Get Fractal
Any one who has ever designed and built for Email knows how frustrating it can be. It can some times be worse than dealing with legacy browsers and all their quirks.
Email has come a long way in the last few years but there are still no standards, although the people at http://www.email-standards.org are trying.
Many great tools exist like Litmus.
A perfect companion to Litmus would be Fractal, It’s a code QA test rather than a visual validation.
Golden Grid System
While Responsive design is becoming more and more popular here is yet another great Responsive Grid system, Similar to the Less Framework.
Definitely worth taking a look at, I think responsive web design is a great solution to a wide audience on a budget. While it’s not perfect it does offer some advantages to specifically designing for specific devices.
3D text on any HTML element
Use multiple text-shadows to create 3D text on any HTML element.
No extra HTML, no extra headaches, just awesomesauce.
Google +
Google + is the new social kid on the block, with limited Beta every one is trying to find a way in.
What I think Google + does better than Facebook is control the way you post your content. The ability to send your posts to selected people/circles is a great idea. I have not used Facebook a tone because I find it frustrating to use, The layout is not intuitive at all.
At the moment Google + is Ad free ( I assume this will change in time ) but the layout matches that of Google Search, and G-Mail.
I would invest the time to share links, images, and videos on Google plus over Facebook. I also consider Google + to be a bit more personal as in it’s not full of other people’s junk. Your profile page looks more or less like a Tumbler blog.
So far so good.
With Google having the +1 button in the search results it is giving a lot of power to users to promote the websites they like. This will most definitely effect SEO as I would think organic recommendations will be valued higher than text-based keywords, and thus adding value and relevance to Advertising. Google will know more about you and in turn deliver more content you “like”, much like Facebook.
Rite now I have noticed an issue with actually finding Google +
http://gplus.to/adampatterson/
Dingo a Lightweight MVC PHP Framework
I have been using a small PHP MVC Framework called Dingo Framework.
Dingo is a Rapid Development Application Framework written in PHP by Evan Byrme. Dingo allows you to create dynamic changing websites easily and quickly.
Dingo is a relatively new full featured framework at a compact size of 70KB, It supports Fancy URL’s, Access Control List, User Authentication, ORM, and simple no SQL database interaction.
Dingo is very easy to leverage, adding 3rd parties libraries is dead easy. The configuration is simple with support for multiple database connections, auto load libraries and helpers.
Dingo is well documented, but a little out dated, You are probably better off checking GitHub for more up to date code.
Try the Dingo TextMate Bundle!
Connecting Pidgen to Google Apps
It might not be apparently obvious but Google Apps accounts also work in Google Talk. Here are the details.
Example email address myname@my.hosteddomain.org
Basic Tab:
Protocol: XMPP
Username: myname (First half of Email address)
Domain: my.hosteddomain.org (Second half of Email address)
Resource: gmail.com/
Advanced Tab:
Connect port: 5222
Connect server: talk.google.com
File transfer proxies: proxy.jabber.org