Written by
Aeriff on June 4, 2008 at 10:07 am
So you’ve installed Ubuntu and your system is rearing to go, but what next? How about we go adding a few bells and whistles? There are many things you can tweak on your Ubuntu desktop, let alone the applications, but a simple area that is often overlooked are the panels and their gadgets.
Unlike Windows, your get two panels on your desktop: top and bottom. The majority of the bottom panel is given over to the window selector for your running applications. For most users, this leaves the top relatively empty, apart from the Ubuntu system menus on the left and the date and time on the right. So let’s make use of that space. Continue reading this entry…
Written by
niemi on May 4, 2008 at 9:24 pm
Not that many years ago, usability expert Jacob Nielsen recommended that links should be blue. No negotiation, just make that link blue. In 2006 Nielsen recently decided to pull back that guide line as “today’s users have seen links in many other colors”.
It doesn’t matter if a download link (or any other link) is blue, green or orange. It does however matter that the link, whether it’s text or an image, stands clearly out from other page elements.
It’s incredible how often you see sites offering downloads in one form or another, yet the download links seem to be invisible to the naked eye. It’s not that the the download link you’re looking for isn’t there, it’s just that someone didn’t realize how important it is to put it on top of the visual hierarchy.
Even though users have gotten used to scrolling, putting important items such as a download link beneath the fold, can’t be categorized as anything else than stupid. It’s like putting the eject button on your DVD-player on it’s backside. Sure enough, most people will find out where it is eventually, but why make it harder than absolutely necessary?
Read make that download link visible!
Written by
aaroncampbell on April 22, 2008 at 10:36 am
Warning: Shortcodes are affected by Trac ticket 6444, which should be applied to WordPress 2.5.1.
First I touched on the topic in my first impressions of WordPress 2.5. Then I whined a little about the tickets relating to them, and eventually I released my Google Maps Plugin that uses them. In the end, WordPress’s new shortcodes are really nice.
What are they?
First of all, a shortcode called “mycode” can look like any of these:
[mycode]
[mycode foo="bar" id="123" color="red" something="data"]
[mycode]Some Content[/mycode]
[mycode]<p><a href=”http://example.com/”>HTML Content</a></p>[/mycode]
[mycode]Content [another-shotcode] more content[/mycode]
[mycode foo="bar" id="123"]Some Content[/mycode]
As you can see, shortcodes allow a user to put a code into a post or page, and a plugin can then easily handle those codes. They can be nested, contain content (including HTML), attributes, etc. Continue reading this entry…