I recently found the YoxView plugin which takes the lightbox to a great new level using jQuery and some nifty animations. A client wanted to use it on his WordPress site, so I made it into a WordPress plugin.

It’s really simple to use.. Just upload the plugin to your plugins folder and activate it. It applies itself to any WordPress gallery using the standard .gallery selector.

Until it’s added to the WordPress Plugin directory, you can download the plugin here.

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I have a “stock” folder with images that I’ve bought over the years and when designing a site and needing an image, I usually just crawl through this folder and grab a random image. It’s a process that takes quite a bit of time especially when you consider that the image will be replaced by the client’s image in a day or two anyways.

No need for this anymore though, thanks to a nifty little site I found this morning. Dummy Image lets you create blank images on the fly, at any size you require. All you do is insert an image tag as follows:

<img src=”http://dummyimage.com/250×250″ alt=”A Dummy Image”>

…which would generate this:

That size indicated in the URL can be adjusted to whatever size you’re needing on your site.

Very cool.

Whilst there’s a plethora of CSS Galleries and Showcases, there’s not too much in the way of showcase sites for niche languages like jQuery, MooTools, Prototype and custom javascripting. Some great animations and effects are being achieved using these libraries and its about time they get some recognition.

Enter NotCoffee.net.

NotCoffee is a jQuery Showcase, a MooTools Showcase and Prototype Showcase of great effects and animations using these libraries.

Be sure to check it out. Grab the feed, or follow them on Twitter.

We’ve had this idea at The Yellow Llama for the longest time and finally last week we got our ass in gear and partnered up with @Norri from Maxiware to build a site that we’re hoping is going to have great appeal.

There are a couple good free icon websites that many designers use when putting together designs for various applications, IconFinder.net and IconArchive.com being a couple.

However the problem with these sites in our opinion, is that they’re owner run. This means that any new icons only come when the owner decides to upload new ones. The latter of the 2 above mentioned sites at least allows you to ‘submit icons’, but even then it’s still owner approved and there’s no real recognition system in place to give the designers their well deserved kudos.

So basically, between last Thursday and today, Norio and I have slaved to get our new site up & running. The site features, among other things:

• Designers upload all the icons
• Designers manage a profile that includes their licensing information and links to their websites and social sites (Facebook, Twitter etc)
• Designers, if they have an Adsense account, can enter their publisher ID, and will earn 50% of clicks made on Adsense units that are shown on their icons’ pages.
• Icons are tagged for easy searching and categorization
• The designer uploads a 128×128 PNG icon, that is automatically resized to 64, 48, 32, 22 and 16×16 icons

  

• Each icon displays the designers information and the designers profile page includes a list of all the icons he’s ever uploaded.

We have many awesome ideas for future developments and additions to the site, some of which include:

• user can “favorite” icons and then have a page that displays his favorite icons
• advanced search: filter by user, filter by size etc
• subcribe to a newsletter that will mail out a weekly digest of newly added icons

Currently the site is still being ironed out, but we’re eagerly looking for some icon designers to come on board and get some icons uploaded to test out the system & give us some feedback on how we can make it better for designers & users alike.

Icon designers who’re keen to get on board and start uploading icons can contact me at markbloomfield at gmail dot com for more information.

Please help spread the word for this post!

Dear Kulula web designers

Good job on the new site and all, but you might want to make sure all your tees are crossed and your eyes are dotted. The calendar on your website is anything but userfriendly. Your nifty little slideshow isn’t correctly z-indexed and it means that the only people that can use the popup calendar are level 55 COD4 Experts… We can see all of 3 or 4 pixels of the “Select” button…

Not the easiest of booking forms.

Let your CSS guru’s know, that they can solve this problem with 1 simple command:

#calendar {z-index:10;}

Thanks much. You’ll receive my consultancy invoice shortly.

Regards
Mark Bloomfield
CSS Guru :)

Have you also been struggling with the apparently insessant problem with Youtube saying “Sorry this video is no longer available”?

Yup, most of south africa has been.

We’ve been playing with a fix and so far, it appears to be working perfectly. And as an added bonus, this fix seems to drastically improve the load time of Youtube & Break’s video loading – No more waiting for a decent buffer.. You can play the video from start to finish.. no problems :)

Here’s how:

Firefox: Click on Tools -> Options. Choose the Network tab and click on Settings. Then change your proxy settings as indicated.

For other browsers, find your connection settings and adjust them as above.

Not only does this stop the “Sorry this video is no longer available” issue, but it also appears to drastically speed up the load time of video’s etc.

Sweet! Hope it works the same for you too.

After receiving upwards of 1 000 000 pledges, Firefox 3 is set to be available for download on June 17th.

There’s still a number of questions though about the reliability of the product itself. Firefox 2 had known issues with RAM usage, and FF3 doesn’t seem to have resolved any of these.

Unfortunately, one issue that still exists in Firefox is memory leaks. According to the release notes, developers plugged “over 300 individual memory leaks,” but still after just a few minutes of browsing with just 8 or so tabs open, Firefox was using over 150mb of RAM — and I often have 20 or 30 tabs open while writing and researching stories

While the memory issue has improved compared to Firefox 2, browsers such as Opera and Safari are handling sites that are loaded with AJAX, videos, music, and other heavy hitters much better than Firefox 3

Anyone who’s spend more than a day surfing the net and checking for software/webware applications, is bound to have stumbled upon SourceForge. To say that they’re an online storage place for source code revisions, would be a great understatement.

Anyways, they’re having their 2008 Community Choice Awards. The good news about their award program this year is that they’ve opened doors to any open source projects hosted anywhere, not just on SourceForge. So if your favorite codes are kept on Codeplex or Google Code, you’re welcome to nominate it to SourceForge’s Community Choice Awards this year.

Some awards are presented to individuals, but that’s not what this program is about. Everyone knows what a few geeks in a garage can accomplish, but support from a community of scale is what really makes open source a force to be reckoned with.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Personally, I’m amazed by the acheivements of the Flex SDK. I don’t yet fully understand the entire scope and ability of this system, but from what I’ve seen online, its a system that’s proving incredibly useful to many developers. It has been nominated for ’Best Tool or Utility for Developers’ (i.e.: The Best Tool or Utility for Developers is a project that makes the most of your precious coding time or allows you to do things you wouldn’t otherwise be able to do).

Go ahead and nominate your favorites.

For the last 4 or 5 years that I’ve been using WordPress, I’ve managed to pick up a good few tips and tricks. 90% of my clients are sites who require content management systems, not blogs. And thus I’ve been able to create highly tweaked and customized WordPress content management systems that give my clients a great method of controlling their entire website via WordPress’s great user interface.

I thus decided to start WPGuru.co.za – a site that I will be using to blog cool tips & pointers on making a killer CMS with WordPress. I trust you’ll grab the feed and enjoy!

Twenty what? Yup… that was my first response when I first heard of the 27 Dinner. Basically its a dinner for geeks, marketers, entrepreneurs, writers, media practitioners, speakers – well, just about anybody who is keen to discuss whatever’s on their mind.

I’ve read about it. I’ve heard about it. I’ve seen stuff about it. And now I’m finally going to it :)

The 27th of April is the next scheduled dinner and its going to be held at the Port Elizabeth Yacht Club at 18h30/19h00.

More information on the PE gig can be seen here.