digg

Friday Focus 06/27/08: Cute, Cheerful, Horizontal Scrolling Sites

June 27, 2008 By Sophia Lucero

This week’s picks are cute, cheerful, and all scroll horizontally. Let’s see how they pulled off this layout technique.

Designs of the Week

It seems that creating a horizontal-scrolling website need not require too much graphics, just a background that can stay fixed all throughout.

I like that the vines growing around each item in the portfolio are subtle rather than overpowering. It’s pretty common these days for illustrations, especially nature-related ones, to be simply staggering in appearance, but not here.

A full-on Flash site for a corporate brand that went for horizontal scrolling as its navigation. There’s a lot of stuff going on, and all the elements come together in a quirky way. Notice how the color pallette is similar to that of Dean Oakley’s site. Muted, “retro” colors are a good way to instantly change the look and feel of your site.

Social Media Weekly

Design – The Web Time Forgot
A global network of computers envisioned long before the Internet was invented.

Design – Wow! 10 Awesome Interactive Websites
What makes an interactive website stand out from the rest? This article may have the answers.

Programming – The Greatest Invention in Computer Science
What’s the most important invention in the field of Computer Science, apart from computers? You might be surprised.

Programming – Episode 4: Scaling Large Web Sites with Joe Stump, Lead Architect at DIGG
A podcast that discusses how the top 100 websites were built to scale.

No One Digs Us

August 8, 2007 By Devlounge

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the somewhat “coveted” digg-effect, it’s that it can either come in bunches, or not come at all. We had our fair share of ~~good~~ excellent articles that still have yet to receive the amount of traffic and recognition they deserve to have. I find it somewhat surprising, especially considering the amount of ~~shit~~ crappy, pointless things that are dugg frantically by the digg user population everyday.

Let’s take a look at what received a massive overload of traffic this week:

Digg in the 90’s – 8,618 Diggs
A photo – yes a photo – that someone put together showing what digg could have looked like in the 90’s, using tables and no css. The description says “very funny” but maybe it’s just me, because I didn’t find myself “ROFLING” after looking at this.

Girl’s boyfriend *accidentally* cooks her laptop in the oven – 5,157 Diggs
Another amazing story. I guess stupidity is more important than a well researched article for example. This girl lives in a high crime area, so she keeps her laptop in the oven. Yes, an oven. I hope you marked that down, as I know I did. Ever since I read this, I decided it be a great place to keep my wallet, house key, and birth certificate. If her laptop can survive when he boyfriend burns the shit out of it, I guess all my goods can too!

CRASH IE6 with one line of code – 2,613 Diggs
Check out this beauty. One piece of code gets IE6 to crash! That one really threw me for a loop. Really, I didn’t know that any code existed that wouldn’t crash IE / cause it display wrong / not display at all / etc. I thought that other people would realize the same thing, but apparently not, as close to 3,000 people found this interesting enough to make the frontpage of Digg.

What’s Better than Mouseovers? How About Scrollovers – 2,760 Diggs
Want a new way to annoy your visitors? Get scrollovers, the modern way to make your links do flips when you hover over them! My favorite part of all this is that a lot of the comments are all negative, but yet people still kept digging away. Bad publicity rules!

I’ve also noticed that many Digg users are deeply into lists. (But will this one get any love – probably not). Smashing Magazine, which very well could be called ListMAG, gets thousands of diggs on almost everything they publish, which very frequently, is a list of some sort. Not that I’m bashing any of their lists, as some of them are extremely helpful and many of them have included us, but a list is still just a list. We’ve listed some things too, but to no avail.

Then there are the digg users with a sense of humor. You know, the ones that laughed historically at that funny digg 90’s picture above. I’ve tried the “humor” route, and even that didn’t succeed all too well. I guess I won’t be doing stand up any time soon.

Occasionally, you get an article that shows the author really knows what their talking about. More often then not, people enjoy this, and show their appreciation. In our case, all of our authors (with the exception of myself probably) have a pretty damn good understanding of what they’re saying. Take, for example, and extremely large, full-length article series on building a WordPress plugin. With the amount of WordPress users out there, you probably would have figured this baby would have rocketed to the Digg top five in less than 24 hours. We came pretty close to reaching the top five alright, with a record shattering 4 diggs.

And, it appears that even when we take the serious / commentary type route, we still get shut out. It appears that digg really shows no love for us.

Is the World Over?

