Articles

What? Yeah sorry, dumb title.

Here’s my point: when websites offer awesome things that seemingly would reduce the amount of traffic they get, the cumulative effect is increasing traffic. …

A reader named Arjan recently emailed me telling me about a website that The Printliminator didn’t work on. They had traced it back to the fact that the site used a bunch of “overlays” with ridiculously high values for z-index. …

The background property is a major player in what makes the awesome CSS designs of today possible. There are just a few properties that make it up: background-color, background-image, background-position, background-repeat, and background-attachment. Very simple, very powerful. I have a …

Long comment threads on blog posts are a mixed blessing. It is great to have stirred up such great community discussion. But anything beyond, say, 20 comments is beginning to get beyond what anyone is willing to actually read. What …

<?php
function trunc($phrase, $max_words) {
   $phrase_array = explode(' ',$phrase);
   if(count($phrase_array) > $max_words && $max_words > 0)
      $phrase = implode(' ',array_slice($phrase_array, 0, $max_words)).'...';
   return $phrase;
}
?>

function limit_words($words, $limit, $append = ' …') {
       // Add 

function randRange(data) {
       var newTime = data[Math.floor(data.length * Math.random())];
       return newTime;
}

function toggleSomething() {
       var timeArray = new Array(200, 300, 150, 250, 2000, 3000, 1000, 1500);

       // do stuff, happens to use jQuery here (nothing else does)
       $("#box").toggleClass("visible");

       clearInterval(timer);
       

If you have multiple display ads of the same size in a block on your site, a good thing to do is randomize their position in the block. It’s more fair to the advertisers and the different layouts reduce ad …

I recently said that I thought the current “standard” pixel dimensions for ads are ridiculous. 728×90? 88 x 31? Wha? I have a new idea: ad sizes that make sense.

Let’s start with a basic building block. 125×125 is very …

1) Load jQuery and the Mouse Wheel plugin

Mouse Wheel plugin is here.

<script type='text/javascript' src='http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js?ver=1.3.2'></script>
<script type='text/javascript' src='/js/jquery.mousewheel.min.js'></script>

2) Attach mousewheel event to body

The “30” represents speed. preventDefault ensures the page won’t scroll down.

$(function() {

   $("body").mousewheel(function(event, 

This is from James Padolsey. Check out his article for a pure JavaScript technique as well.

(function($){
 
    $.fn.shuffle = function() {
 
        var allElems = this.get(),
            getRandom = function(max) {
                return Math.floor(Math.random() * max);
            },
            shuffled = $.map(allElems, function(){
                var 

This is an update to the first version of filtering blocks I did a while back. The idea is that you have a long list or large set of “blocks” on the page. Each block belongs to a certain group. …