Cards
// Announced since last July, Twitter Cards is Twitter’s equivalent (or “answer” if you like tech drama) to the Open Graph. By defining a set of #meta #tags in your #HTML code you can provide instructions to #Twitterin order to display an “expanded” preview of your page, when your page’s URL is included in a [Continue reading]
Tracking shares before they happen (or even if they don’t happen)?
// A tricky question poped up in my Quora home page: Is it possible to check, if somebody requested your site’s #meta #tags ?The logic behind this is that you could track social shares even if the user doesn’t complete the process (load’s up the URL on Facebook or a sharing widget) and then quits. [Continue reading]
How to create an infographic from your Google Analytics data
// Well, there’s not much to say here. People love #infographics for visualising information and numbers in an easy to consume manner. People also love #GoogleAnalytics for an endless amount of #statisticsabout their website.Now you can combine both with a few clicks on the free tool by Visual.ly. The process is relatively simple, you connect [Continue reading]
Does your company know what the internet is?
//_UPDATE_: The situation has been sorted out, the project is back online normally http://bit.ly/chartjs // Yesterday I wrote (http://bit.ly/g-chartjs) about Chart.js, a new library for javascript/canvas-based charts. A day later, the site is down with a note shown in the screenshot, basically explaining how the developer’s employer doesn’t like the idea of #OpenSource. Here’s the outcome [Continue reading]
Chart.js: cross-browser, animated, HTML5 charts
//Non-Flash charts is a favourite topic of mine (see more here http://bit.ly/g-chart), basically because charts have been one of the last things Flash could do that HTML couldn’t. This of course has been changing a lot the last few years. Another very recent (released yesterday!) example of is Chart.js. It packs: - 6 animated chart types: [Continue reading]
Blog redesigned – comments?
// I hadn’t touched my blog’s design for a bit over year, so I thought it was time for a refresh. Yes, In case you haven’t noticed, I have a blog at which contains a full (an indexed) archive of all my Google+ posts. So over the last 20 months I have ended up writing [Continue reading]
Add icons to your links with CSS3
// A lovingly quick way to add icons next to your links that I just saw in +Lea Verou’s (of W3C) site: all you need is a simple line of #CSS3 code. a[href^="http://twitter.com"]::before { content: url("twitter.png"); } See it live at http://lea.verou.me/
The Ultimate Browser Detection Fail
// So here’s a screenshot from #Google #Nexus , running Google’s #Android browser, showing a page on a Google service (Google Groups). We notice two things happening: 1) Google’s page can’t identify Google’s browser correctly and instead mistake it for #Safari2) Google engineers can’t (or wont?) make a page of relatively simple (in terms of [Continue reading]
CSS Paint times and a Faster Web Experience
// At a perhaps an alarming rate, web sites are becoming more and more like complete applications, see for example the refreshed +The Next Web or +Mashable). This means that looking into initial page loading times is not enough. We need to monitor how the web page reacts at user input. +Addy Osmani has been posting a [Continue reading]
Change your scrollbars with jQuery NiceScroll
// For some time changing the look of #scrollbars has been quite tricky but the last couple of years this has become easier. Probably one of the best is a #jQuery plugin call NiceScroll. Now in version 3 it features: - simple installation with just a line of code for any div or the whole [Continue reading]
Finally, an awesome UX tutorial
// Answering the question "What are the best resources for learning bleeding-edge web, UI and UX design?" on Quora, Colm Tuite, UI/Visual Designer & Developer, decided to write one of this own. The result was an extensive post / #tutorial with 10 steps to a decent (if not great) start in learning about #UX. To sum [Continue reading]