Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on October 5, 2008 – 9:07 pm
Steven Carrol, Next Web WebTipr France
Following on from Patrick’s wish for a specific tool to edit the theme of Wordpress blogs, I want to introduce a company that I would love to use and have been drooling over but can’t because it is PC only and I am strictly a Mac man. However, they do solve a very real problem that I am constantly grappling with, they make money, and they could make a ton more if they designed a Wordpress plug in that solved Patrick’s problem and pain.
To edit a website’s design is currently a real hassle, as a developer you have to constantly fath about in a sort of trial and error mode, adjusting one color or parameter at a time. Of course once you change one, that changes everything so you often end up going around in circles for hours until you no longer know whether you’re coming or going (in my case it’s mostly the latter).
Styling is a very time consuming task which generally causes many arguments and frustrations between developers as they try to attain a unique, fresh and interesting look for their projects. With a product like Stylizer this pain is alleviated and the cream works in minutes. One can control the styles in a live fashion seeing how they change the overall look while simply turning knobs and watching the changes take place before your eyes.
As a nuts and bolts developer I personally struggle tremendously with creating a fresh clean look for my own projects. Only after attempting to create graphics yourself do you really gain respect for graphic designers. Earlier in my design carrier I have been constantly disappointed with graphic designers thinking they overcharge, are slow, produce substandard work, etc. In many cases it is often true and one area where I struggled to find a outstanding professional artist. Though I did eventually it is clear to me they are few and far between.
What is now also clear to me is how frustrating and difficult this task really is, I am certainly in the market and will pay good money for an elegant solution to this personal pain, hint, hint, Stylizer Mac version please!!! It is also a little odd that there is not a Mac version of this software (unless there is by someone else and I dont know of it?) given all graphic designers I have ever worked with only ever used Macs.
So if your in the same boat, struggling with creating a shit hot look and feel for your own sites and you use PCs, give Stylizer a shot and let me know if this software is really as good as it looks! Do also do let me know if there something out there similar for the hardened Mac users.
P.S. This article was written by a human not a machine and following on from last weeks huge outcry about the automatic article generating software, we at The Next Web have pledged never to use such software, but the question remains! are the top blogs actually using it? As many sources I have spoken to still think they are :).
I hope you like that post!
The Next Web Blog covers start-up news from all over the world (not just the Valley), exciting new technologies and inspiring entrepreneurs. If you're new here, you may want to read our '
About' page and subscribe to our
RSS feed.
Do you have a start-up that we should write about?
Contact us! Thanks for visiting and hope you come back again!
Written on September 5, 2008 – 3:52 pm
Guest blogger, sharing views on The Next Web
This is a guest post by Kilian Valkhof, co-organizer of Fronteers
The web is divided, there are people that adhere to the international standards and have their websites work in all browsers, and cowboy coders, called that way because they ‘code without rules’. Unfortunately, cowboy coders far outnumber real web developers. It’s time to change that.
Fronteers is the dutch branch organization for front-end developers (the people that write CSS, HTML, JavaScript and AJAX) and the first of it’s kind internationally. It was set up last year in September and is run completely by volunteers. Within a year, they already have around 120 members, a figure that continues to grow.
Why is this good? Members of Fronteers are actively working on making their websites better, and making them work for more people. A wholly different world from the “it works in my browser”-excuses of old. As more people start working like this, the web will become better for everyone.
That is why Fronteers is organizing a two day conference on the 11th and 12th of September. With a heavy focus on CSS and JavaScript, it’s sure to be of interest for anyone working with the web. During those two days, industry heavyweights such as Dean Edwards, Andy Clarke, Bert Bos (W3C), Christian Heilmann (Yahoo!) and Stuart Langridge (Lugradio) will talk about topics ranging from Maintainable CSS to JavaScript closures and from the CSS box-model to the HTML5 video elements.
As is the case in so many professions, there is not just one good way to build websites. That’s why the conference also has a secondary track where there will be in-depth discussions on topics such as CSS, SEO, and Accessibility. A perfect opportunity to ask Christian Heilmann of Yahoo! about their website, or the makers of the Dutch Web Accessibility Guidelines about said guidelines.
Of interest to many web workers will also be a presentation held by Pete LePage. LePage is a member of the Microsoft Internet Explorer team and currently works on their new browser, Internet Explorer 8. The presentation is said to provide insight into the browsers’ improvements that are yet to come.
The two-day conference costs 250 euros. Members of the Fronteers organization get a discount. For more information about the congress, visit the congress website.
Written on July 29, 2008 – 1:42 pm
Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor
Rss is still getting more important for many bloggers, as co-blogger Boris update our blog for RSS last May:
“Well, if it turns out that most of your readers don’t actually visit the site but just read your posts in their RSS reader than it might be time to start optimizing for that.”
Since the updates, subscribers on thenextweb have been increasing tremendously! (subscribe here if you haven’t done allready) Here at TheNextWeb office we have been trying out different programs to read the feeds of other sites, and today I found one on Techcrunch with a new time saving approach:
Open source program Apprise allows users to not only read, but also share news directly from your RSS reader. The project is developed by Christian Cantrell, an Adobe Employee and editor on WatchReport.
The reader is based on Adobe Air, users can simply add and aggregate feeds. Its not world changing, but I believe this is the first RSS reader that can share your articles this easy.
(more…)
Written on May 20, 2008 – 1:32 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
My personal blog attracts between 150 and 250 visitors a day but has more than 800 Feedburner subscribers. This is a fact that I discovered today and it might have some impact on how I blog. Most bloggers spend a lot of time optimizing for search engine and making sure their websites look good.
Here at the Next Web Blog we always look for nice illustrations to go with our posts because we know people like to look at nicely formatted posts. In general I write my posts with a preview window open next to it so I can see how the text flows around the images and what goes below and above ‘the fold’.
What I don’t do is optimize for RSS. As I have written before in a post title RSS Awareness Day: “According to some research (Pew Internet & Yahoo) only 12% of all people are aware of RSS and less than 4% have knowingly used it”. So why bother spending too much time on it?
Well, if it turns out that most of your readers don’t actually visit the site but just read your posts in their RSS reader than it might be time to start optimizing for that. One example are the images. The image I used here is scaled down a bit in html and placed on the right with a CSS class. All of that is ignored in RSS. That means that if you read this post via your RSS reader the image is huge and displayed right on top of the article.
With more and more traffic going straight to RSS it makes sense to start optimizing for it. I want a Wordpress plugin that adds a ‘preview this post’ button so I can preview it in both the browser AND in RSS readers.
Then we get to the issue of cross platform compatibility. You might have your HTML and CSS working fine in Explorer and Firefox on Window and Macintosh and Linux but how does it look in Google Reader? Or My Yahoo? And have you checked NetNewsWire on a Mac VS NewsGator on Windows?
As RSS becomes more popular this becomes an aspect of webdesign we can no longer ignore…
Email
Facebook
Netlog
Linkedin
Twitter
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
