The Secret of Keeping Web Apps Responsive

With AJAX becoming more and more common place on the web, old lessons need to be re-leant in order to create user interfaces that don't hang.

Anyone with any AJAX experience will be familiar with the problem. You fire off your AJAX request, you get your response, you update the page and everything is good… except it isn't. Updating the page takes forever and while that's happening the user can't do anything, not scroll, navigate to another page or even close the current page.
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Skinner Plugin and Presentation Toolkit Plugin

As part of the development of the soon the be released Vistered Little 1.7, I created a skin selector based on the Theme selector that comes with WordPress, which has resulted in the Skinner Plugin. Now all themes can enjoy the benefits of being skinable.

I've also created a Presentation Toolkit Plugin based on the Wordpress Theme Toolkit by Ozh. It's basically the same, except now it's a plugin and it supports skins (i.e. with the Skinner Plugin.

Enjoy,

–
Tom

11 Steps to a Successful Open Source Project

For a few years I ran an open source simulator project, which was used for a number of competitions each year. This put some pretty strict deadlines on the project as not only did in need to be ready for the competitions, the participants had to have it pretty far in advance in order to adapt their code to work with the newer versions of the simulator. Here are some of the things I learnt along the way.

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