Call me mad, but your favourite web geek advent calendar is back for a second season at 24ways.org. The idea is that we post a new web design/development article every day from the 1st December all the way up to Christmas. Last year was tough work but well worth it as all the articles were very well received.
I can’t promise we’ll top the success of last year, but at the very least we’ll try to match it. I’ve got a great line-up of authors all ready to go, including some familiar names from last year as well as some fresh contributors. I’ll not spoil the surprise – you’re going to have to check back each day and see what we’ve got in store.
To kick the proceedings off today, I’ve opened with an article on building a widget like Safari RSS’s article length slider. This enables the user to dynamically adjust the length of text shown on the page. I’ve called it the Tasty Text Trimmer for want of a better name. Feel free to check it out and grab our feed to keep tabs on the articles thoughout the rest of the month.
All of last year’s articles are available at a new home (with suitable redirects in place – nothing should be broken).
Now if only the damn Gravatar server would remain stable. I’m convinced more and more that we need to move away from centralised network services like this. What a disaster.
Comments
Yay! I would like some chocolate as well please ;)
Yeah. The problems with decentralised services, though, is that you have to persuade everyone to get involved. The bar to entry’s so much higher. How would you do gravatars, for example? Put a in the page at your domain? Look in the head of the page at your URL for a link to a FOAF file? Pinging one of those every time just to get a little picture is…a bit of a sledgehammer.
You might want to think about caching the gravatars?
I do cache the gravatars, but that’s only any good if there’s a service available to get the original image from. It’s extremely difficult to get a file from gravatar.com at all at the moment.
I was thinking more of a directory-style system something a little like DNS. You pick a provider and load your gravatars from them. That provider subscribes and publishes directory updates to the other providers. It would also be then up to that provider to choose to trust the image moderation judgements of each upstream provider, or to re-moderate for their own users.
Excellent! Perhaps I’ll pick up another project idea this time around as well.
I’m glad this 24ways is happening again. It would be great if it included usability tips for developing for Lynx, people with colour blindness or Opera with voice.
Merry Christmas by the way.
Has it been year already?! Doesn’t time fly? Looking forward to some great gems. Thanks Drew.
Cheers,
Pete
congrats Drew, this was an excellent resource last year and I’m sure will be the same this time around