If you’re looking for some expanded design options for your web site, Google’s Web Fonts gives you access to a growing collection of free open source fonts that you can easily link to in your CSS style sheet and display on your site. You can create detailed previews of all the fonts first to be sure you know exactly how your site’s text will look when you’re done.
Since it’s all done through a standard style sheet link you can specify alternate fonts that all users will have on their computers in the event that the Google fonts are ever unavailable or for whatever reason you can’t connect to them. CSS provides a reliable method for fallback, so I don’t see any risk to trying these out on your site.
Here’s the link that goes inside the <head> tag on your web page to load a web font (the Open Sans font, in this example):
<link href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans"
rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" >
And here’s a sample CSS entry where you need to define a font face (body, p, H1, H2, etc). You can—and should, as a practice—specify other fonts in the event that the primary one is unavailable.
font-family: 'Open Sans', Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;
I just implemented it on this site using Droid Sans for the body text and Open Sans for the post titles and primary navigation along the top. I like the looks of it.
Posted: June 8th, 2011
Filed under: Development, Free (or low-cost), Web-based Tags: design, google, open source | No Comments »
According to Netcraft’s June 2011 Web Server Survey, the open source Apache web server software is far and away the leading platform today. It’s a powerful statement for the viability of FOSS (free and open source software) when the majority of the web is running on it.
Posted: June 7th, 2011
Filed under: Competition, Development, Free (or low-cost), Software, Web-based Tags: apache, open source | No Comments »
If you do web site development you’re probably well-acquainted with browser testing*—checking your site in a variety of web browsers to ensure that you know how it’s going to look and behave for the vast majority of users. You especially want to test against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser: it has been one of the worst in terms of rendering consistent with HTML and CSS web standards.
Adobe has a free online tool—BrowserLab—that will let you check your site in a simulated browser session using a wide variety of rendering engines, including IE 6, 7, 8 and 9, various versions of Chrome, Safari, Opera and Firefox. You can specify Windows or OS X versions and quickly check where you may need to fix some coding errors, or even hack your perfectly-compliant code to accommodate IE’s willful ignorance of basic CSS rules.
BrowserLab is really useful, and seems to give an accurate rendering. I fired up Windows in a virtual machine on OS X and did some testing with the Windows versions of IE 7, Chrome, Safari and Firefox, and then checked the results against BrowserLab—the results in Windows looked the same as what I got from BrowserLab, including some ridiculous scrolling issues on Chrome 11. You just need to create an account on the site and log in to use it.
* If you’re not testing against other browsers besides IE on Windows, or whatever development platform you use, give it a try and make sure that your site looks the way you expect it to across different browsers and operating systems. Your users will appreciate it.
Posted: June 3rd, 2011
Filed under: Development, Free (or low-cost), Software, Web-based Tags: adobe, browsers, code, css, html, microsoft, web-standards | No Comments »
Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) kicks off next Monday, June 6 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, beginning with Steve Jobs’ keynote (aka The Stevenote) at 10 AM.
Below is a photo from AppleInsider showing some of the banners going up. It looks like the three themes of the conference will be:
- Mac OS X Lion (10.7)
- iOS 5
- iCloud
I’m really interested to see what Apple is going to do with the iCloud service. I hope it’s better than MobileMe, which never seemed to me to be a very serious effort on Apple’s part. Cloud syncing and backup services like Dropbox and a few others have shown what a good service can look like in that space. I think it’s pretty clear by now that a music syncing/streaming service is going to be introduced as a big part of the iCloud offering. I’m sure that calendar and contact syncing will remain, and some have speculated that parts of the iCloud service may be offered at no cost to users who upgrade to OS X Lion.
Posted: June 2nd, 2011
Filed under: Apple, Development, File Sharing & Storage Tags: cloud, icloud, iOS, iOS5, wwdc | No Comments »
Hype is a Mac app for creating keyframe-based animations using standard HTML5, CSS3 styles and JavaScript. The product probably needs to mature a bit but it could replace Flash for some basic web animations right out of the box.
