BuzzWeb

'Real' Shadows

A couple of weeks ago I was looking through some really old bookmarks when I came across this. The visuals are honestly quite terrible, but bear with me – because the technology is really quite cool. Basically, Markus Svilans has developed a way to pretty accurately emulate shadows. In the example he’s used an eagle, which you can drag around a sun watching the shadow move accordingly (whilst the eagle breaks pretty much every law of science). All done with JavaScript and CSS.

Although the example may be a little bit visually, er... un-stimulating – I can’t help but wonder what we could use this better on? Some kind of time-of-day specific page header? Developers are going to start hating me – I can feel it.

See the original here, or the Mozilla (slightly better) version here

Things I HAVE to try!

More often than not, when I see something cool – I end up having to code it. I find that it’s the best way to understand the constraints of these things. Then when I come to design something, I know exactly what I can and can’t do (without upsetting the real developers!!). So here are some things to get your teeth into that you might want to try and suggest to your client on your next site;

Coda Bubble
You must have seen it on Panic.com? It’s amazing, I love it. Use it!
http://jqueryfordesigners.com/demo/coda-bubble.html

AJAX Instant Edit (CMS)
A good way to edit existing content in a CMS-stylee. Not sure about cross browser support though.
http://www.yvoschaap.com/instantedit/

Kwix - now for jQuery!
This was initially done within the moo:fx framework, but now it’s in the easy-to-understand jQuery
http://www.jeremymartin.name/examples/kwicks.php?example=4

Starbox (for Prototype)
Obviously everyone does star rating now... nut here are a few variations on a theme.
http://www.nickstakenburg.com/projects/starbox/

InnerFade with jQuery
A great way to present multiple images within an area. I used it recently for random quotes too.
http://medienfreunde.com/lab/innerfade/

Crazy Egg (the results)

The results from this page

Well it's been a day already since I reported on Crazy Egg, and the results are in! Shortly after I posted on the 'weblication' that allows you to view 'HotSpots' of user activity - I installed the code on my portfolio site. Since then, I've received nearly a thousand visits, and wanted to show you the results.

Click on the thumbnail (right) to see the results in a bigger image. I'm absolutely blown away by this, it's an amazing tool which enables me to review the content of my sites based on just clicks, instead of click through's (like G's Analytics). I'm also visually able to distinguish where visitors are likely to go after this page, what content is working, and what's not. I know GetClicky does this, but I can actually see this!

Go to CrazyEgg and get a free trial of this. Well worth it!

Update: the CrazyEgg javascript code sygnificantly slows down your page loading time, and may interfere with functionality.