My previous post was about some important FAQs from the view point of a logo designing professional. I hope that would have been as beneficial for my fellow designer as I expected it to be. This post is more of a sequel to the previous post, however, it addresses to the FAQs from the point-of-view of a business owner or an entrepreneur.

A logo is very important for your business, and more important than a logo is a ‘good logo’. However, there are a few things you should keep in mind while getting a logo designed for your company. Your company’s logo should be the symbol for everything that your company represents. When a customer looks at your logo, it should act as an immediate call-to-action and they should be able to quickly recall your services.

This is called brand awareness. Brand awareness is basically the act of creating public awareness of your brand in order to maximize its recognition. A good logo is one of the most successful brand awareness strategies that define a company’s uniqueness and sets it apart from its competitors.

No matter if you do or do not have a logo for your company following FAQs may help both big and small entrepreneurs and business owners to have a good insight about brand awareness through logo.

The thought process of designing logos is incredibly important. A creative logo can be included in layouts for marketing brochures and help to build brand identity. The same thing is true for placing logos on business cards, customers will recognize the image.

1. How large should my business be to have a logo for itself?

Answer: There is no set pattern or a formulated theory that can gauge that a certain business is ripe enough to have a logo for itself. It is you and your business’ maturity and the stability of its marketing plans that is decisive in the logo making process. There have been some cases in which a certain entrepreneur did not have a solid plan or marketing strategy for its company, even then he got a logo made for his company and placed it on brochures, flyers, postcards and business cards etc. as a result, he had to do a major brand identity remake only after a few months.

If you are not sure that either your business is settled or not or the company is on its personality, services, differentiators and target audience, it may be better to hold off creating a logo so that once the roots of your business get firm, the logo will be as accurate and as lasting as possible.

2.  What are the things, the designer of my company’s logo should know about my business?

Answer: In order to get the most perfect design out of the designer you have hired to design the logo for your business, you should try and make him/her understand what exactly your company is and the things it does. Most businesses have a very complex brand definition and it is quite difficult to try and make the other person understand what you want.

It is important that before you go into logo making process, filter out the attributes, strengths and achievements of your business and try to and base your logo on one of these. Trying to pack too many details into a logo can create a muddled mess. You’re your done with the narrowing down process; it will be easier for you to make others understand your business well, and will enable you to get a concise and focused logo design that will tell your business’ story clearly.

3. To what extent can I influence my logo’s design with my personal likes and dislikes?

Answer: It is not at all advised to influence your business’ logo design with your personal taste. As a business owner, one of the most important business decisions you will make is to choose the design of your logo. Many business owners make the mistake of basing their logo choices or their personal preferences. Here you should understand the fact that you are making the logo for your target customers and not for ‘your eyes only’.

Your logo has to connect with your clients and their perspective is the most important thing. Obviously the logo in not your tattoo, so; your likes or dislikes should have very little to do with the logo design.

4. Can I get away with launching my business without a logo?

Answer: Launching a new business without having a logo for it can be disastrous. Some entrepreneurs are of the idea that they will research, plan and then launch their business, and when the business attracts a couple of clients, they will hire a designer to make a logo for it. This should not be the case, not at all.

The reason behind such attitude is the initial lack of customers and cash flow often causes new small business owners to put off designing a logo and marketing materials professionally “until they get a few clients. Do remember that when you start a business, you need to create the quickest possible route to business identification. A logo helps to create this by contributing to your business’s visibility, credibility, and memorability and helps your business to grow and be successful.

5. Why am I so bored with my logo?

Answer: Your boredom with your business’ logo may have many reasons, but most of these would relate to your own issues rather than the logo being dull or problematic. The main problem of logo boredom is that you keep seeing your logo, over and over again. When you are done seeing the logo for the millionth time, the logo starts to lose its sheen.

It no longer seems as brilliant or perfect as it once did. So for the next time you feel like getting tired of your logo, put your focus on something else. Design new marketing material (like brochures, flyers or business cards etc.), or change up the other graphics that you have on them (like photos, background colors or the font treatments). This will change the look of your materials without changing the logo.

6. What are the signs when it is the time to change my logo?

Answer: Although a change in your logo designing is as unadvisable as surfing in high waters, because this can damage the image and awareness of your brand real hard. However, there are times when your business comes across situations when logo change becomes inevitable. The most common and important reason for a logo change may be that when you first start a business at a smaller scale, you create your brand based on your hopes and plans for the future of the company.

Then once you actually start the business, you may find that your business is going on a bit different path than you anticipated in terms of its objectives and target audience. Here comes the need for changing the logo. However, a change in the brand identity should not be taken lightly. Redesigning a logo requires a solid business reason. Do it, if you have one, otherwise, don’t even think about it!

