Front-End Book

• RT @problogger 15 Useful Tools for WordPress Bloggers, really good list with some “new” plugins I havent seen before #
• Looking for houses, probably the only potential buyer around these days #
• How many best of 2008 and … in 2009 lists will we see the next three days posted on Twitter, Digg and elsewhere? #
• Checking out @MrTweet, my personal assistant for discovering the great followers and influencers in my network! http://mrtweet.net?c=11! #
• Somebody must have gone wild with the ugly stick on Outlook Webmail on Safari and Firefox #
• Zend Frameworks Routing do not like åäö #
• Start watching The Dark Knight #
• Doing the daily Google Analytics routine with a little taste of FeedBurner as well #
• wrestling with utf-8, routes and rewrites in Zend Framework and I am not winning #
• http://tinyurl.com/9owef2 #
• How Monitoring Twitter Can Help Build Links is the label for the link posted #
• Happy New Year #
• RT @rworth jQuery ThemeRoller 2 http://ui.jquery.com/themeroller #
• jQuery alerts,prompts and confirm boxes http://tinyurl.com/776n7u #
• 5 CSS 3 Techniques http://tinyurl.com/9u23lf #
• The Golden Ratio of Web Design http://tinyurl.com/a7qzy2 #
• xuheki ajax driven webmail http://www.xuheki.com/ #
• Layoffs at Microsoft Part II: http://tinyurl.com/8yn3nm #
• Douglas Crockford: “Web Forward” on Yahoo! Video http://ff.im/-sX76 #
• TypeWatch http://ff.im/-sXlw #
• PDT 2.0 Release Notes http://ff.im/-sY91 #
• jQuery UI, ThemeRoller and jQuery 1.3 http://ff.im/-sYAN #
• UI.Layout Plug-in - Home http://ff.im/-sYDe #
• Easy Tweets - It’s About Conversations http://ff.im/-sYFr #
• Android for any device http://tinyurl.com/7m99u3 #
• User Experience Sverige UXS - LinkedIn Grupp http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/131112 http://uxs.se #svpt #
• trying to uninstall twitter application in Facebook. Not as easy as I foolishly believed #
• RT @steverubel Darth Vader’s “Management” Secrets http://tinyurl.com/7bzxhr #
• The 80 Best Lifehacks of 2008 - Stepcase Lifehack http://ff.im/-t0kW #
• 10 Usability Tips for Web Designers | Webdesigner Depot - Photoshop Tutorials, Wordpress, Icons, WP Themes http://ff.im/-t0nP #
• I am reading “Wikinomics” by Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams #breviewfri #
• Apple redirects to wikipedia apple.com/hypercard #
• Apple redirects to Wikipedia http://apple.com/hypercard #
• Apple redirects to wikipedia? http://ff.im/-tbyJ #
• Yes, You Can Achieve Financial Independence ∞ Get Rich Slowly http://ff.im/-tbMb #
• Ajaxian » “I won’t support IE 6 in 2009″ http://ff.im/-tbZc #
• How to integrate Twitter with your Applications | Twitastic http://ff.im/-twpk #
• Hacking at 0300 : Extending jQuery UI Widgets, The Final Chapter http://ff.im/-twtv #
• Pictures: Sony Ericsson C510 ( Kate ) http://ff.im/-twvR #
• TechCrunch redesign, going portal, yikes http://www.techcrunch.com/ #
• The Best Tutorials and Freebies of 2008 - NETTUTS http://ff.im/-tDdV #
• Huge Compilation of WordPress Code http://ff.im/-tDps #
• Bra film på SVT 23.55 “Sling Blade” med Billy Bob Thornton, missa inte http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117666/ #svpt #
• RT @mattcutts Password Top List http://tinyurl.com/85ubm4 #
• RT @jbripley Icons for Web Sites and Apps http://code.google.com/p/twotiny/ #
• The Secret Origins of Clippy: Microsoft’s Bizarre Animated Character Patents http://ff.im/-tM7n #
• Working on an unobtrusive JavaScript for aggregating streams from different social networks #
• I really like SimplePie… http://simplepie.org/ #
• Twitter Tools for Mac Users http://ff.im/-tPsT #
• goosh.org - the unofficial google shell. http://ff.im/-tPDn #
• recession marketing for small business | Jim’s Marketing Blog http://ff.im/-tPQH #
• Artikel om svenska spelbolag på Malta. http://tinyurl.com/9kgnue #svpt #
• 2009 is the Year of jQuery UI http://ff.im/-u3Wk #
• Nice jQuery Resource http://ff.im/-u40g #
• 10 Ways Twitter Will Change Blog Design in 2009 http://ff.im/-uqM5 #
• Plex Media Center for OS X http://ff.im/-uqNm #
• Understanding Your Guests | chrisbrogan.com http://ff.im/-uqRm #

