CSSKarma

Has anyone noticed the lack of hopping in web development over the past month or so? The industry is usually so active that we can find new stories coming up in our RSS feeds every week. Maybe it’s the feeds I subscribe to, but the stories have been trickling in lately. Maybe we’re all off building our mobile web sites.

Here’s some things we can read up on in preparation of the new web.

Back in January I went up to Vancouver for the Web Directions North (WDN) conference (notes from day 1 - notes from day 2). It was a great conference and I meet some really cool people, learned a lot, and got to bring a lot of knowledge about where the web is headed (beyond the desktop). Last night I got an e-mail from the folks at WDN about the podcasts and slides from the conference and in the spirit of open source, I thought I’d share:

Hi there,

How time flies. Much more than 2 months since Web Directions North. But plenty of time to start putting all the things you learned in January in Vancouver into practice I hope.
The really good news is that we’ve been able to put together an excellent set of resources to refresh your memory. All the slides and podcasts from just about all of the sessions are now available at our resources site. The easiest way to see all of them at once is via the blog post below:

A few weeks ago, I decided to do a little research into Google Desktop. Which is basically a Google widget platform competing with Yahoo! widgets. After some exploration and dissecting Google Gadgets, this is what I came out with:

• The core of the application runs on 2 files
  • main.js
  • main.xml
• There are also some image and CSS options readily available, but the guts of it really run on JavaScript and XML
• Overall, it’s very straightforward, a little playing around with the sample gadgets will give you a good idea of what you can do (endless possibilites)

The file structure of some of the sample gadgets leaves a lot of room for improvement. Some seem to be built to handle very large, modular applications, but in most cases, they’re a little too modular (in my opinion).

Some of the more useful samples you can go through are:

• Animations
• ComboBox
• Countdown
• DragDrop
• HelloWorld
• HTMLDetailsView
• QueryAPI
• RSS
• XMLDetailsView
• XMLHttpRequest

There are others too, but these are the one’s I found most useful. So, lookin at those options, a being an RSS freak, I chose to customize the RSS gadget for CSSKarma

I wrote an article for SitePoint called “Tomorrow’s CSS Today: 8 Techniques They Don’t Want You To Know” that got published today. Let me know what you think:

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/tomorrows-css-today