7.  What should be the color of my company’s logo?

Answer: Picking colors for your logo can be difficult. It is not an easy job to go about choosing appropriate colors for your logo. Everyone has a particular like and dislike when it comes to colors, however; it is advised to keep this ‘personal favorite’ thing to your dresses, shoes and nail paint only. Whether or not you personally like a color actually has little to do with its appropriateness for your business’s brand. There are few key points you, as an entrepreneur, should keep in mind, while picking the color for your logo.

The color should…

• Tell your brand’s identity through color psychology

• Lay the color foundation for your visual vocabulary

• Give light and dark contrast to your logo elements

• Complement each other and create a proper visual appeal

8. How can I squeeze the best logo out of the logo designer I have hired?

Answer: getting a logo designed for your company can be a very frustrating process. And at times you even think that it would have been easier if the designer could read your mind. However, as we know that it is not possible, there are still some logical ways to approach the design process to make sure you end up with a logo that’s truly and uniquely “just the right” logo. There are some simple tips that can help you get the best out of your logo designer.

• Work with a designer who can pace up with your style and aesthetics

• Gather some examples of logos that match your interest

• Explain your business attributes and achievements thoroughly to the designer

• Once you start getting response, give detailed feedback

• Remember that your logo is to appeal to your best clients, and not just you

Follow these tips and get closer to a logo that works for your business. These will also avoid you frustrating yourself with design repetitions.  Don’t get annoyed, as it is worth going through the process to get the best logo possible for your business.

Your logo is more than just an important part of your marketing materials. It is the face of your business. Your logo gives clients and prospects a visual reference to pair with your business name, which increases the memorability of your brand.

Related posts:

1. Become A Logo Designer at Logomyway.com Need Amazing Custom Designs? LogoMyWay connects clients needing design...
2. LogoBee Reduces Logo Design Delivery Time To appease growing demand, LogoBee launches new faster turnaround...
3. Create an Famous Blog Logo Through Photoshop Tutorial Today we’re trying to present an short way for...
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If you have ever added a background image to your web page, and found that by default, it repeats itself on the page so that copies of the image fill the entire browser window (like the tiles on a floor), this article is for you. It shows you how to disable that tiling effect, and centre ("center") a single copy of the image in the background using the free KompoZer web editor.

Davy Van Den Bremt (via DrupalFire)

For one of our clients, we are running a Drupal site with about a millions of nodes. Before launch, those nodes are imported from another database and then indexed into Apache SOLR. The total time to index all of these nodes in an empty SOLR instance is measured in days rather than hours or minutes.

A bit too long to do this import regularly. So me and my (XDebug) profiler delved into the Apache SOLR module code to look where we could scrape of a few hours/days of the execution time.

Seemed like in our case, there were 3 components responsible for a large share of the execution time. Let's have a look.

BTW. We are using the latest dev build of version 2 of the Apache SOLR module.

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Lullabot (via DrupalFire)

Drupalcon Copenhagen slides and a video!

I had a great time at Drupalcon Copenhagen! Thanks to everyone who made it happen. I did one presentation this time around, "The Command Line is your friend." It covered the basic commands for getting around and doing things, most of which are covered in more detail in the Command Line Basics video series. One thing that was new and that I ended up not having time to get to in Copenhagen was showing how to install Drupal from the command line. A number of people expressed interest in seeing that part, so I promised I'd make a video of it, and now I've gotten it done. I'm attaching the slides from the presentation here as well, so please have some fun playing around on the command line.

• Archive.org video of the live presentation
• My slides as a PDF
• The new Command Line Basics: Install Drupal video

Lullabot (via DrupalFire)

How to create presentations that entertain & inform.

I had the opportunity to present to a local organization in Salt Lake City on the techniques Lullabot uses for making kick ass presentations and how we streamline our presentations so they're reusable amongst our teaching staff. Watch the video below and download the slides.

• Ditch PowerPoint. PowerPoint prefers boredom, repetition and information fatigue.
• Do a cold open and talk about something relevant: the weather, the setting, world news.
• Kill the bullet points. People don't retain bullet points. They retain the story.
• Don't apologize for a demonstration not working as expected. Either figure it out together with the audience or simply move on.
• Simple, but not simplistic. You're audience is smart. A one-by-one reveal of bullet points is simplistic. A large photo with a brief message is simple (and brilliant).
• When creating reusable slides, use learning objectives and outlines to supplement the presentation while leaving room for each presenter to share their stories.
• Make it fun! Connect the presentation to what you're passionate about.

Development Seed (via DrupalFire)

Plans for the Aegir 1.0 release and how we'll get there

Last week at DrupalCon Copenhagen Antoine Beaupre and I shared our plans for the 1.0 release of the Aegir hosting system. After the 0.4 release that we are currently working on, the project will start working towards a final 1.0 build, rather than head towards 0.5.

Our goal for Aegir has been to implement a hosting system with a stable documented API that provides a solid foundation for integration of other services. Once we hit the 0.4 release, we will have the infrastructure in place to support this. With our key goal met, we've begun determining our must have features for a 1.0 release.