I found this post by Karl Swedberg on Learning jQuery interesting.

Two years ago I made the somewhat immodest claim that 2007 would be the “Year of jQuery.” Since then, jQuery’s popularity has grown in ways that none of the core contributors could have imagined. Now I’m ready to make another bold pronouncement: 2009 will be the year of jQuery UI. Here’s why:

Read the full story at Learning jQuery

News in jQuery UI 1.6

• New classes for error, highlight and disabled states
• Extended, sprite-based ThemeRoller icon set
• Class system for adding rounded corners via CSS (Firefox and Webkit, gracefully degrades)
• New ThemeRoller tool with inspector style view
• Theme gallery with voting and user-generated themes
• Improved documentation for generating custom themes and using the class framework

News in jQuery 1.3

• Selector Engine (Sizzle)
• DOM Manipulation rewrite
• Event Namespaces
• Event Triggering

In this post I will list a couple of things I think was interesting, significant or the bomb during 2008. In no way is this list full and I probably missed something such as the birth of a new internet empire or something, but the things listed below is stuff I remember and find interesting about 2008 and believe will make the biggest effect on the years to come.

Mobile Web

iPhone and the Android platform have changed the way people interact and expects of web based services the last year. We wrote a post about how iPhone and Android will change the web earlier this year and with Firefox as mobile browser coming up, we know that 2008 was the year mobile web, finally after a lot of years, made it to the crowd and online services.

Mature JavaScript Libraries

2008 saw no or very small happenings in the JavaScript library world. We saw a lot of great implementations on top of the big libraries but nothing revolutionary. The big things coming as I see it are jQuery 1.3, YUI 3 and hopefully someone who dares to take the libraries to a new abstraction level without bloating the experience of using the framework/library. One framework that have been good at promoting its name the last year is Dojo. I believe 2009 can be interesting when it comes to JavaScript as developers who traditionally only developed back-end solutions will move over to write more front-end solutions as the online libraries, services and tools are growing in numbers.

CSS Frameworks

No one likes CSS. Except the guys and girls who distribute and maintain CSS frameworks. One really good thing with 2008 was that we saw that CSS frameworks such as BlueprintCSS, YUI, YAML, Boilerplate and 960 grew in numbers and more people started using them. The higher abstraction level the easier to focus on the right things instead of things such as browser bugs etc. What are the next step? I believe we will see more interaction pattern based components that combine CSS, JavaScript and Markup and solves problem under the hood, graceful degraded, unobtrusive, SEO-friendly and better than you as a single developer can build them.

Bubblish

2008 was the year we saw strange services pop up each and every day, and you asked your self the question: “OK, I know the Internets are big and that, but who wants a micro-blogging-video-on-demand-service for chihuahuas?”. Together with the financial crisis and venture capitalists that start to think one more time before throwing money at someone faster than they can say “twitterish” we have moved into something that looks more and more like the dotcom-bubble 2000-2001. The big difference now compared to then is that now we actually have websites who earn money, and hopefully some people will still have a job to go to in late 2009.

