Here with are with another month drawing to a close. We are just 5 weeks away from the first year anniversary of Friday Focus, so feel free to start putting together your gifts for us now. I’m not sure what exactly the 52nd week of Friday Focus will actually hold, but hopefully I can get a whole bunch of things to stuff the focus with when the time comes. In another quick announcement, I apologize for not getting out the Wordpress 2.3 sum up article out right away like I had promised. The week became a lot more busier than I expected it to be. Things are coming, just be patient.
Enough talk, let’s kick off the weekend with a new Friday Focus.
Sites of the Week
Leading off is Groop, a really simplistic, clean design that utilizes flash. They’ve done some really cool work, including stuff for Live Earth, so check them out.
Next is ShawnBlanc.net, a good example of a dark design that is simplistic, uncluttered, and eye catching.
And finally we have the updated version of Hydra Studio. They’ve done some really clean work, including designs for the bands The Almost, Underoath, and Mae among others.
Digg Weekly
Design - 100 (Legal) Sources for Free Stock Images
From the digg description: Staying legal as a designer or webmaster means you’ll have to either create your own images or buy them from stock sites. Fortunately, there are a number of sources for free images, and we’ve collected them here. So read on for 100 sources where you can find free stock images: and don’t worry — they’re all legal!
Programming - 7 Reasons I Switched Back to PHP
Everyone thinks that Rails is the future of coding. It is already in use on tons of web applications, but this article just may make you reconsider.
Lots of people have been waiting all day for this, and now Wordpress 2.3 is finally out. You can grab it here. I’m going to be making the upgrade now, so if you run into anything not functioning over the next little while, that’d be why. Expect a full 2.3 report tomorrow afternoon.
Here we are with the forty-sixth time I’ve said this. It’s Friday Focus time. Welcome to the weekend everyone.
Sites of the Week
Kicking off the 46th edition of Friday Focus is Cornerstone Fellowship. This is just another great example of religious sites being designing and built right. Some of the nicest designs are now being found in places you wouldn’t expect.
Second this week is Mint (no, not that mint). Mint, the money management application that has been hyped for a long time finally went live, and although I have yet to actually try out the application (you kind of need to have money in order to use it), mostly everything I’ve heard and seen about it has been all positive.
And wrapping things up is Cottyn. The Virb/Purevolume crew is at is again producing some cool (and funny) tee’s. Right now there are only three, but I’m sure you can expect a lot more in the future.
Digg Weekly
Design - Advanced Glow Effects in Photoshop
Description from Digg: In this tutorial we’re going to create some really sharp looking glow effects using a combination of layer styles, the pen tool and colour blending. The end effect is quite stunning and hopefully you’ll pick up some tips you didn’t know before.
Programming - Couldn’t find anything amazing or really standout, so we’ll leave this as is this week, unless someone has some suggestions.
Summing Up a Big Week
This was a very big week in terms of traffic for us. It was very nice to see, especially because it seemed like things were slowly beginning to die here as days went on and on and I didn’t write anything new. The font list post really woke things up and will hopefully create a nice spark from here on out. I have an interview with Keegan Jones that should be hitting your screens and feedreaders pretty damn soon, so be on the lookout. Over and out.
With Wordpress 2.3 about to be released, I had to update some code I used to correspond with the new taxonomy schema.
For another blog I run, I have a feature where I show only the categories that have recently been posted against. For example, this post is being published under the category 'Sidenotes', so sidenotes would be the first category shown on a list.
For the new schema, I had to write a new query. I thought I'd share my query in case others find it useful or want a real example of a query using the new taxonomy schema.
PHP:
-
<?php
-
function getLastFiveCats() {
-
-
$query = "select t.term_id as term_ids, t.name, t.slug, max(p.ID) as id, tx.count from $wpdb->terms t, $wpdb->term_taxonomy tx, $wpdb->term_relationships tr, $wpdb->posts p where t.term_id = tx.term_id and tx.parent != 0 and tx.taxonomy = 'category' and tr.term_taxonomy_id = t.term_id and tr.object_id = id and p.post_status = 'publish' group by term_ids order by id desc limit 5";
-
$results = $wpdb->get_results($query);
-
foreach ($results as $result) {
-
$catPermalink = get_bloginfo('url') . "/category/" . $result->slug . "/";
-
?>
-
<li><a href=
'<?php echo $catPermalink ?>'><?php
echo $result->
name ?></a></li>
-
<?php
-
}
-
}
-
?>
Please note that this query only searches for non-parent categories, but this can be changed to search for all categories pretty easily by removing: tx.parent != 0
Here's another query that gets all the categories and orders them by when they were last updated:
PHP:
-
<?php
-
function getAllCats() {
-
-
$query = "select t.term_id as term_ids, t.name, t.slug, max(p.ID) as id, tx.count from $wpdb->terms t, $wpdb->term_taxonomy tx, $wpdb->term_relationships tr, $wpdb->posts p where t.term_id = tx.term_id and tx.taxonomy = 'category' and tr.term_taxonomy_id = t.term_id and tr.object_id = id and p.post_status = 'publish' group by term_ids order by id desc";
-
$results = $wpdb->get_results($query);
-
foreach ($results as $result) {
-
$catPermalink = get_bloginfo('url') . "/category/" . $result->slug . "/";
-
?>
-
<li><a href=
'<?php echo $catPermalink ?>'><?php
echo $result->
name ?></a></li>
-
<?php
-
}
-
}
-
?>
Lists definitely seem to be all the rage. It's been less than 24 hours since the 30 Fonts You Want To Have list went up, and after just checking Mint it appears like it is going to be a record setting day. With just under 10 hours to go before the books close on today's unique visitors, we are already at 4,000+. I'm excited to see what the day brings in at the end of the all, and what effect, if any, it will have on subscriber counts and comments / reads on other articles.