Going Drupal 7

Aegir 1.0 will be built on Drupal 7. Due to the commoditized nature of hosting infrastructure, we felt it would be impractical to have a stable release that requires additional investment whenever the API changes during development. Therefore our primary goal is to rewrite Aegir's user interface for Drupal 7 and release it as early as possible in the Drupal 7 lifecycle.

With this we hope to ensure that custom and contributed extensions to Aegir built for the 1.0 release will stay viable for as long as building Drupal 7 sites remains viable, allowing your investment in the platform to remain usable for upwards of two years.

New features

After focusing heavily on Aegir's backend in previous releases, we will be turn our attention to the user interface for the 1.0 release. We want this release to be the most lickable version of Aegir yet, with many user interface and workflow improvements.

We plan to implement new functionality to ease and automate issues surrounding 'Development to Staging to Production' workflow problems felt by our users. We'll further integrate with Drush make, allowing Aegir to subscribe to new releases and automatically download them when a new one becomes available. This will allow you to migrate sites to the latest version literally with a click of a button.

The 1.0 release will also focus heavily on interoperability. We will rebuild the hostmaster install profile to Kit specification, replace custom listing code with Views (something which is already in progress), and integrate more closely with Features, Context, and Spaces. This will simplify our code base and allow for useful functionality like the ability to create SSL sites per client and possibly integrate Open Atrium features with Aegir.

We are open to feature suggestions from our users for the 1.0 release. If you have a request that would improve your experience with Aegir, please send it to @aegirproject.

Finalizing the 0.4 release

We are close to wrapping up the 0.4 release cycle. Once we have completed DNS slave server support (master support already works), we will be feature complete and will start releasing betas in preparation for completing 0.4. We hope to have this functionality completed in the next few weeks.

Slides from the DrupalCon session Aegir: One Drupal to Rule them All are up, and we'll post a link to a video of the session here once it's online.

CivicActions (via DrupalFire)

CivicActions has been working with Google's “Make the Web Faster” project team to make some (last minute) improvements that make Drupal 7 faster.

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Matthew Saunders (via DrupalFire)

Richard Jones of iKos gave a presentation on simplifying and streamlining the development of Drupal sites. His team observed that they were creating the same basic sites over and over again. To this end, rather than starting from scratch each and every time, the team created basic sites to start from and rapidly built out the basic site for a client in several weeks. This allows the client to start entering data early in the process - which means come theming time, you are working against real client data. This is a plus when you are trying to achieve the results your client is seeking. In the iKos model, design comes last and is somewhat subject to the functionality that has been developed.

iKos set the the goal to reduce Drupal development time by 80% - to radically reduced the repeated effort that the company engaged project after project. They created a model of a site "startpoint" that begins each new client effort.

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Gábor Hojtsy (via DrupalFire)

It is that phase of my life! I'm just turning 30 in a month, working with Drupal for 7 years and just had my third Acquia anniversary a week ago. Time to look back and evaluate how things went, all the good and bad things; even better if the wisdom can be shared with others. This was part of my thinking when I submitted the session titled "Come for the software, stay for the community" for Drupalcon Copenhagen. I was interested to distill and share how Drupal came to be as unstoppable as it is, what core values lie behind it, so someone coming fresh can understand and integrate with these.

When Dries Buytaert started Drupal he made a few key decisions which launched the project and kept being governing principles ever since. First of all he decided to make it free and open source, and release it under the GPL. The choice of one single license helps you use all the Drupal components together without the requirement to consult lawyers. Also, the choice of GPL in particular ensures that derivative works are distributed in the open as well.

Using PHP as the base technology was probably the best decision to help proliferation. PHP is not only the most installed backend software (thanks to all kinds of server side software), but its also easy to learn and jump into. While this can and did end up with some projects that gave PHP a bad name, it also opened the door wide to contributors. Having numerous contributors encouraged the tinkering, technology experimentation spirit that defined Drupal from the gate. What's more, Drupal was an integration platform from the beginning. Even Drupal 3 (in 2001) included RSS generation and consumption, a distributed and automated website directory and tagging. Drupal 4 (in 2002) added Jabber user account integration, XML-RPC services support and Drupal shared authentication. See, Drupal had lots of the base features we praise it for even 8-9 years ago. Woo!

Having a technologically advanced system that people can contribute to easily is not enough. You want to build a culture of building on top rather than forking to avoid the bad fate of many other systems grown up through the years. Establishing the hook system on the API level and the node system on the content handling level formed a good foundation to let people tinker even with the innards of Drupal without ever needing to fork.

Building a big home for all these contributions was the next major idea that distinguished Drupal from many other projects. Drupal itself was built on a sharing cultural mindset and drupal.org was set up for all kinds of contributors to follow suit: release code, designs, tools under the same licenses with the same issue handling system, etc. This helped people move between projects of their interest, contribute to each other's work. Having a strong central base versus everybody's own little kingdoms around the internet jumpstarted the large Drupal ecosystem. In 2009, we had above 2200 new projects started on drupal.org, that is above 6 per day.