Platforms and Tools

Not all platforms and APIs was released 2008, but this was the year we actually started using the platforms, tools and APIs out there. LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter and Google all opened up new ways to retrieve and manipulate data as third party developers. In 2009 we will laugh at services who do not expose a platform or API. It will look as stupid as not having a mobile front-end.

Google App Engine

Google launched Google App Engine in April 2008 and the main thing with it was the possibility to host and run you web application in the big Google Cloud. This opens up for the developer to easily build big scalable web apps. I believe we will see more of this in 2009.

Google Chrome

The Google Chrome Strategy is interesting and not fully understood yet, but years of discussion about the Gbrowser and Google pushing for Firefox ended in Google releasing Chrome. Chrome is not available for Mac and Linux yet, but built on WebKit and with an extremely fast JavaScript engine (V8) it will probably start gaining market share anyway. My personal opinion is that we do not need another browser, I would rather have seen Google going full time into either Firefox or WebKit rather than starting their own branch. In the long run we do not need more browsers.

Authentication Services

Facebook Connect, Friend Connect from Google and OpenID saw their big debut and usage in 2008. Even though OpenID been available for a while, it was just now we saw big use of such services. With 1,000,000 different social networks and other sites where you need to store credentials, the need for such services will only grow stronger over the years to come.

Twitter and FriendFeed

For micro-blogging sites such as Twitter and real mashups, such as FriendFeed, 2008 was the bomb. According to services such as Compete.com these services has grown significant during 2008 and nothing seems to stop them during 2009 (maybe the uptime for Twitter though ;-)). Barack Obama used Twitter (even though I doubt he did it in person) as one important piece of his winning election campaing that sent him to the white house.

Personal Level

• My then-wife-to-be gave birth to our second child in May
• We finally got married in December
• I turned down a really (really, really, amazingly) good job offer
• I was about to build a great new house

Conclusion

2008 was an interesting year with ups and downs, both private and professional. I believe that 2008 finally showed us the web as a web of services where small dedicated services prosper over the ones trying to be a one-stop-shop for anything. The internet is more and more becoming a distributed UNIX-system with specific services doing the thing it does best, and it is up to the user (another service or a person) to do whatever he/she/it needs the system for achieving.

Happy New Year,
Mattias

• RT @jeresig jQuery 1.3 beta is out http://tinyurl.com/ay6g2t #
• I just bought @psvensson book Learning Dojo http://tinyurl.com/8nqmqn #
• anyone else who uses FeedBurner site stats? I feel they give me a quick overview on my visitor stats. #
• I am looking for a new mobile phone, any suggestion except the iPhone? #
• rearranging domain folders and server settings when I should be fixing the yearly web-christmas-card #
• Reading WordPress 2.8 Feature http://tinyurl.com/9hk6ue #
• 10 low hanging SEO-fruits http://tinyurl.com/a8uvwh #
• Reading Greasemonkey article http://tinyurl.com/8qqy6t #
• Next step in Google Advertising “Friendsense” http://tinyurl.com/8v2tag #
• How come only geeks use Adobe Air. http://tinyurl.com/8lvawq #
• I like this idea http://tinyurl.com/8r9pde #
• Game Marketing on YouTube http://tinyurl.com/3ghs7o #
• I think tweebay is on to something. Use Twitter as sender of commands to your system without the user having to give out their pwd #
• Reading http://tinyurl.com/9kes4l #
• 160+ RSS Feeds For Web-Designers And Developers http://tinyurl.com/ayloua #
• Apple 30″ vs. Dell 30″ http://tinyurl.com/7pf566 #
• This is good news http://tinyurl.com/46cz4j #
• The first person I followed on Twitter was @jbripley. http://tinyurl.com/9cflat #firstfollow #
• The “Authority”-discussion about Twitter search is amazing and feels like very old school approach to the web. #
• RT @svartling on the Authority debate regarding Twitter Search. #
• The url for that, ladies and gentlemens, are http://tinyurl.com/9syf56 #
• Top Online Security Threats for 2009 http://tinyurl.com/a6euzz #
• I think the strength with Twitter is the simplicity. Skip the features, add better stability and less restrictions for the API:s #
• Kikar på spöket laban med sonen #
• Alexa and Quantcast top 1,000,000 sites http://tinyurl.com/a5gs5x #
• Better than free, good article http://tinyurl.com/2pacvr #
• Extensive list of SEO-tools http://tinyurl.com/5bcavd #
• How to with Social Media Carnival http://tinyurl.com/8yemwj #
• Transmit + Textmate = All you need #
• Five worst predictions for 2008 acc to CNET [Video] http://tinyurl.com/a3up8k #
• 2009 Tech Predictions by CNET [video] http://tinyurl.com/a3up8k #
• URL Update to 2009 tech predictions http://tinyurl.com/a3up8k #
• Setting up my wifes gmail account (with her new family name) #
• photoshopping wedding photos.. she looks great but who the hell is the fat guy on her right #
• Steve Souders on Coupling Asynchronous Scripts http://tinyurl.com/72so3w #
• what platform is barackobama.com built upon? I have heard Drupal, anyone knows? #
• RT @krummas http://my.barackobama.com/page/s/techinterest OK, PHP and MySQL, could we go higher in the abstraction level? #
• Movabletype lists barackobama on their showcase page http://www.movabletype.com/showcase/ #
• layoffs on Microsoft in january 2009? http://tinyurl.com/9qhg9j #
• iPhoto 08 is a pretty good app. Really like the Events feature #
• Often I feel like: It would be nice if Twitter supported… and realize that is FriendFeed #
• I used to be good at photoshop, maybe we have changed, both of us #
• Using torrents for educational purpose #

