The Science of Web Art, Design and Development

It is often said that content is king, still, conscious people around insist that layout and design for you blog/site is essential.

In fact, I think this is no contradiction at all, no monarch can keep the throne without proper garment.

read full post…

Since I first met Gmail, in the very beginning of the service, I became addicted to the interface and, this days, I can hardly imagine myself using something else.

Yet using public email addresses is a big problem because if one day you change to another service you will have the headache of telling everybody about your new address. Having your own domain and your email within it is much better.

You may also want to handle old email accounts within Gmail transparently.

In this article, I will show you how to configure Gmail to manage multiple accounts in a transparent way and using your own domain email address or any other you may like.

Update: See the sequel of this article and learn How to manage all your main in Gmail: Filters, Labels multiple Id’s and even backups

read full post…

Simple hint, how to select a number random items from a MySQL database:

SELECT *
FROM your_table
ORDER BY rand()
LIMIT 2;

The code above, selects all the fields from a database table named “your_table” orders the results randomically and gets the first two. Change two for your favourite number.

Want to see an example of this working? Just look to your right! On the sidebar, there is a section named “Recommended Reading”. This is a section with books I like and recommend. I keep a list of books on a database and I pick two six at random with a query like this, each time a page is loaded.

Maybe you did knew this command already, or at least you heard about the ORDER BY command, but do you exactly know how it works and how further you can go with it?

I’ll show you some nice things in this article.

read full post…

I think most good web developers know how a bad browser Internet Explorer is.

Web development has an inherent difficulty because code you write is only an outline of what you want done, an intention. Is really up to the browser what is actually going to happen.

Some browsers don’t support some features and web developers should treat this with graceful degradation. Explorer is no exception.

One of the beauties of the web is that the user is in control. Browser choice and options are there to ensure that and sites should support that.

As a web publisher one want primarily to deliver information to public, not layout. The layout is support, meant to enhance the usability of the page. Not only for eye pleasure and reinforce brand indentity.
read full post…

I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with informative blogs. Those that doesn’t have original content and just collect things around the web. In fact, I do read regularly a couple of them.

But I do think that a blogger who doesn’t put thoughts and feelings on his blog is missing a huge chance to learn.

read full post…

Trying to increase the quality of service of the Zo’C blog and trying to reduce my effort to manage spam and approve comments quicky I’ve just instaled the Comment-Policy WordPress plugin.

read full post…