Keeping the community all together, Drupal could embrace a culture of change as well. Drupal core could be rearchitected with every major release and have tools to help contributors keep up with the flow. This way Drupal can be at the forefront of innovation both in core itself but even more in contributed modules and themes. As Drupal itself keeps improving, contributed modules are forced to rethink their approaches, purpose, and get better in the process. Old and cumbersome solutions vanish while new ones take their place. Developers and users both come out empowered at the end.

This all provided with good ways to do power distribution without appointment. Everybody can be the king (AKA well respected lead) of their modules, themes, documentation sections, translation teams, and so on. There is no need to appoint people to positions per say and possibly face issues when people become inactive. The centralized project and code management space gave way for power transfer when needed, making it easy to hand off maintainership and continue work without breaking history.

All-in-all it is both Dries' forward thinking launch of Drupal and the bright minds who carried on and continued following the same basic principles for almost a decade. This is why we consider Drupalcons where people can meet and drupal.org where people do Drupal work our most precious possessions. This is why the Drupal Association puts money first and foremost into making drupal.org a better place for both newcomers (with the redesign) and for developers (with the git migration) as well putting on Drupalcons around the world. While looking for the next big thing is always on our mid, we managed to keep our values and build a happy community on the way. Win!

Ps. The new Drupal Code of Conduct was just published on drupal.org which might help you understand some of the basic human values we strive for.

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Matthew Saunders (via DrupalFire)

Ryan did a session on the new version of the D7 Commerce Module. He was the original writer of the Ubercart package - a main stay of ecommerce sites in Drupal 6. His self deprecating humour at the beginning of the session was charming as Ubercart was his first segue into many aspects of Drupal and it has become the defacto leader of the pack for Drupal ecommerce sites.

His new offering is looking very slick, making use of fields in core for example, and while Ryan tells us it isn't quite ready for primetime (he's still building out features) it looked pretty good.

Video from this session is below in seven sections. The original first video was only 4 seconds long.

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Kristof De Jaeger (via DrupalFire)

I've been promising benchmarks for the Display Suite module after every presentation I gave so far. It took me a while to get a good setup but now it's here. I've used the demo site as a start, so there are a lot of modules enabled for this test. Views, panels, fivestar, heartbeat, comment, taxonomy, location, gmap, imagecache are the most important ones since they all integrate with the ecosphere of Display Suite modules.

I added a new content type called 'benchmark' and added 14 CCK fields to it: 4 textfields, 4 textareas, 2 images, 2 filefields, 1 node reference and 1 user reference. It also has a title, body, 2 taxonomy fields, a fivestar widget and a couple of comments.

Depending on the test, the complete set of modules integrating with Display suite are enabled or disabled. These include ds, ds_ui, cd, hds, nd, nd_cck, nd_search, nd_fivestar, nd_location, nd_switch_bm, ucd, ud and vd. You gotta love small project names right ?
<!--break-->

Desktop

The first test was ran on my Fedora Core 13 desktop - Intel Core Quad, 2 GHz, 2MB RAM with php 5.2.13 and eAccelerator - ab sending 100 requests with 5 concurrent users on a single node and page caching disabled.

Without Display Suite
PHP 4.91 MB
Requests per second:    36.18 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       138.202 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       27.640 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)

Build mode blocked
PHP 5.31 MB
Requests per second:    34.68 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       144.174 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       28.835 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)

With Display Suite
PHP 5.33 MB
Requests per second:    34.51 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       144.876 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       28.975 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)

Server

The second test was ran on a CentOS 5.3 - 2 x Intel Core Quad, 2,6 GHz, 8MB RAM with php 5.2.11 and eAccelerator - ab sending 100 requests from my pc to the external server with 5 concurrent users on a single node and page caching disabled.

Without Display Suite
PHP 4.25 MB
Requests per second:    26.91 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       185.775 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       37.155 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)

Build mode blocked
PHP 4.61 MB
Requests per second:    26.76 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       187.072 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       37.514 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)

With Display Suite
PHP 4.63 MB
Requests per second:    26.65 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       187.642 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       37.828 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests))

I knew that enabling modules would cause the memory of PHP to grow on both my desktop and the server. The server however behaves better in terms of keeping the requests per second steady per setup, so that's the real good news. I'll probably run some more in the future to see how it behaves in other situations, but I'm glad that I've got some results to show!

You may lose a few microseconds, but win days of maintainability!

Matthew Saunders (via DrupalFire)

Many thanks to everyone who made Drupalcon CPH happen. The final session is a suitable (if silly) ending to what was a very productive week for me. Lots of meetings, reconnecting with old friends, and sessions.

The greatest silliness and fun in the session were the Kitten Killers - you can see just that piece of the presentation here (again and again and again).

