WordPress Plugin Updates

The Presentation Toolkit, Skinner and More from Google plugins have been updated. Pretty much just minor bug fixes.

Vistered Little 1.7.4 Released

Vistered Little 1.7.4 has just been released and is now available for download.

More from Google 0.0.0 Released

More from Google 0.0.0 has just been released.

More from Google allows you to easily embed Google search results within your WordPress site.

Security Alert for Vistered Little Theme

Wordpress Blogs using Vistered Little are being targeted by hackers

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How to Create Resolution Independent Web Pages

Imagine a web page to automatically senses the size of your browser and renders the content so it fits perfectly. No horizontal scrolling. No blank columns. Everything just fits, as though it was made with just you in mind.

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Meebo is Great

I've got to say I'm very impressed with Meebo. If you've been to Windy Road recently, you may have noticed the chat widget on the side, that allowed you to IM me, without needing to go to another page or download some software.
Well, now Meebo has released a chat room feature and I've updated the widget accordingly. It was just so easy to add to the site and it just works. Round of applause for Meebo.
The only problem I do have is that because I'm an early adopter, the Windy Road Chat Room happens to be quite popular and thus is getting a lot a random chatters dropping in, who know nothing about Windy Road or any of it's article or software. I'm kind of dreading what's going to happen to the room when I'm not online tonight.

Update 2007.05.20

OK, so maybe Meebo isn't as great as I thought, or at least it's widgets aren't. I ended up removing the embedded chat room because it was simply blowing out the page load times by a huge amount. Oh well.

The Secret of Super Fast Lightboxes

The lightbox technique is a beautiful combination of (X)HTML, Javascript and CSS, allowing images or (X)HTML elements to be shown in a modal fashion on top of the page the user is browsing. Traditionally lightboxes have been implemented using Javascript, yet most of the functionality can be archived using (X)HTML, CSS and no Javascript at all.
This article describes a PoC demonstrating the lightbox technique using no Javascript by taking advantage of the :target pseudo-class, which is part of the Selectors Module of the CSS 3 Working Draft. This also means this technique only works in Firefox and Safari at the moment.
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How to Create a Javascript Speedometer

This is just a simple PoC of a Javascript speedometer for a colleague of mine.

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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