No, of course not. Digg is nothing more than a burst of traffic and a status symbol, and for any one of our posts to ever make the front page, it’d be like us playing the part of Ronald McDonald and robbing the crown right off the BK King’s head. It is a bit disappointing, considering if you found any of our best articles anywhere else, say Vitamin, they would have been crowned with front page status a long time ago. Instead, we walk down the red carpet alongside the other stars, but the reporters and paparazzi ignore us. We’re okay with that, because hopefully, sometime soon, we’ll be due to break out – and if this is the article that does it – well it’s about damn time.

What this post just did

If you just read this post, than I can congratulate myself for a mission accomplished. And more importantly, if this is the post that finally gets a lot of diggs, it just pointed out a few prime articles – that are all fairly new – for people to look into. For first time visitors, this is a key way to try and get them to stay, and “dig” (no pun intended) further into the site. I played it pretty sneakily (I don’t really think that’s a word), by dropping in in-site links mixed with some random sarcasm and a whole lot of pointlessness (another non-word?) to [hopefully] keep people interested and entertained. It contains a mixture of what everyone seems to love on digg – comedy, a partial list, lots of links, and even an image. That makes for one hell of a complete article, ehh? For regular readers, hopefully you didn’t find this post too annoying. Actually, I hope it got you to laugh (at least once would have been nice). All in all, the main goal of this commentary post was to make it to the front of digg, and allow our other, actual articles to enjoy the same benefits, and get the same kind of exposure they deserve to have.

Disclaimer: Digg doesn’t matter all that much too me ;).

The Digg Crew

April 2, 2007 By Devlounge

The much anticipated interview with various members of the Digg staff team is finally here! We thank the ever busy development team for taking the time to give us some responses.

Q: What’s the best part of working for a young company? Is it the same as an everyday job, or is it more fun to be part of such a highly successful site?

The Digg team is still relatively small, but we are completely focused on developing new features for our users..and yes, it’s a blast to work for a company like Digg because we have such a loyal following and close relationship with the community.

Q: On a hosting / tech specs related question, how do you estimate or determine the amount of bandwidth you’ll need each month to run such a high traffic site?

We grew fairly quickly right out of the gate, so before too long one server became two servers, myisam become innodb, we moved to Debian then we went to three servers, Apache 2.x, mysql master-slave replication, started using memcached, moved to PHP 5.x, hired a dba. And then the pace picked up yet again. We try to account for 1,000 requests per second at high points in the day for traffic.

The Digg Team

Q: How likely is it that you will be going strong and still run by the same people in the next 5 – 10 years? Is selling to another company something that you see in the near future?

We just recently closed a 2nd round of funding, and are completely devoted to focusing on growing the site internally into something that will continue to offer users the best social experience on the Net.

Digg, at its current design state (April 2007)

Q: What’s it like knowing that everything you do front-end wise is going to have both positive and negative feedback from the hardcore users? Do you take a lot of the feature and design suggestions to heart?

We always listen to the users, and check every email that comes to the feedback address. It might take some time for us to get everything that’s requested rolled out, but that’s because we want to do it right.

Q: How long will it be before the Digg API is released?

Soon, very soon.

Q: Are there any plans for allowing users to register as “owners” of a particular URL (similar to how a user can register as the owner of a blog at technorati) and to allow them to “adjust” poorly chosen (or sometimes blatantly false) titles and descriptions that link to their content?

We don’t have any plans along those lines at this time, but I would add that Digg currently provides users with a variety of tools to report inaccurate content on the site. With these tools, Digg empowers its more than one million users as editors of content on the site.

Q: Care to shed some light on any future plans and what we should be looking out for from Digg in the coming months / year?

Stay tuned. As always, Digg will continue to innovate and offer cool new features. Also, please come out to the Digg user celebration party at Mezzanine in San Francisco on April 19th.

Friday Focus #21

March 9, 2007 By The Team

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.

Friday Focus #19

February 23, 2007 By The Team

This week as Ronalfy and myself continue to split the duty of managing Friday Focus, Ronalfy will begin his own columns, allowing us to bring more depth to your favorite week-in-review article series. Let the fun begin!

These are the two new sections to the Friday Focus, and like always, we appreciate any feedback you may provide. Design Dilemma will ask the readers for feedback on a particular dilemma. And since we have many WordPress readers, Ronalfy begin showcasing a few WordPress plugins every week or so.