If you just want to see the final session from beginning to end - I've posted the entire session below. The second to last is the Kitten Killers.

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Matthew Saunders (via DrupalFire)

Have we replaced the Drupal Song? At the end of the final session, the Killers played a new song, "I Can Be Your Module, You Can Be My Theme". It was a fun and silly way to end the main part of the conference and segue into the sprints.

The song was fun and sounds like it would be really easy to sing again and again and again.

Here's hoping it has been placed in the public domain.

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John Forsythe (via DrupalFire)

Every day, millions of people use Google Image Search to find pictures, products, and people. If you're using Drupal, chances are you're not getting any of this traffic.

Here's why:

Drupal's robots.txt file contains a major mistake. Amazingly, the mistake has been there for years, and very few people seem to know about it.

read more

Lullabot (via DrupalFire)

Save 25% On All Lullabot Learning Series Videos!

Use coupon code: SCHOOL25

The school year is starting up, DrupalCon CPH is over and it's time to learn Drupal! For those of you who've been waiting for the perfect time to grab your copy of one of our awesome Learning Series videos, now's your chance to save big. Now through Friday, September 3rd you'll aget 25 percent off your purchase of any physical or downloadable product in the Lullabot store by using the coupon code SCHOOL25. That includes ALL of our Lullabot Learning Series videos and video bundles!

To get this special savings, just use the coupon code SCHOOL25 at checkout and place your order before the sale ends! Tell your friends and share it with others, there are no limits on this coupon code, but it ends Friday, September 3rd.

Visit store.lullabot.com (or click the "store" link in the menu above) and shop for whatever's been tickling your fancy.

What others are saying about Lullabot's Learning Series Videos

Just finished watching Advanced Theming video. It was exactly what I needed to move ahead with my current project. Completely demystified template.php, and Forms API is now malleable. You guys are the pros, you rock!
– waj194 (via Get Satisfaction)

Gábor Hojtsy (via DrupalFire)

Anders Høeg Nissen from Harddisken, the P1 Danish Radio show was out at Drupalcon Copenhagen to report and interview people about Drupal and just generally spread the news. P1 is part of one of the oldest and largest media empires in Denmark, its parent company was founded in 1925 as a public service organization.

Dries Buytaert and Angie Byron were on the show being interviewed on their thinking of Drupal, and how they manage the flood of people coming with Drupal 7. I was interviewed to share some of the ideas behind my session titled "Come for the software, stay for the community - how Drupal improves and evolves". The radio host was interested in what I think are major drivers in Drupal's thriving community and how do we make it work. We got some of our thinking translated to Danish even.

I unfortunately don't know Danish (like probably most of my readers). If you know, a transcription / translation would be useful, thank you. In the meantime, you can listen to the show (MP3) mostly in Danish. (The first 25 minutes cover Drupal).

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Gábor Hojtsy (via DrupalFire)

As Drupal events grow around the world, more and more people find meetups and conferences closer to themselves. However, traveling to bigger events like Drupalcons can still be a financial problem for many. One of the solutions for this is couch surfing, where you could take a couch from someone who has it available in the host city for an event. Of course sleeping at an unknown person's place can be problematic. However, if we consider you already go for a Drupal event, and drupal.org has a profile for people with attached data on their activity, it can form as a reputation system. At Drupalcon Copenhagen, we discussed that maybe it would even be possible to build this tool as a group on groups.drupal.org (but definition of what is exactly needed is best to be done first).

I don't have the opportunity to help and build this tool but thought throwing the idea out would be useful for others to brainstorm and possibly help the community by making it work. We already had a nifty slogan for it when module maintainers couch surf: "I'm using your APIs, may I use your couch as well?"

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We are like to presenting some useful JavaScript tutorials, jQuery snippets, libraries, articles, tools and resources, we’re today with some latest techniques about javascript. In this round-up we sharing calendars, forms, buttons, navigation, debugging, optimization and compatibility tables as well as handy resources and tools. We also cover various jQuery-plugins that will help you extend the functionality of your website development and improve user experience with ready components or coding solutions.

Most of the Web Developers and Designers are using mostly JavaScript  as per latest design requirements, because now many modren techniques are available on world wide web, we always follow various web techniques and scripts for best user experience, we sharing most wanted JavaScript Tutorials as per modern web needs.

Hope you like all listed tutorials which will more helping in your web development, you may share your own experience about js (JavaScript) here as comment.

Quick Tip: Quick and Easy JavaScript Testing with “Assert”

Years ago, I learned a deceptively simple “assert” function from John Resig, for testing your JavaScript. Amazingly, at barely five or six lines, this code provides a great level of power and control over your code, when testing. I’ll show you how to use it in today’s video quick tip.

jDigiClock – Digital Clock (HTC Hero inspired)

jDigiClock is a jQuery plugin inspired from HTC Hero Clock Widget.

