Screen Shot of Microsoft’s First Website

Early 1993

Social Media ROI Tool

The company offers a free spreadsheet download that looks as though it may be very useful.  Get it here.

Funny Google Auto Suggest

Link to another blog that has a whole list of these

click the image to see

This was what Google suggested the other day when I started a search query with “why won’t”.  I swear this has not been edited with Photoshop.  Try it yourself and see.

Save a Tree and Capture a screen shot Instead

In observance of Earth Day I thought I would share a widely known but under used technique that hopefully will save a print-aholic some paper.   I hate wasting paper and moreover it’s just easier/quicker to take a screen shot than print something off.

Get ready because this is a difficult 2 step process iPhone:

1) Hold down the home button

2) Press the top reset/pwr button

For taking a screen shot on a Mac:

1) command + shift + 3

optional 3rd step) Add the trendy “Please think twice before printing this email…” paragraph to your email signature and send your screen shot to a friend or colleague

Android runs on iPhone!

Planetbeing is a wizard!  I believe this is the very first time someone managed to install a non-Apple OS on the iPhone and the implications of this are absolutely huge, therefore I don’t think an apology for your lack of photoshop skills is necessary.

Great Article on Best Practices for Integrating JavaScript into a Site

Here is a link to a great article I just read from Smashing Magazine titled “The Seven Deadly Sins of JavaScript Integration”. It addresses a lot of issues I have personally encountered.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/02/22/the-seven-deadly-sins-of-javascript-implementation/

Tool for Creating Sprites

I use CSS Sprites a lot when designing links and navigation menus because they nearly always look great without sacrificing page load time but they are a bit of a pain to create sometimes.  I just stumbled upon SpriteMe.org which has been nice enough to create a tool that helps to ease the pain a little bit though.

SpriteMe features:

1. finds background images
2. groups images into sprites
3. generates the sprite
4. injects the sprite into the current page
5. recomputes the CSS background-position

Go to SpriteMe.org

Need an Icon?

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iPhone Bookmark Icon for Your Website

I recently noticed that when I bookmark some websites on my iPhone and add the bookmark to my home screen it shows up as a nice professional looking icon like this

iPhone Icon

While others show up as a tiny thumbnail of the actual web page that’s being bookmarked. After a quick search I was happy to find that there is a super easy solution to this. All you have to do is create a 57x57px image that you want to be your icon, name it apple-touch-icon.png, and upload it to your site’s root directory. You don’t even have to round the corners or put a glare effect – the iPhone does it for you.

This is the one I created

No glare and No round corners

Another option, if you don’t have access to the root directory, is to add a link to the head section of your web page like you would for a favicon.
For example:
<link rel=”apple-touch-icon” href=”/customIcon.png”/>

Magic Toolbox’s Magic Thumb JavaScript

I’ve decided that since I come across so many different resources and great info in the course of working on projects that each time I stumble upon something good I will post it on my blog.

I recently created a thumbnail gallery for a salon’s website that’s located here in Atlanta. The gallery consisted of 18 thumbnails that when hovered over automatically expand to a larger profile image of each employee.

After some shopping around I decided to use Magic Toolbox’s Magic Thumb script. It’s similar to the ever popular lytebox, however it’s highly customizable and offers an API to use in development.

I happened to get stumped on something while writing the script for the gallery and emailed a support person named Alex. I not only got a quick reply, but Alex uploaded an example of what I was trying to do to make it more clear. I was super impressed with the high level of service.

Magic Toolbox also has some other scripts for viewing images that I’m sure are just as good. You can check them out here.