I have just finished a very simple plugin that enables JSON-syndication for blogs running on WordPress. You can test the output on this blog.

http://frontendbook.com/feed/json/?callback=? (content-type:application/json)

Find out more

• Plugin home
• Github
• Readme

Why

• I think JSON is a very powerful way to syndicate content and data
• I think we should not need to write stupid proxies for aggregating feeds via JavaScript
• Opening up your data is a good thing
• I could not find a working example that was a plugin, all solutions I found was hacks in the actual source code of WordPress.

jQuery Example Retrieving JSON

$(function(){
$("body").append('<div id="wp-json">Loading JSON</div>');
$("#wp-json").css({
'position' : 'fixed',
'right' : '0px',
'top' : '0px',
'background' : '#f00'
});
$.getJSON('http://frontendbook.com/feed/json/?callback=?', function(json){
var result = '<ul>';
$.each(json.items, function(){
result += '<li><a href="' + this.link \
+ '">' + this.title + '</a></li>';

})
result += '</ul>';
$("#wp-json").css({
'background' : '#fff'
}).html(result);
});
});

Download

• Download at Github

This just got tweeted around. Nice overview on what a Call To Action should do and examples on some nice ones actually doing the job well.

Read more at Web Design Trends: Call To Action Buttons

Ok, Yahoo is laying off people in big numbers, and every day we hear about the health of the world economy. I think it is clear to everyone, this is more than a sneeze, it is recession hitting us hard and fast all over the world. Of course this will become reality even for people working in healthy businesses, in comparision to Yahoo, where there are a business strategy, product focus and numbers going in the right direction. How do you adapt to the fact that things are actually going the wrong way, and things out of your hands may eventually decide wether or not you have a work to go to next month. People who were part of the dotcom-crisis know that even healthy companies got hit harder than they deserved. In this post I will try to discuss how you can handle recession and prepare for the worst and make all you can in order to avoid it.

Pragmatic, Pragmatic, Pragmatic

OK, now is the time to start being pragmatic when it comes to everything. Roles, tasks, platforms, frameworks, libraries or any other thing that could enable cat-fights in any web department. Ask yourself the question: “Am I a pragmatic person when at work?”. If the answer is Yes, could you be even more pragmatic in even more areas, in order to avoid unecessary (from a business point-of-view) discussions and fights. If your answer is No, start being more pragmatic, put feelings and opinions away and focus on facts, reality and truth. I know a lot of people who say they are pragmatic (everybody wants to be pragmatic) and at the same time say that we must spend 12 man-year on building an almighty architecture that will survive WW III, when business needs here and now could be solved with existing tools or with lesser efforts added to the project. In short: Start being pragmatic in your daily work, and stop saying you are pragmatic.