Quick Tip: Dissecting jQuery – Filters

Sporadically, over the course of each month, we’ll post a “Dissecting jQuery” video quick tip. The idea behind these is that we’ll take a single chunk of the jQuery source  at a time, break it down, and determine exactly what’s going on under the hood, so to speak. Then, with that knowledge, we’ll learn how to better utilize the library in our coding. Today, we’ll review filters.

Quick Tip: An Introduction to Sammy.js

You’ve been seeing it for a while now with Google’s Reader, Gmail, and most recently, on Facebook. Probably, you, too, would like to write RESTful evented JavaScript applications. Well, fellow developers, meet Sammy.js, a tiny JavaScript framework built on top of jQuery. Sammy utilizes the URL hash (#) to allow you to create single page AJAX applications that respond to your browser’s back button. Interested?

In this article, I’ll be providing a short overview of the framework, and then a brief demonstration of what it’s like working with Sammy.js, with the hope of enticing you enough to consider it for your projects.

Building Persistent Sticky Notes with Local Storage

HTML5 local storage is like cookies on steroids; it’s incredibly simple to use and yet still so powerful. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create “sticky notes” functionality, that allows your users to take persistent notes while browsing your site.

How To Create A ‘Mootools Homepage’ Inspired Navigation Effect Using jQuery

As you know there are a host of competing javascript libraries around these days. Though I prefer jQuery, I’ve always liked the way the menu on MooTools worked. So in this tutorial we’ll recreate that same effect … but we’ll do it in jQuery!

iPhoto-like image resizing using Javascript

Upon seeing the Fluxiom intro video, I was compelled to figure out how they pulled off iPhoto-like image scaling in a browser. Leveraging the work of others, it’s actually very simple.

If you use the script.aculo.us slider control to capture input values, it’s really just a matter of converting those values into something useful and modifying styles.

Building a 5 Star Rating System with jQuery, AJAX and PHP

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to build a rating system with AJAX, PHP, and jQuery. Votes will be recorded and updated in real-time with the magic of AJAX, and we’ll also leverage the power of PHP so that you don’t even need a database!

Drag & Drop Sortable Lists with JavaScript and CSS

In Web applications I’ve seen numerous — and personally implemented a few — ways to rearrange items in a list. All of those were indirect interactions typically involving something like up/down arrows next to each item. The most heinous require server roundtrips for each modification…boo.

Then I came across Simon Cozens’ example of rearranging a list via drag & drop. I was so inspired I had to try it out myself.

jQuery Tutorials for Designers

This article contains 10 visual tutorials intended for web designers and newbies on how to apply Javascript effects with jQuery. In case you don’t know about jQuery, it is a “write less, do more” Javascript library. It has many Ajax and Javascript features that allow you to enhance user experience and semantic coding. Since these tutorials are focused on jQuery, I’m not going to get into the details of the CSS.

How jQuery Beginners can Test and Improve their Code

jQuery’s arrival has made the process writing JavaScript laughably easy. But, you’ll notice that making small changes to your code improves the readability and/or performance significantly. Here are some tips to get you on your way to optimizing your code.

Date / Time Picker

A date picker control. To open the calendar, click the icon at the right side of the input box.

SlideViewer

Textboxlist Auto-Completion

LavaLamp for jQuery lovers!

Hover above and feel for yourself, the nifty effect of Lava Lamp. What you just experienced is nothing but the LavaLamp menu packaged as a plugin for the amazing jQuery javascript library. I personally believe that the effect rivals that of flash – Don’t you? Especially considering the fact that it is extremely light weight.

Lightbox 2

Lightbox is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. It’s a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers.

LightWindow

After researching every single modal window, lightbox, slimbox, etc out there nothing fit the bill. Granted some of them were very nice but only fit a specific purpose, others were a nightmare on the code end, and others were just hacks of another. None of them truly supported all of the features we needed and those that were close could not be easily adapted without a bottle of Prozac near by.

Other caveats were the complete lack of ability to style and position the system, and the insane over-kill of some of the systems trying to reproduce either another desktop (As if most computer users aren’t confused enough) or the reproduction of a popup window (Show me someone who likes popup windows…). Lastly, most people didn’t actually test for their media types and how they behaved in other browsers and operating systems (Yes the movies and Flash work in Firefox for the Mac).

jQuery Tutorial – Create a Sliding Menu Using jQuery

This time we’ll be building a sleek menu using jquery and some styles. What’s beautiful about jquery is how you can change a few bits and you get an entirely new effect.

jQuery Tutorial – How to Make a Smooth Animated Menu with jQuery

Ever seen some excellent jQuery navigation that left you wanting to make one of your own? Today we’ll aim to do just that by building a menu and animate it with some smooth effects. The menu has such a smooth animation because of a thing called “easing”. Adobe’s definition in the Flash Developer Center is a little more complete:

“The term easing refers to gradual acceleration or deceleration during an animation, which helps your animations appear more realistic. Easing creates a more natural appearance of acceleration or deceleration by gradually adjusting the rate of change.”

