August 4, 2010 — The explosion of JavaScript libraries and frameworks such as jQuery onto the front-end development scene has opened up the power of JavaScript to a far wider audience than ever before. It was born of the need — expressed by a crescendo of screaming by front-end developers who were fast running out of hair to pull out — to improve JavaScript’s somewhat primitive API, to make up for the lack of unified implementation across browsers and to make it more compact in its syntax. Read more…

August 3, 2010 — “The need is constant. The gratification is instant.” That’s from the American Red Cross, and it was copy that I plugged into a poster for a blood drive at a comics convention. Sitting beside an image of the sexy and well-endowed Vampirella, the words took on a different meaning. Oops! Read more…

July 30, 2010 — Recently I released a WordPress plugin for Google Analytics that adds a tracking code and dozens of various pieces of meta data to blogs. Since the release of version 4, I’ve updated it 6 times, to the point where it’s now at version 4.0.6. In this article I would like to share with you my experiences in maintaining this and other WordPress plug-ins and common good practices that I’ve distilled from that work. Read more…

July 29, 2010 — Waves of change are currently rippling through every aspect of the Web. The iPad and other mobile devices are changing the way we access the Internet, while HTML5 and CSS3 promise to change the way we develop it. However, another storm is brewing that threatens Photoshop’s throne as the application of choice for Web design. The battle suggests a fundamental shift in the design process from Photoshop to mark-up. Read more…

July 28, 2010 — For too many projects, there comes a time when every action taken, every decision and sacrifice made, is spurred on by pressure to finish. Tempers seem to shrink along with the available days, talk about “high standards” gives way to “good enough,” and people realize that _dead_lines are aptly named. During the last-minute crunch, someone may well wonder, how did it come to this? Could it have been prevented? Read more…

July 26, 2010 — An effective, well-organized workflow is an important asset of professional web designers. The more useful and time-saving your tools are, the more time you can focus on important things, thus creating a foundation for timely good-quality results. The problem is that there are just way too many tools, services and resources out there, so it has become difficult to keep track on them and find those tiny little time-savers that will spare you headaches and save time in a long run. Read more…

July 25, 2010 — Camera is a remarkable piece of innovation. However, it is the person behind the camera that makes it truly remarkable. It’s his imagination, passion, talent and knowledge of the medium. You don’t need a high-end costly equipment to get beautiful results. Just your talent and a way of looking at things differently along with ability to envision the final result in your mind is more than enough for a great shot. Read more…

July 23, 2010 — In this post we release a free Facebook GUI PSD Kit, designed by SurgeWorks and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The main idea behind the kit is to speed up the prototyping of Facebook application UIs and Facebook fan pages, thus sparing you from drawing all the comps and letting you customize all the texts, buttons and data as you need. As usual, the kit is free to use in all projects, without any restrictions. Read more…

July 23, 2010 — Mark Rothko, an American artist who described himself as an abstract painter, once said that he was not the kind of person interested in the relationship of form, color or similars. He didn’t define himself as an abstractionist, but rather as a person interested only in expressing basic human emotions such as doom, tragedy, ecstasy and so on. This was one person’s vision of art, but what do we mean by art today? Why is defining the concept so difficult? Read more…

July 22, 2010 — Think of Tumblr as micro-blogging on steroids (technically, it’s called “tumblelogging”). Whereas Twitter and similar services limit posts to 140 characters or less, Tumblr lets you post updates of any length, although it’s best suited to short-format posts. Tumblr bridges the gap between full-blown blog and micro-blog. Read more…