Improve your jQuery — 25 excellent tips

For those of you that either use jQuery or are curious about it, TVI Design has compiled some great tips on how to develop the most efficient code.

All About Floats

Floats are often confusing for those starting out in CSS. To be honest, they can be confusing for anyone regardless of skill level. CSS Tricks has attempted to break down the use of floats to simple, easy-to-understand bits.

Adobe Browserlab

Most web folks know that you should always test your designs on multiple browsers and platforms, because quirky issues can sometimes occur, especially in Internet Explorer. Here is another online browser testing app that will keep you from having to jump from computer to computer in order to verify if site renders well for all users.

Thanks to Al Kirby, a designer working in University Relations; Prof. Dave Stanton in the College of Journalism and Communications; and Ken Schwencke, a UF journalism senior.

34 Amazing Tumblr Themes, Twitter could never look this good!!!

Thirty-four cool themes for Tumblr.

Typeface Anatomy and Glossary

A glossary of common type terminology.

101 High Quality CSS And XHTML Free Templates And Layouts

A ton of free (and beautiful) templates.

Twitter And (Not) Monetizing The Attention Economy

A piece from Business Week about how a lack of advertising is not smart for Twitter.

Service-Oriented Architecture: Using Our APIs Internally

In Stanton’s words: “NYTimes builds its site by using its own API instead of direct-fed from the CMS. Love this concept of ‘eating your own food.’ Great SxSW panel on this topic.”

On D.C. Streets, the Cellphone as Lifeline: Homeless People Turn to Technology to Track Assistance and Opportunities

An article on how essential some technologies have become.

Atlas: a visual IDE for desktop-like web apps

From the site: “With its Atlas IDE for building web apps in Cappuccino and Objective-J, 280North is set to make web app programming as easy as drag-and-drop. Ars talks with 280North’s Ross Boucher to get the skinny.”

20 Websites with Beautiful Typography

Typography, as demonstrated by the 20 sites listed by SixRevisions.com, can provide artistic value in the same way as an icon or other graphic.

45+ New jQuery Techniques For Good User Experience

If you’re a fan of jQuery as a means of improving site usability through progressive enhancement, then you’re going to love the new techniques provided by Smashing Magazine.

Google Analytics Maximized: Deeper Analysis, Higher ROI & You

We’ve all probably used Google Analytics to track and analyze users, but are we fully understanding and interpreting the numbers? Writer Avinash Kaushik has put together a list of nine items that can verify if you’re an Analytics Newbie or a Maximizer.

If you have suggestions for sites that would be of interest, submit them in the comments or send to webmaster@ufl.edu.

High Performance Web Sites lays the foundation for making web pages zip in your browser, and it turns out this has little to do with expensive hardware upgrades or server code rewrites. This quick book uncovers what really slows down pages with a peek into the gears of things we use every day: the browser, the HTTP protocol, and the caching mechanisms in both. Rather than bog us down with specs, Steve Souders lays out simple rules that let us take advantage of these findings immediately, and changes the way we think about web performance.

Sites like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Netflix are already following Souders’ lead, but these practices are accessible to all UF web workers. There’s already a wealth of free tools and guides to help us follow the rules and find where we’re not. YSlow for Firefox is one. My pet project, Minify, is another; it serves your Javascript and CSS in ways that automatically follow several of Souders’ guidelines. This book, Souders’ video presentations, and the Yahoo! Exceptional Performance site are all great places to dig into the topic.

So, if you’re interested in giving your sites a performance boost, borrow our copy of “High Performance Web Sites”.  Thanks, Steve!