How to Detect the Social Sites Your Visitors Use

One of the great things about the web is the relative ease with which one can set up a new service. In social bookmarking alone with have Del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Fark, Mister-Wong, Newsvine, Reddit, Technorati, Slashdot, and StumbleUpon, to name a few. That’s great for competition, and that’s great for users, but it’s not so good for bloggers and content creators.

What are you to do if you want readers to promote your content? Kevin Rose, of Digg, put it succinctly: “Encourage your visitors to submit their favorite stories directly to Digg [with a Digg badge].” Not everyone uses Digg. You have to decide on which bookmarking site, if any, to dedicate your precious screen real-estate. It’s a hard choice. If you choose poorly your reader won’t vote—it’s not a single click coupled and out-of-sight means out-of-mind—and your content losses its chance to make it big. You have to choose your horse wisely.

Javascript Image Gallery Using Mootools

This free image gallery based on javascript is a quick & easy solution. Implementing the demo doesn’t requre knowledge of any javascript. In this article, I’ll explain and breakdown the javascript that runs the image gallery using the javascript framework Mootools.

Making accordion menu using jquery

Last time, I’ve shown how to create accordion using jquery. But, In this post I’ll show you how can you create fancy accordion menu using jQuery. In this post, you’ll see two examples of accordion. First menu’s visibility get’s toggled on clicking on the header while the another menu’s visibility get’s toogled when mouse is moved over it.

Sponsor Flip Wall With jQuery & CSS

Designing and coding a sponsors page is part of the developer’s life (at least the lucky developer’s life, if it is about a personal site of theirs). It, however, follows different rules than those for the other pages of the site. You have to find a way to fit a lot of information and organize it clearly, so that the emphasis is put on your sponsors, and not on other elements of your design.

We are using PHP, CSS and jQuery with the jQuery Flip plug-in, to do just that. The resulting code can be used to showcase your sponsors, clients or portfolio projects as well.

jQuery.Syntax

jQuery.Syntax is an extremely fast and lightweight syntax highlighter written in JavaScript. It has dynamic loading of syntax source files and integrates cleanly using CSS or modelines.

How to Create a Drop-down Nav Menu with HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery

In this tutorial, we’ll take a look and see what we can achieve with HTML5 and CSS3 when it comes to the staple of current web sites: the humble drop-down navigation menu. We’ll also use jQuery to handle the effects and add the finishing touches for us.

HTML5 brings to the spec a dedicated <nav> element that should be used as the container for any major navigation structure, such as the main vertical or horizontal site navigation menus, or an in-page table of contents for example. IE unfortunately doesn’t support this new element yet, but there is a simple fix we can use, of which I’m sure you’re all aware.

Using CSS3 we can do away with what would have required the use of several background images and possibly an additional wrapping container or two and rely (almost) purely on some of the new style properties, such as rounded corners and drop-shadows for example, that are available to supporting browsers. Again, not all browsers (cough, IE!) support these new rules, but we can very easily provide fall-back solutions for the browsers that can’t handle our styles.

jquery.timepickr.js

This is my humble attempt to enhence web time picking.

For the moment I’d call it a toy project, it might stay in experimental state evitam eternam.. I just wanted to see if I could create a better time picker. I’ve seen lots of time pickers styles and approaches, but none seems to focus on user experience accross many platforms and beautiful degradation.

SyntaxHighlighter

SyntaxHighlighter  is here to help a developer/coder to post code snippets online with ease and have it look pretty. It’s 100% Java Script based and it doesn’t care what you have on your server.

Rich Text Editor

The Rich Text Editor is a UI control that replaces a standard HTML textarea. It allows for the rich formatting of text content, including common structural treatments like lists, formatting treatments like bold and italic text, and drag-and-drop inclusion and sizing of images. The Rich Text Editor’s Toolbar is extensible via a plugin architecture so that advanced implementations can achieve a high degree of customization.

Sexy sliding JavaScript side bar menu using mootools

When trying to conceive ways in which space could be saved on a web page I decided a sliding menu would work well as shown in the images below.

Learning Basic JavaScript Faster Than Ever!

Before we begin to learn and practices with JavaScript, it’s going to make things a lot smoother if we are all using the same document setup. so for this tutorial I recommend you to practice with the following blank document.

jQuery Sliding Tab Menu for Sidebar Tutorial

This tutorial, we will be making a jQuery Sliding Tab Menu for sidebar. Previously, I made a tutorial about jQuery Tabbed Interface / Tabbed Structure Menu, if you have not read it yet, check it out. I’m using it for my sidebar at the moment. The differences between both tab menus are, the sliding direction and this time, we are using a little bit different HTML structure and massive change in jQuery script.

