Linking the Logo to the Home Page with JavaScript
Posted: Thu 01/08/2009 by ramiroThe logo of a Web site is not only important for branding but also as a navigational element, that many users expect to link to the home page. According to usability guru Jakob Nielsen the first of Ten Good Deeds in Web Design you can do is link your logo to the home page except you are on the home page.
Mr. Nielsen conducted many usability studies and has written groundbreaking articles and books on Web usability. Good reason for me to trust him when it comes to this topic, especially when it sounds completely plausible.
MediaWiki can Look Great
Posted: Tue 09/09/2008 by ramiroMediaWiki is the wiki software that drives one of the most popular sites on the Web Wikipedia. I would't say that Wikipedia looks ugly but it feels a bit moldy.
MediWiki also drives the jQuery documentation site which demonstrates that MediaWiki can look great. Before the recent redesign of jQuery.com the designers of the jQuery docs site already managed to create a unique look in contrast to 99.9% of the other MediWiki driven sites. Now they made it a blast, congrats!
Creating Amazon Ads that Rock with jQuery and PHP
Posted: Mon 08/06/2007 by ramiroAre you sick of annoying ads that take up large parts of the screen, pop up, under or anywhere else, move around, blink and flash? You want to learn how to create ads that rock with a few lines of simple JavaScript and PHP code? Then let me show you how.
Parsing Yahoo Pipes JSON Feeds with jQuery
Posted: Sat 07/07/2007 by ramiroIn this article I describe how you can parse and display Yahoo Pipes data returned as a JSON feed. Yahoo Pipes can be used as a data aggregator that lets you mashup online data sources, such as RSS feeds. To learn more about Yahoo Pipes and how to create them you can watch this video on how Yahoo Pipes work.
Highlighting Hard Coded Active Links with jQuery
Posted: Tue 07/03/2007 by ramiroWhen using Drupal's menu system for linking pages on your site the corresponding menu link gets the CSS class active when the referred page is being displayed. To make use of this to improve a site's usability you can highlight this link by assigning a different color, background color, etc. Drupal's l() function also takes care to add the active class to currently displayed links.
On this site I have to blocks in the sidebar (Recommended Articles, Drupal Modules) with hard-coded links to internal pages using plain HTML. My main reason not to use menu items is because I am too lazy and I don't use the l() function to not increase the number of database queries more than necessary.
