Episode 21
02/11/2007 | Filed under Podcast
On this show: The panel discusses the opportunities available because of APIs. We take a second look at the Blueprint CSS framework, example ways to optimise your website and discover how to create the ultimate sign up form.
The opportunities of APIs
This week’s guests are Jeremy Keith, Paul Hammond, Christian Heilmann and Drew McLellan. The topic of discussion focuses on some of the incredible opportunities offered by APIs, which is inspired by the an article in this months .net magazine entitled "the top 20 APIs for your site". Topics include:
- What exactly an APIs is
- What is currently happening in the world of APIs
- How to get started working with APIs
- Some of the best uses of APIs that are around
- The easiest and nicest APIs to work with
- What the panel has been doing with APIs
- What the future of APIs hold
- Google OpenSocial
News
A CSS framework
The CSS frameworks Blueprint has been around for a while and provides a way to speed up the creation of standards based websites. It provides a default print stylesheet, a browser reset stylesheet and basic typography. However, most significantly it offers the ability to quickly and easily create complex grid based layouts.
This week the guys over at Blue Favor have published an article extolling the virtues of Blueprint. Although their arguments of improved productivity are compelling Blueprint is not without its limitations. The grid system only work on fixed width sites and the nature of frameworks means it creates a lot of redundant code and un semantic markup. Despite the claims of the Blue Favor article, Blueprint seems to be more suited to rapid prototyping than final site production.
Creating the ultimate sign up form
At the Future of web design conference in London Ryan Singer spoke on designing forms for web applications. It was an extremely informative talk not just for those developing web applications but for anybody who ever has to build any type of signup form. The video of the Ryan’s talk is now live and is available at the Think Vitamin website.
13 simple steps to optimise your website
Earlier this year, Steve Souders from the Yahoo! Performance team published a series of front-end performance optimizations "rules" for optimising your website. These looked at issues like reducing HTTP requests, compressing css and javascript as well as many other techniques.
Stoyan Stefanov has recently fleshed out Yahoos advice in a detailed tutorial entitled Web Site Optimization: 13 Simple Steps. This tutorial looks at practical ways of implementing Steve Souders recommendations especially when developing with PHP and Apache.
Make my logo bigger cream
It can be frustrating being a designer. Clients often come back with the same ill considered requests again and again. Make the logo bigger, add more content, make it more punchy. Its enough to make anyone loss it and that is obviously what has happened to the creators of "make my logo bigger" cream. This superb video based website is incredibly funny and dripping with the kind of bitterness that only a brow beaten designer can generate. Great Friday afternoon viewing.
