8 Ways to Sunday

Design Geek

• Color Me Impressed — Publish.com’s Edmund Ronald offers some interesting speculations about Microsoft’s plans for color management in Windows Vista. Microsoft posts a white paper on the subject, and a Windows XP “power toy” offers a preview of things to come.
• One Layout to Rule them All — Dougal Campbell has discovered the One True CSS Layout. The technique, created by Alex Robinson of Position is Everything, doesn’t quite live up to its grandiose name but still provides a mind-bending level of flexibility for three-column layouts. Some of the ideas could be easily adapted to other layout styles, and indeed I found that I’d already used some of his techniques in a simpler form for this weblog and for Little Elegy.

Web Geek

• Matthew Mullenweg, Spam Killa — The creator of WordPress has started a new web service called Akismet that blocks comment and trackback spam on the blogs of subscribers. A few days latter, Sebastian Schmieg Herp released an Akismet plugin for Spam Karma 2, my spam-blocker of choice. (via)
• Take That, Mint — Stephen Wettone has released a simple, yet elegant, web stats analyzer based on Shaun Inman’s defunct ShortStat program. Dubbed SlimStat, one could argue it’s more the true spiritual successor to the free ShortStat than Inman’s $30 Mint is. Such distinctions don’t really matter much to me; I just want something that’s free/cheap and that works. Mint may be more than I need, while SlimStat seems just right. Early impressions from some TextDrive users are positive. I may have to give this thing a spin myself.
• Demystifying the Voodoo of Web Analytics — Don’t know your visits from your unique visitors? Can’t tell a page-view from a hit? Do your eyes glaze over when someone says the words “conversion rate”? Digital Web Magazine offers up an informative article on the hows and whys of web traffic analysis, pointing out how developers, designers, and marketers can all use it as a tool to measure their effectiveness. If you make or market web sites professionally, you need to read this article. (via)
• A Globe-Trotter’s Wishlist — I’m probably way behind the curve on this one, but I just learned about 43 Places — a new web app from the folks behind 43 Things. The twist is that instead of tracking your things-to-do goals, you use it to track your places-to-go goals.

Code Geek

• PHP on Rails — CakePHP is a rapid development framework for the PHP language, inspired by Ruby on Rails. Until Rails is more broadly supported by web hosting companies, I think frameworks like this are going to see a lot of use. How much of a bite will they take out of Rails itself?
• AJAX Made Simple(ish) — In the wake of Jesse James Garrett’s tipping-point essay on remote scripting, at least a dozen JavaScript libraries and toolkits popped up to ease the creation of the kinds of web applications he described. The Open Source Applications Foundation has an excellent survey of such toolkits, giving pros and cons for each.
• AJAX Made Squeaky Clean — While not exactly falling into the same category as the AJAX toolkits, Behaviour is also worth mentioning. All that fancy JavaScript used in AJAX web applications can really gunk up your XHTML with onclick attributes and <script> blocks. Behaviour provides a simple way to implement the principles of unobtrusive JavaScript by hanging script behaviors off of CSS selectors when the document is loaded. The Behaviour web site offers a couple of examples, showing how much cleaner the XHTML of sites like Flickr and Backpack could be if unobtrusive JavaScript practices were used. This is no mere aesthetic consideration; externally linked JavaScript files are cached by web browsers, while inline script elements are not. Using unobtrusive JavaScript not only makes your code easier to maintain, it also makes your site’s pages download faster.