2009 November

Free Vector Chart Icons (Vol.2)

by WebResourcesDepot on Nov.30, 2009, under Web development, WebResourcesDepot

Few weeks ago, a post at WRD was sharing the "Free Vector Chart Icons" that included pie, column, line, area charts & a meter.

As there are very few free chart icons on the web, the creative team at IconShock improved the set with 5 more icons.

The set contains doughnut, organization, radar charts, a thermometer & data analysis icons.

It is totally free to use them in both personal & commercial projects.

P.S. The icons can not be distributed on any other media. Please link to this page if you share it on your website, thanks for that.

Special Downloads:
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Free Admin Template For Web Applications
jQuery Dynamic Drag’n Drop
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Tags: AI, PNG

Statsy – find those wasted bytes with a bookmarklet

by Ajaxian on Nov.30, 2009, under Ajaxian.com, Web development

Stoyan Stefanov is all about the performance of web products. One small tool that gives you a bit of insight as to where you can optimize is a new bookmarklet he released today called statsy.

If you run statsy on a web site you get the following insights:

JS attributes (e.g. onclick) - this is the sum of all onclick, onmouseover and so on including the attribute names. So for example <a onclick="#"> is 11 characters (bytes) of JavaScript attributes code
CSS style attributes - the sum of all style="..."
Inline JS - the sum of all the contents of all script tags (excluding the tag itself)
Inline CSS - sum of all <style> tag contents
All innerHTML - this is document.documentElement.innerHTML.length, it should be close to the ungzipped size of a page, provided the page is not doing a lot of DOM manipulation
# DOM elements - the total number of elements on the page is counted simply using document.getElementsByTagName('*').length

On Ajaxian, this is the result:

You can install statsy by dragging the following link to your link bar: Statsy and the source is also available.

Nothing earth-shattering but a good tool to use together with YSLow or PageSpeed.

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LABjs gets “Even Faster” with version 1.0

by Ajaxian on Nov.30, 2009, under Ajaxian.com, Web development

We have posted about LABjs before, the library that aims to be able to effectively load any script resource(s), from any location, into any page, at any time. It loads them all as parallel as the browser will allow, but maintains execution order when you express the need to do so in the usage of the API, for keeping dependencies safe.

At JSConf.EU in Berlin, I saw Steve Souders and Kyle Simpson riffing on how to make LABjs follow the research that Steve (in his newest book) and Kyle have done.

There were issues in the past, but we now have a new release of LABjs that does the right thing, as long as you wait():

PLAIN TEXT

JAVASCRIPT:

$LAB
.script("framework.js").wait()
.script("plugin.framework.js")
.script("myplugin.framework.js").wait()
.script("init.js");

Give it a whirl, and read the full post for details on performance and issues with flashing in before behaviour has been added... which leads us to the cavaet on jQuery and DOM ready.

Also, if you think that you should be just concat'ing all of the files into one, see why Kyle thinks you should potentially think again.

As I wrote this another library called NBL came in from "Berklee". He told us:

The other day I tasked myself with rewriting our company's website in HTML5 and I really wanted to improve performance all across the board. So after rewriting the HTML and CSS, I looked to JavaScript lazy loading to increase performance. After searching for a small library to do this and not finding anything not requiring jQuery, or unable to handle network timeouts, I decide to write my own non-blocking lazy loader.

It's called NBL and comes down to 1187 bytes minified. It runs stand-alone and has several options that I could not find in any other library:

1. It can load plugins for your JavaScript framework *after* the framework has been loaded (jQuery is considered the default, but you can override it with any other framework and keep this behaviour).

2. You can provide a callback function that fires when all scripts are loaded, or if you use jQuery, the callback will be fired by jQuery's document.ready() function (unless the page finishes before jQuery initialises, in which case it fires when all scripts are loaded).

3. In case of network latency (or faulty urls), NBL will fire the callback function after a timeout (by default 1200ms).

4. It does not need to be called, it can be configured completely from the script tag itself, like this:

PLAIN TEXT

HTML:

<script type="text/javascript" src="nbl.js" opt="{ urchin: 'http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js',

plugins: [ 'jquery.lightbox.min.js', 'jquery.carousel.min.js' ], ready: my_ready_function }" />

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Detect Mobile Browsers Using Any Language

by WebResourcesDepot on Nov.30, 2009, under Web development, WebResourcesDepot

Detect Mobile Browser is an open source project for easily understanding whether a visitor of a website is using a mobile browser or not.

