Design Grid

I’ve often found myself requiring icons when linking to or referencing different social networks I’m a member of.

Whilst there are a lot of icon sets available that can help me do this, most seem to be oversized and highly stylised. In the past I’ve used site favicons, but these can often be visually inconsistent.

You can grab these beautiful icons from Paul Robert Lloyd here.

Yes, this is another round-up of fresh and useful Javascript techniques, tools and resources. But don’t close the tab yet, as you might find this one very useful.

In this selection we present calendars, forms, buttons, navigation, debugging, optimization and compatibility tables as well as handy resources and tools. We also cover various jQuery-plugins that will help you extend the functionality of your website and improve user experience with ready components or coding solutions.

Read the full article over at Smashing Magazine

Most of my clients are on twitter, this results in my clients wanting to show their latest tweets on their home page.

While Twitter provide JavaScript ‘badges’ to show your latest tweets, it it sluggish and what happens if a user has JavaScript disabled?

My workaround for this was using php to parse the users RSS feed.

//RSS Feed URL
$rss_url = “http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/14942878.rss”;

if (!$rss_data = @file_get_contents($rss_url)) {
echo "Oh snap, it seems twitter is down :(";

} else {

$rss_xml = SimpleXML_Load_String($rss_data);

$channel_title = $rss_xml->channel->title;
$channel_link = $rss_xml->channel->link;
$tweets = array();
foreach ($rss_xml->channel->item as $item) {
$item_title = $item->title;
$item_link = $item->link;
$item_description = $item->description;

$tweet = explode(": ", $item_title);
$tweetmessage = preg_replace("/(http:\/\/[^\s]+)/", "$1", $tweet[1]);
$tweetmessage = preg_replace("/(@[^\s]+)/", "$1", $tweetmessage);
$tweets[] = $tweetmessage ;
}
echo $tweets[0] ;
}

This chuck of code uses a regular expression to parse the XML of your RSS feed, puts each tweet into an array.

Example: Display your 5 most recent tweets:

echo $tweets[0] ;
echo $tweets[1] ;
echo $tweets[2] ;
echo $tweets[3] ;
echo $tweets[4] ;

Enjoy!

The sophisticated image of minimalism has always been a popular style of design.

In webdesign a minimalist site is stripped naked of eye candy and fancy colours or effects, leaving the underlying structure exposed. The key to a beautiful minimalist site is a solid and structured layout, as well as focus on stylish and well designed typography.

These 50 examples showcase some of the best minimal site designs out there on the web.

Read full article over at Line25

This little snippet of code does amazing things!

Using imap_open, you can display your unread email count from your googlemail (or any pop/imap server). I used it for my status board, and it works a treat.

$mbox = imap_open ("{imap.googlemail.com:993/imap/ssl/novalidate-cert}INBOX",
"gmailusername", "gmailpassword", OP_READONLY)
or die("can't connect: " . imap_last_error());
$check = imap_mailboxmsginfo($mbox);
if ($check) {
print $check->Unread; //. "/" . $check->Nmsgs;
} else {
print "Failed";
}

Just a couple of things to note:

• novalidate-cert – This is important for Google Mail, otherwise you will get authentication failures
• Make sure you have php5-imap installed. [sudo apt-get install php5-imap ; /etc/init.d/apache2 restart]

I know, I know, shameless plug.

Yesterday I was rolling out some updates to Listy ToDo, a small and simple web based to do list. I use it for everything these days so wanted to share it with you in the hope it will help you too!

Go to Listy ToDo – listytodo.com

So, maybe this is a bit off topic but it is so cool, I had to share it anyway.

Yesterday, I built my own status board (inspired by this: http://www.panic.com/blog/2010/03/the-panic-status-board/)

This is a brief over view of what it does.

It’s built using PHP/MYSQL and uses AJAX requests every 20 seconds to keep it updated constantly.

It shows the latest projects that are not started yet, ready to go, and active. It also has the days events/to-dos, does needing Rice & Sour Cream count as an event?

It is updated via a simple PHP/MYSQL backend from my local machine.

The bottom center module is a real time server status that pings each server to check that it is still alive and well.

The most exciting module is the bottom right that executes an IMAP request to pull the number of unread emails from my googlemail and my work email accounts.

That’s all there is to it, but it looks pretty cool mounted on the wall.

I’d love to know your thoughts on it!

There has been an increasing and sincere interest in typography on the web over the last few years. Most websites rely on text to convey their messages, so it’s not a surprise that text is treated with utmost care. In this article, we’ll look at some useful techniques and clever effects that use the power of style sheets and some features of the upcoming CSS Text Level 3 specification, which should give Web designers finer control over text.

Read the full article over at Smashing Magazine

Web design is a relatively young field. It’s youthful, growing and made up of people from all kinds of backgrounds, many of whom lack formal design training. We have learned, and still are learning, as we go.

Read the full article over at Smashing Magazine