Everyone has their own personal preferences when it comes to deciding what fonts to you one their designs. Depending on the project type and what the design is for, certain fonts make more sense in certain situations than in others. There are millions of fonts out there - not one list could ever list them all. Some are available for free, and others will cost you a little bit of dinero, but in the end, the larger font collection you have the better off you'll be in ensuring you have the perfect font to meet your clients needs.
We've compiled our own list of 30 fonts we think you should have if you don't already have them. The list is a mix of some popular ones as listed in a "Favorite Font" thread over at Mintpages, and some of them I have added myself because I happen to be a big fan on them. Each font also has a url listed where you can grab it from (damn we make it convenient for you huh?) Enjoy!
The List
1. Rockwell [Paid]
2. Segoe UI [Free]
3. Helvetica [Paid]
4. Calibri [Paid]
5. TW Cen MT [Paid]
6. Bello [Paid]
7. Myriad [Paid]
8. Century Gothic [Paid]
9. Fat Love [Free]
10. Decker [Free]
11. Non Serif [Free]
12. Interstate [Paid]
13. Lane Narrow [Free]
14. News Gothic MT [Paid]
15. SF Arbocrest [Free]
16. SoopaFresh [Free]
17. Ubahn [Free]
18. Vrinda [Paid]
19. Babel Sans [Free]
20. Bitstream Vera Serif [Free]
21. Bold Bold [Free]
22. Franklin Gothic Demi [Paid]
23. GoodOT [Paid]
24. Din Regular [Paid]
25. Sansa 2 [Paid]
26. Marcelle [Free]
27. Avant Que [Free]
28. Stag [Paid]
29. Apex New [Paid]
30. Arrival [Paid]
Your Thoughts?
What fonts would you like to see on the list? Obviously like I said, we can't list them all. I'm sure I missed plenty of great ones. These are just a few that come to my mind. Feel free to use the comments to let us know what you thought of this list - what shouldn't have been on it and what should have.
Another weekend is upon us. This was a fairly busy week in terms of site changes around here, most of which have been received fairly well. Now that school is beginning to calm down and settle back into the usual "pattern" I can expect to be in until June, I should hopefully be able to get writing again over the weekend or at the beginning part of next week. Watch for it, because it is about damn time I write something other than these focuses!
Anyways, enjoy the weekend everyone!
Sites of the Week
This week was rather scare, and there wasn't too much of anything that really caught my eye this week. One site that I did stumble upon and found pretty nice was Cabedge. Cabedge is a Nashville based web design and development studio. Besides offering design and development help, they also offer hosting to any of their clients.
Design Float / Digg Weekly
Design - 30 Secret Photoshop Shortcuts
A collection of Photoshop shortcuts aimed at boosting your productivity. From WebDesignerWall.
Programming - Creating Google Custom Search Engines
A custom search engine (CSE) tells Google which sites to search and which to avoid when dealing with a search query. This makes it much easier to get specific, guided answers to questions about a specific subject area. If you create a CSE you can use your expertise in a subject to control where Google looks for information about that topic.
Just thought I'd put up a quick note before everyone else starts posting about it. The latest beta build of Wordpress 2.3 is now available for download. Everything I've tested so far with 2.3 has been working superbly, and I'm really excited to see 2.3 go final and get it in use here on Devlounge. The first release candidate is due out next Monday (continuing with their new released every Monday pattern that's been going on over the last few weeks), so we sure to watch for it. You can grab the beta here if you are interested.
Round two of the homepage updates have now been completed. You'll notice that the homepage sidebar is now a little bit more populated than before. Header images have been added for each section, to give some visual identification to each section. You'll now find the four latest news briefs and side notes in the sidebar as well. Lots to click on, but it is all leading on into the site. That's good, right?
I was recently on the hunt for some social bookmarking icons. I found a couple of resources, but all of the icons were for a particular background color. And then I stumbled upon a resource with some icons with the beloved transparent background.
Both icon sets are from the same site: http://www.vikiworks.com/
For the code to implement some of the icons, please check out the Life Rocks! 2.0 icon page.