It provides codes in several scripting languages (PHP,Rails, ASP, JSP, Coldfusion, .htaccess & JavaScript) that can detect the browser.

The website also has a simple forwarding function which you can create a link like:

http://detectmobilebrowser.com/a.com|b.com

and the user will be redirected to "a.com" or "b.com" depending on the browser type used.

Special Downloads:
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Free Admin Template For Web Applications
jQuery Dynamic Drag’n Drop
ScheduledTweets

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Tags: Android, ASP, Blackberry, iPhone, JSP, Php, Rails

Node.js Makes Building Scalable Network Programs Easy

by WebAppers on Nov.30, 2009, under Web development, WebAppers

nodejs

Node.js is an Evented I/O for V8 javascript. Node’s goal is to provide an easy way to build scalable network programs. This is in contrast to today’s more common concurrency model where OS threads are employed.

Thread-based networking is relatively inefficient and very difficult to use. Node.js will show much better memory efficiency under high-loads than systems which allocate 2mb thread stacks for each connection.

Furthermore, users of Node are free from worries of dead-locking the process – there are no locks. Almost no function in Node directly performs I/O, so the process never blocks. Because nothing blocks, less-than-expert programmers are able to develop fast systems.

Node is similar in design to and influenced by systems like Ruby’s Event Machine or Python’s Twisted. Node takes the event model a bit further – it presents the event loop as a language construct instead of as a library.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://nodejs.org/
License: MIT and GPL License

Interface Design Inspiration: Web & Patterns

by WebResourcesDepot on Nov.29, 2009, under Web development, WebResourcesDepot

Web & Patterns is a website that collects and displays screenshots of interface design patterns.

The patterns are very well categorized from forms to paginations or typography to breadcrumbs.

Every screenshot has a short definition that mentions "why it was added to the gallery" & anyone can share their thoughts about the screenshots.

Web & Patterns is a very nice resource for anyone who wants to quickly browse for an inspiration on a specific design element.

Special Downloads:
Ajaxed Add-To-Basket Scenarios With jQuery And PHP
Free Admin Template For Web Applications
jQuery Dynamic Drag’n Drop
ScheduledTweets

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Tags: Pattern

Flexible Context Menus: Jeegocontext

by WebResourcesDepot on Nov.28, 2009, under Web development, WebResourcesDepot

Jeegoocontext is a jQuery plugin for creating highly customizable context menus.

It transforms unordered lists into multi-level, smartly positioned navigations.

Multiple context menus can be created on the same page & they can be customized via CSS.

It has customizable time-delays for submenus' disappear values which makes browsing them easier.

The plugin also has a workaround for Opera not allowing right-click overrides & works with it as well.

Special Downloads:
Ajaxed Add-To-Basket Scenarios With jQuery And PHP
Free Admin Template For Web Applications
jQuery Dynamic Drag’n Drop
ScheduledTweets

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Tags: Javascript

Vanilla – Open Source Pluggable Discussion Forum

by WebAppers on Nov.28, 2009, under Web development, WebAppers

Vanilla is an open-source, standards-compliant, multi-lingual, theme-able, pluggable discussion forum for the web. With over 450 plugins so far, Vanilla is ideal for custom community solutions. Anyone can download and use Vanilla for free. If you do not have a web space, you might be interested in the hosted version of Vanilla as well.

Vanilla lets you have total control over the appearance of your forum so it can completely mesh with the look & feel of your site. Vanilla is fast. Setting up a forum takes moments, using Vanilla is a breeze. With Vanilla’s Pages feature, you can add custom pages to your forum and turn it into a complete website. Add a bunch of plugins and you’ve got a totally interactive website to go along with your forum.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://vanillaforums.org/
License: GPL License

25 Funny Comic Strips About the Web & the Internet

by WebAppers on Nov.27, 2009, under Web development, WebAppers

Web is a multiple utilities. It can either be a resource that can provide information or help you keep you in touch with your loved or even be a source of entertainment. There has been exponential increase in functionalities associated with the Internet, that it is very difficult to keep a track of it.

Here are some comics that can help you catch up with what is happening on the Internet! Thank you so much for BLaugh bringing us the following funny comics about web.