Focus on Possibilities

Recession opens up for good things. When times are bad, investors and competitors decrease their efforts and that is a possibility. When others are braking, you should increase your efforts in order to gain market shares or enter a market that are ultra-competitive during good times. As long as you are still employed or running your own business getting clients, make sure you invest whatever you can invest making sure that you are increasing your market shares and revenues. This sound easier than it is in real life. But in order to convince you: Apple, Microsoft and businesses such as Online Poker where born during other time of crisis. I am confident we will see new business-leaders born or growing big during the coming years. I am writing a post on what companies I think will go out of recession as winners, will publish it before Christmas. Remember: In bad times, brave people can build the platform for being the next winner.

It Aint Personal

If for some reason someone (your company or lack of clients) puts you in the corner where your job is at risk, or even worse you get sacked or have to shut down business, Do not take it personally, because during times like these even talented people are fired. Often middle-management has to fulfill a number of layoffs and meet some strange budget-requirement making their decisions somewhat numeric instead of human-resource-optimized. Often roles needed for running daily businesses are the ones that are prioritized to keep. If you do not do this right now, you are probably more likely to get sacked than the guy making sure that the SVN-server is up and running. But it aint personal (most of the time at least).

Business Argument not Techie Arguments

I do not like techie arguments when we have good times, and I am pretty sure no business owner likes them at all during bad times. Developers have to be better, in good and bad times, trying to put numbers on their arguments. This is important for two reasons: First, it is easier to convince the business owners with business arguments and second, if developers try to find business arguments instead of tech arguments, they will be better developers as they do understand business better and tech solutions are business driven and not vice verca.

Summary

We will face recession. Your company will adapt to this. Maybe they speed up, maybe they slow down. The important thing to know is that no one is safe but recession is not all bad, it also opens up for new businesses and possibility to enter competitive markets. One good thing to bear in mind during recession, as well as better times, is to try to be more pragmatic and business oriented not only in mind but also in action.

I just got a letter stating:

We are excited to announce that we have extended Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to Europe. Developers and businesses can now run their Amazon EC2 instances in the EU to help achieve lower latency, operate closer to other resources like Amazon S3 in the EU, and meet EU data storage requirements when applicable.

We are looking for a good solution for scalable hosting and were thinking of going with Slicehost, but this changes a lot for our project, as we will target both Europe and the US.

A quick view on Pricing, says it is +10% in Europe in comparision to the US. I bet I will write more on this.

Read more

• EC2 Pricing in Europe and US
• TechCrunch on the news

I missed GeekMeet yesterday because I “had” to join in on the company pool tournament and free-beer thing, but lucky enough we had the opportunity to listening in on Chris Heilemann not once, not twice but three times today. He made a really good presentation for the whole department where he focused on where the web is today and where he thinks it is moving, really nice for business owners who still believe the web today is the same as 5-10 years ago. Later on we had the same presentation as he held during GeekMeet about performance and how a leaner front-end can make wonder on site performance and user experience. I believe Yahoo is doing a great job here, and it was nice to listen in on Chris input and ideas. Finally we listened in on how to manage JavaScript in larger teams, this is something that will be very important on my department where we are a lot of Web Developers and JavaScript knowledge is widely spread from beginner to more savvy developers. Interesting. If you get the chance to listen and talk to Christian, take the time. He is enthusiastic, funny, professional, pragmatic and obviously he loves his work. He made my day better, and I felt confident that we will build better products when I left the office (hopefully the feeling is still there on monday when reality hits the fan).

Presentations

• Watch “Shifting Gears” right here, right now
• Read “Playing With The Web” with Easy SlideShare