We will be using a famous plugin called jQuery.scrollTo. jQuery scrollTo is an amazing plugin and doing sliding menu has never been so easy! Please continue reading, As usual, this tutorial is separated into 3 sections: HTML, CSS and Javascript.

Use jQuery To Submit Form To PHP/MySQL

Using jQuery to submit a form, is something you are seeing more and more of as jQuery’s popularity builds. When I first started reading about jQuery and Ajax all I wanted to do was learn how to submit a form using jQuery.

I was so confused and lost, seeing the code was so abstract to me. So in this tutorial, I want to show you how to use the jQuery framework to submit data through a form using jQuery to a PHP page that submits to a database.

We are going to take form data and submit it to a jQuery Ajax call then send that to a PHP page with the data. Check out a live example of this post.

A Simple Movie Search App w/ jQuery UI

In this tutorial, we are using jQuery UI’s autocomplete widget, to build a simple AJAX movie search form. The script is going to use TheMovieDatabase.org‘s free API, to provide auto suggestions against a vast database of movie titles.

For those of you who might not be familiar with TMDb.org, this is an open, community driven movie database. It is similar to IMDb, which you’ve probably heard about, but also provides a number of useful API’s for developers.

Photo Zoom Out Effect with jQuery

Today we will show you how to create a simple image zoom out effect with jQuery. The idea is show some images which are zoomed in initially and when hovering over an image it gets zoomed out. This effect could be used in photography websites or image galleries. Our example uses some black and white images to focus on the effect.

A Fresh Bottom Slide Out Menu with jQuery

In this tutorial we will create a unique bottom slide out menu. This large menu will contain some title and a description of the menu item. It will slide out from the bottom revealing the description text and some icon. We will use some CSS3 properties for some nice shadow effects and jQuery for the interaction.

Making a Mosaic Slideshow With jQuery & CSS

When designing a product page, it is often necessary to present a number of images in a succession, also known as a slideshow. With the raise of the jQuery library and its numerous plugins, there is an abundance of ready-made solutions which address this problem. However, to make a lasting impression to your visitors, you need to present them with something they have not seen before.

Today we are making a jQuery & CSS mosaic gallery. Mosaic, because it will feature an interesting tile transition effect when moving from one slide to another.

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Development Seed (via DrupalFire)

Aegir's new home, release updates, and DrupalCon

The Aegir Project has just launched its new home - aegirproject.org. Right now this site is just a placeholder, but we'd like to turn this space into a resource for documentation, release announcements, and community discussion. We'd love to hear about your ideas for what you would like to see on the site - please send ideas to @aegirproject.

Development on Aegir has been advancing quickly this summer. Earlier this month we put out the Aegir 0.4 Alpha 9 release, which added features like multi-server support, a vastly simplified installation, and support for sites encrypted with SSL to the system, and we just announced the 0.4 Alpha 12 release, which contains bug fixes and usability improvements. The last major feature missing before we can consider Aegir 0.4 feature complete and start the beta cycle is the ability to host DNS for all your sites. This is a requirement to allow us to move sites between servers successfully.

I'll be presenting on Aegir at DrupalCon Copenhagen tomorrow, August 26th, at 1:30 pm in the Trellon Room with Antoine Beaupré. We'll walk through Aegir and show off the new features that have been added over the last year, especially some of the multi-server magic like how to use Aegir to add additional web and database servers and migrate and clone sites between several servers. We'll also talk about our future plans for the project and share best practices around how to lessen the impact of the development -> staging -> production workflow problem by making use of tools such as Drush make and Features.

For those who have already consumed the Aegir koolaid (or beer, since Aegir, the Norse god of the ocean, is known for his love of beer), we will have a BoF at 4:00 pm tomorrow and after that, meet in the lobby to head out to our traditional Aegir dinner. This is always a great time to hang out in person and get to know the team better.

Development Seed (via DrupalFire)

Open Atrium goes Kit compliant

Yesterday we released Open Atrium 1.0 Beta 8 (aka "Seatbelts"). This release makes some of the biggest changes to Open Atrium since the Beta 4 release last winter, focusing on compatibility, accessibility, and stability.

Compatibility

Eight features in Open Atrium are now Kit compliant. Kit compliance pushes Open Atrium to a new level of modularity, allowing any of the eight features to be used in other distributions or your own projects with fewer dependencies and less hassle than before. Changes related to Kit have also improved the compatibility of Open Atrium on several other fronts:

• The Seed module that provided a grab-bag of UI tweaks and utilities has been deprecated in favor of several projects that accomplish the same jobs and better. ImageCache Profiles now provides the user picture thumbnails, Node form columns makes it easy to rearrange content forms, and iTweak Upload streamlines the attachment UI.
• A pattern of optional enhancement has been adopted across Open Atrium features, allowing you to use them in their simplest incarnations and then progressively add on niceties like Organic Groups and Spaces integration, Relative date display, and Crayon colored popups/condensed displays in lists.