tatsuya’s posterous

Ever wished that someone would overlay some data that fascinates you on a Google Map? Ever have an idea for a new desktop widget to take the computing world by storm? Well, no matter what your skill level is, there are tools out there in the world that will help you realize your dreams just by dragging-and-dropping what you need and in the order you want it.

Take a look through these ten solutions — which range from common, everyday type of Google Maps mashups to heavy-hitting, enterprise-level applications — and be amazed at how very little work can bring big results.

A while back, Smashing Magazine did an awesome round up of 2009 Web Design Trends. The post was a great round up of trends for 2009 and websites that showcased these trends. I would like to take that post a step further and add a list of tutorials to show you how to recreate these popular trends.

SlickMap CSS is a simple stylesheet for displaying finished sitemaps directly from HTML unordered list navigation. It’s suitable for most web sites – accommodating up to three levels of page navigation and additional utility links – and can easily be customized to meet your own individual needs, branding, or style preferences.

The general idea of SlickMap CSS is to streamline the web design process by automating the illustration of sitemaps while at the same time allowing for the predevelopment of functional HTML navigation.

I recently made a half serious post on FriendFeed as to whether or not you would name your child if the domain of their name wasn’t available. Perhaps I was taking it a little overboard but if you ask the same question to any company trying to come up with a name it goes well beyond making sure the domain name is available.

Locking down brand names across all social media sites is not just an issue for big companies and celebrities. Internet addicts like myself are extremely particular about having a consistent username across all sites. I can only imagine the anguish of those who were late to Twitter and don’t have their username of choice.

Wouldn't it be cool to be able to allow users to automatically fill parts of a form, especially the location part of addresses? Services like FireEagle allow you to do that but it is not very likely that mainstream users will have signed up to them.

One thing we can do is recognise the user's IP number or allow the user to enter one thing and try to guess the rest for them. GeoFill is a JavaScript wrapper library that uses Yahoo Geo and GeoIP to do that for you. Try the following examples:

Examples

• Provide a location suggestion based on IP
• Provide a button to get data
• Lookup from postcode

Your current feed reader is full of unread items. You’re hesitant to subscribe to any more feeds because you can't keep up with your existing subs. Maybe you've even abandoned feeds altogether.

Fever takes the temperature of your slice of the web and shows you what's hot.

To make this book available to as many readers as possible, the author, with permission of Cambridge University Press, has placed the full text online free of charge. See the terms of service on the right.
Contents

I recommend starting with the Preface, which gives an overview of the book's contents.

The book has two main parts: search fundamentals (Chapters 1-7) and advanced topics (Chapters 8-12). Each chapter is linked to below.

CMSs are beautiful things. Just as CSS allows us to abstract the design away from the markup, a CMS allows us to use a database to abstract the content away from the markup. There are a zillion of them, each with different backend UI’s and different ways to doing things.

But CMSs are for web people. Even my beloved WordPress can be challenging to train/explain to someone who has no experience working with websites. Perhaps this is the motivation toward a new trend in CMSs I’m calling “light” CMSs. Each of them attempt to make the task of updating content on a website easier and more intuitive. This is largely at the cost of features. These are for simple, otherwise static websites where updating content is the name of the game.