There’s a nice gallery of projects created with Hype, tutorials for getting started and a very impressive documentation page. Available now at the Mac App Store for $30.
Posted: May 20th, 2011
Filed under: Development, Innovation, Software Tags: css, html5, javascript | No Comments »
Apple has a preview page of Mac OS X Lion, the next generation of the Mac operating system that’s expected to be available sometime this summer.
Scroll down to the ‘Gestures and animations’ section and watch the video. This is where we’ll see many of the touch-based features of the iPad being integrated into the Mac OS.
Posted: February 27th, 2011
Filed under: Apple, Development, Software Tags: mac, os x, os x lion | No Comments »
From the Google Chrome team, a fun look at web and browser technologies in 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web. Very nicely done, and useful if you’re interested in learning a little more about how these things work.
Some of the topics covered include:
- Cloud computing
- Web apps
- HTML5, Javascript, CSS
- Browser plug-ins
- Malware, phishing & security
- IP addresses & DNS
If you use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) web browser on Windows, take a few minutes sometime to download and install one of the following web browsers (free!) and see how sites likes the one linked to in this post really come alive with a modern browser.
Chances are good you’ll keep using one of these alternate browsers – they’re all better than IE, in my opinion.
Posted: November 18th, 2010
Filed under: Development, Innovation, Mobile, Tips, Web-based Tags: browsers, chrome, firefox, google, internet, safari, web-apps | No Comments »
Today Google announced Refine 2.0, a “power tool for working with messy data sets, including cleaning up inconsistencies, transforming them from one format into another, and extending them with new data from external web services or other databases.” It looks kind of like an extension of Google Spreadsheets with some powerful data-scrubbing features.
Open source (Mac, Windows, Linux) project is here: code.google.com/p/google-refine
Posted: November 13th, 2010
Filed under: Development, Free (or low-cost), Innovation, Web-based Tags: code, data, google, open source, web-apps | No Comments »
Six Revisions posted a good article today called Things You Should Do Immediately After Launching a Website.
There’s some good information there about optimizing your site for search engines, as well as other performance and metrics tips. One of the tools they recommend is Google Analytics. I’ve been using GA for a few years now—it’s terrific, and free.
Article highlights
- Create a Sitemap.xml and Robots.txt file. These will help search engines—especially Google’s searchbots—to find your site, understand its structure and index it successfully. For WordPress installations there’s a free plug-in to create the Sitemap.xml
- Set up web analytics (Google Analytics and other free tools)
- Google Webmaster Tools
- Monitor search engine rankings
- Monitor your website uptime
Posted: November 8th, 2010
Filed under: Blogs, Development, Free (or low-cost), Tips Tags: analytics, blog, google, wordpress | No Comments »
I like this strategy for assessing new product ideas at Amazon.
There is an approach called “working backwards” that is widely used at Amazon. We try to work backwards from the customer, rather than starting with an idea for a product and trying to bolt customers onto it. [...] For new initiatives a product manager typically starts by writing an internal press release announcing the finished product. [...] If the benefits listed don’t sound very interesting or exciting to customers, then perhaps they’re not (and shouldn’t be built). Instead, the product manager should keep iterating on the press release until they’ve come up with benefits that actually sound like benefits. Iterating on a press release is a lot less expensive than iterating on the product itself (and quicker!).
Werner Vogels wrote about this in 2006 and detailed out a few points:
- Start by writing the press release
- Write a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document
- Define the customer experience
- Write the User Manual
He said:
The Working Backwards product definition process is all about fleshing out the concept and achieving clarity of thought about what we will ultimately go off and build. [...] Once we have gone through the process of creating the press release, faq, mockups, and user manuals, it is amazing how much clearer it is what you are planning to build.
A little more reading on the Working Backwards concept can be found at this article on shmula.com.
Posted: October 25th, 2010
Filed under: Customers, Development, Innovation Tags: amazon, strategy | No Comments »
