Web Design and Development Browser Addon: XRefresh
What XRefresh can help web designers and developers is to save time to refresh web browser antomatically every time once you make any source file modification. It’s simple but useful particularly for you that have two monitors where the IDE and the web browser runs on each. When you CTRL+S save source files, XRefresh will detect it and refresh a web page for you. XRefresh is a browser addon and designed for Firefox and Internet Explorer 6+ only, addictionally Firebug is required for Firefox users.
Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer 8 Comparison Chart
Latest Microsoft has created a web browser comparison chart called “Windows Internet Explorer 8: Get the facts” for Internet Explorer 8, Firefox and Chrome, but no Safari sorry. The chart is categorized by the following categories: security, privacy, ease of use, web standards, developer tools, reliability, customizability, compatibility, manageability and performance. And at each field Microsoft has also added their own internal comments on it that you should not miss out anyway. No doubt it’s a very old-school advertising skill but it doesn’t work for me. Take a look the browser comparison chart and let me know you thoughts on the comments please.
Analyse Your Website Color Contrast with CheckMyColours
CheckMyColours is a convenient handy online color tool that allows you to verify whether it’s sufficient contrast between the background color and font color to ensure better web standard accessibility. There is a detail information on the complete report includes foreground, background, contrast ratio, brightness difference and color difference. You only have to enter a url that you want to check and then the web application will make the verification based on the algorithm proposed by the World Wide Web Consortium.
Below is the the testing result of Blog Reign, how about yours? Have you checked the color contrast for your websites already?
Testing done on 422 elements
Luminosity Contrast Ratio: 3 failures
Brightness difference: 0 failures
Color difference: 6 failures
Monitor Your WordPress with WP Health System Plugin
WP Health System Plugin, designed by Germany coder Heiko Rabe, is a new WordPress plugin that display your internal hosting system states on the admin dashboard widget. There is total 4 menu tabs with information categorize by system, PHP, WordPress and database. It’s currently a pure information tool and cannot be modified. As the coder Heiko said, the upcoming version will have more options, front-end analysis and much more possible. The plugin is still quite new and not available on WordPress.org officially yet. Installation is very simple, no setting required. Download WP Health System Plugin and upload to your plugin directory. Once you enable the plugin, the WordPress Health System widget would be available on the dashboard immediately.
Update: WP Health System plugin finally was released on WordPress latest, you can click a look at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-system-health/
23 Awesome Free Magazine Style WordPress Themes
WordPress has become the most powerful CMS platform on the web and it’s not just the blogging application but also can be a publishing platform like online magazine and newspaper. WordPress theme designers are more willing to selling their high quality premium designed and magazine style theme nowadays. In this post we will present 23 quality designed magazine style WordPress theme for 2009. Whatever you are looking for a better theme for your site or just want to get inspiration for your upcoming design project, both cases benefit you to customize and design skill anyway. All the themes below is free to use in both personal and commercial projects. Don’t forget to bookmark the post for future reference.
Arras Theme
ψ Download § Live Demo
A theme designed for news or review sites with lots of customisable features. It comes with 5 different news layouts to customise your front page, and an integrated theme options page for you to adjust the theme.
Read the rest of this entry »