Welcome to another edition of Friday Focus, now in it’s twenty-first week of wrapping up all the weekly happenings on the web (ok, not all, but some). Let’s get started.
Sites of the Week
Expression Engine (EE) recently launched a new design for the products site, I it looks very good. It’s a really great, streamlined designs composed of navy and light blues, and whites.
Virb, a social networking site from the creators of Purevolume (Unborn Media) also launched publicly this week. It’s simple design beats out Myspace, and what’s even better is the almost unlimited ways you can customize your profile using css and html.
And finally this week comes Carfreaks, an absolutely great looking car blog / magazine. Even on dark colors, the design works perfectly.
Digg Weekly
This week’s best according to AJ, picked from the top dugg articles over the past 7 days.
Design – What Can Pulp Fiction Teach You About Typography?
An amazing animation to an audio clip from “Pulp Fiction” that uses various fonts and text sizes to convey the meanings behind the words. I thought this was very, very cool.
Programming – How to Create Sliding, Collapsible Div
An article outlining the steps to create a sliding, collapsible div with javascript and css. Includes step by step instructions.
This week’s up and coming according to Ronalfy from Digg.
Design – Web 2.0 Tutorials Round Up
Smashing Magazine does it again with a nice list of Web 2.0 tutorials.
Programming – Include Flash in web pages without “Click to activate this control”
Unobtrusive Flash Objects (UFO) v3.20 is a neat little tool that allows you to include a flash object in Internet Explorer without the user having to click to activate the control. I personally use an alternate solution that works great as well.
Design Dilemma
The purpose of Design Dilemma is to post one dilemma a week and allow the readers to voice their suggestions and/or opinions. If you have your own dilemma, please send me yours at ronalfy+devlounge@gmail.com.
Congratulations. You’re a freelancer and you’ve been hired by a company to redesign its website and input the old content into a new content management system. There’s only one minor problem: there are over a thousand static html pages and all of them contain tag soup. What would be your approach for stripping out the content and inputting everything into the CMS?
As a sidenote, nobody responded to last week’s design dilemma. I assure you that this dilemma has a solution. If you would like to know my approach, please express your interest in the comments. The solution is fairly involved, so I would have to write a tutorial for it.
WordPress Plugin Spotlight
The first plugin spotlighted is called MoveComments. When a user leaves a comment on an old post, or the wrong post, it is not very simple to move comments. The MoveComments plugin allows you to easily move comments from one post to another. The plugin is in an early version and I am looking forward to seeing what the author will do with the plugin on later versions.
The second plugin spotlighted is called Ajaxified Expand Post Now. If you use the “more” tag when you publish posts, this plugin will allow a user to see the rest of the content (via AJAX) by clicking on the “more” link. This plugin is also in an early version and is in need of an admin panel. To install and configure this plugin, you will need to be fairly comfortable with PHP.
