Reviews, Tech News »

By now most people have heard of JS-Kit, the ever-popular, freakishly simple, non-obtrusive, self-contained, mostly-free widget service. JS-Kit is a ten person company that works full time on creating and maintaining these website tools. Their current selection of services is a Ratings widget, a full-featured Comments widget, Polls, and a so-called Top Rated widget that summarizes data from the Ratings widget. The best part? With the exception of Top Rated, these widgets are free and contain no ads.

This past week I had the opportunity to ask some questions of Khris Loux, CEO of JS-Kit, about the future of his fast-growing widget company. We talked about some of the exciting changes recently made to JS-Kit, as…

Useful Tools »

I just found a great reference for anyone who makes, ports, or just edits WordPress themes. WP Candy has made a PDF with an impressive list of code snippets for Wordpress. The list is put together nicely, and well organized. According to their website, the PDF has code for “basic template files, PHP snippets for the header, PHP snippets for the templates, and extra stuff for WordPress.” This looks mighty useful, I’ll be using it while I’m updating Simply-Basic.com’s design. Check it out here.

Tech News »

Just saw this one thanks to one of my readers. SitePoint is giving away a free Ruby on Rails book by Patrick Lenz on how to build your own web applications in Ruby on Rails. The book has 12 chapters and 447 pages. You can get the e-book for free, or a printed edition for a generous discount. I downloaded mine earlier. All you do is give them your email and they send you the link. Oh, it’s only free for another month from the time I am writing this. You can download it here.

Tutorial/How-To, Useful Tools »

Update 11/16/07: I realized I had a few typos in some of the code, below. If you’ve been having trouble getting this working, re-copy the code that links your HTML document to the scripts. It should be working now.

I’ve always been a fan of tabs. I think they are not only useful at clearing up clutter, but they can be down right sexy if they’re done right. A while ago I can across Nyokiglitter’s website where she throws up some of her examples of scripts using MooFX. That’s where I found this next script for this tutorial. This script provides a tabs unit that uses a nice sliding effect when changing tabs. It is based on…

Useful Tools »

I’ve had a number of people email me this past week and ask how I got code to show up so nicely in my post about a Fisheye Menu Script. The standard way is to use the <code> HTML tags. Unfortunately, even if you don’t use a WYSIWYG HTML editor, Wordpress still tries to clean up your code and seems to ignore the <code> tags. So how can you get around this?

There is an easy way. After looking for 30 minutes one day on the best way to effectivly publish code on my blog, here it is. And it’s actually remarkably simple.

First, download a plugin called “Preserve Code Formatting” by coffe2code here. Refer to the…

Tutorial/How-To, Useful Tools »

I’ve always been a fan of Macintosh’s Dock. Something about that sleek mouseover effect gets me every time. Recently, I was working on a project that needed a minimally invasive similar effect on a website. During the course of getting it ready, I came across a number of scripts that attempted this very thing. Some of them were good, some weren’t. Fisheye Menu by Marc Grabanski is so easy to install that I thought I’d share it here.

The script is open source, though I’ve only made minimal tweaks to it. All credit and blame go solely to Marc Grabanski. The only thing I’ve added is a single line of code that changes the mouse cursor to…