The Science of Web Art, Design and Development

I was just watching the Helvetica Film that just arrived after a very long wait, and I one of the many interesting things was to see designer Win Crouwel saying

You can’t make better design with computers, but you can speed up your work

Win Crouvel

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If you haven’t heard about Django, it is a Python Based framework to build complex and resource savvy sites easily and quickly. I have been studying and playing with Django in the last days and I’m simply amazed about it.

If you are a designer rather than a developer, the word python might scare you a little, since you don’t want to learn any python at all. Instead, if you are a developer, you might be skeptic to read that complex sites can be built easily.

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This post is just a quickie to wish all Zo’C Readers a Great Christmas. And I hope following this blog this year has been as interesting for you as mantaining it has been for me.

Also, warm feelings to the nice people at Authority Blogger Forum, which is friendly community and an invaluable resource for bloggers.

When I started working on the web, ten years ago, sites should be done to be visible with a resolution of 640x480px, otherwise a good part of visitors would be blocked out. As resolutions increased the minimum size increased to 800×600 and today it is believed that designing towards 1024×768 is safe.

Will this number increase in the future? Should we still concern about low resolutions? What is The ultimate answer to screen resolutions for web design?

I really don’t think the ultimate answer for screen resolutions is a number, no matter what the number is. I think the answer is a process by which websites are developed.

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It is the law of the market, if people are interested in your work, no matter the reason, you can make a lot of money. If people are not interested in what you do, no matter how well you do it.

Designers, software developers and other people who can do valuable work quickly and enjoying it seem to face a moral problem with charging good money for it, and when they not, they have a bad time explaining the price to clients that ask why would you charge so much for something that you will do in little time and enjoying it.

Why is the client wrong on these assumptions?
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Some time ago I was looking for a plugin that showed both favicon and name on a WordPress blogroll. As I couldn’t find it, I had to made my own, but the code wasn’t general enough to distribute it.

Recently I have created a powerful blogroll, in the form of a page template, capable to display the name, favicon, description, notes and even the RSS link of blogs in your blogroll, because blogrolls with just a list of links are not useful anymore.

Now I have packaged it as a plugin for your delight: The ZoC Powerblogroll.

Download it right away, or go to the plugin page.

Download It

(Comments are disabled on this page, you can discuss this on the plugin page.)

This plugin has been downloaded [downloadcounter(ZoC-powerblogroll.zip)] times.

I have just published Zo’C Subcats, a wordpress plugin that enables you to display either a list or a drop down menu with the subcategories of a category of your choice. The plugin gracefully degrades in absence of Javascript.

You can read further instructions and download it on the plugin page or you can download it immediately here.

The plugin started humbly to address a need of my fellow blogger Desty, and was published thanks to the incentive of Michael and Jen.

Any feedback is welcome

Enjoy!

(Comments are disabled on this page, you can discuss this on the plugin page.)

This plugin has been downloaded [downloadcounter(ZoC-subcats.zip)] times.

Among the almost infinite list of html entities, the non-breaking space ( ) is one of the most popular but very little understood.

The correct place for a   is, for instance, in “Mr. Smith”. The   will avoid a line break between Mr. and Smith, while leaving a space between them.

The non-breaking space earned its fame because in the dark days of the table layouts people needed to put content on certain elements without visual rendering.

As the normal space is discarded by the browser in most situations an entity like the non-braking space, which is always considered and yet has no shape was very welcome to leave a gutter.

Yet, the   should not be used to leave gutters. While it is quick and easy to put them, is really a nightmare to upgrade, because markup and presentation are all mixed. The role of the non-breaking space is actually to bind things together and not so separate them.

Have you seen Jamie Oliver‘s shows on the “telly”? Sure you did.

Put the flour on the table, open a hole, pour water, add yeast, oops… spilled on the floor. No problem, let’s put it away and make some more.

…for this dish, let’s put this on a big pan, while we cook that on the small one. Chop this, chop that, use your hands, wonderful!

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How often you click on the archives on the sidebar of a blog? How often do you follow links in a blogroll that you didn’t knew already? In my site, according to my statistics, almost no one does it.
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