“Though I have a tolerably good handle on e-commerce software, I’ve not written much of it myself. In this respect, I’m not one to know what’s going on under the hood at any given site: maybe there is a reason why something works the odd way it does. But I’ve observed one technique that has been nearly universal: the practice of refusing to allow spaces or dashes in credit card number entry fields…

Credit card numbers are always printed and read aloud in groups of (usually) four digits, and when verifying a number after entry (which involves looking back and forth between the card and the web form) one uses the spacing to resynchronize. If there were some security or integrity reason for disallowing these characters, I guess I’d buy it, but I’ve not found a single good reason for it. The consensus among those that I’ve spoken to is that it’s nothing but lazy, sloppy programming. I completely agree.”

The purpose of the Web Standards Design + Development group is to form a strong network of individuals who have taken the initiative to become craftsmen of their trade. Today it is a list of names, tomorrow it will be a force for good…

“Most designers would have heard of the term ‘CSS Frameworks’, for those who don’t know or aren’t sure, here is a brief description from: Wikipedia:

A CSS framework is a library that is meant to allow for easier, more standards-compliant styling of a webpage using the Cascading Style Sheets language. Just like programming and scripting language libraries, CSS frameworks package a number of ready-made options for designing and outlaying a webpage.

Sounds great doesn’t it, something that is going to make designing and developing a website that little bit easier. It will take away the repeating of the same old boring stuff and if you write your framework correctly you will be guaranteed your code will meet W3C recommendations. That will leave you plenty of time to design your site, the fun side of the job!”

“This is about how I spend 24 concentrated hours spread out over 4 days during Holidays to build the online service Wigitize.com. It is part of my ongoing learning process on how to run a successful web startup.

Even though I’m a super pimple-faced code-geek, I strive to be a creative entrepreneur who can utilize modern day tools and navigate the chaos to build cool stuff. What I tried to do for this project is use some new methods/tools out there to solve practical problems in my weakness area: design, frontend coding, system administration and SEO.

Purpose of this article is to show my thought process on the multidisciplinary aspects of this project. Also to invoke the discussion on how these things could be done much better (correct me!) and hopefully also to educate other entrepreneurial minded hackers.”

Congrats to the fine folks at Smashing — it seems like it’s been much longer than a year since the magazine launched, considering all the comprehensive roundups they’ve published. Anyway, your humble xBlog editor is happy to be participating in the anniversary festivities so be sure to check out Smashing every day this week.

Turn on the music, break out the champaign, get out the balloons and whistles, but — more importantly — keep track on what will be happening this week on Smashing Magazine.

World’s leading designers, developers and graphic designers will be celebrating with us. We’ll also have some giveaways for each and every one of you.

Be prepared. This week we’re going to smash you big time. Really.

UPDATES:
7 Sep: Smashing Freefont and Wordpress Theme (free downloads for all)
7 Sep: 170+ Expert Ideas From World’s Leading Developers (part two of the piece I contributed to)
6 Sep: 1st Anniversary Giveaway (48 free software packages, licenses, accounts and credit giveaways)
5 Sep: 50 Designers x 6 Questions (part one of the piece I contributed to)
4 Sep: 40+ Books For Professional Design & Development (free book giveaway)
3 Sep: Get Out The Balloons: Smashing’s 1st Anniversary (celebration announcement)

“Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your CSS development time. It gives you a solid CSS foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, and even a stylesheet for printing.”

“We look at a lot of Ajax applications, and we have seen a lot of trends over the last couple of years. In general we are maturing, but as complexity has gone up in Ajax applications we are seeing one scary trend. The first set of apps simply added some <script> that did some happy XMLHttpRequest dancing. Then we abstracted to libraries such as Dojo and Prototype. Then people tried to do the right thing and use unobtrusive JavaScript where we keep the HTMl structure separate from the code. We would all like to see more of this. Unfortunately, we are starting to see Ajax applications that look more like Flash web pages…” (Thanks SuccessForce!)

btw, you can see some work XPLANE has been doing for Salesforce over at the Successforce blog.

Reagarding software programming, it boils down to: Partitioning, Hierarchy and Independence.

“10 years from now what will we look back on as important to the web? That’s what we asked 16 top designers, developers and entrepreneurs… We asked them all this question:”

What’s one thing about today’s web (company, technology, movement, etc.) that you think we’ll look back on in 10 years and say ‘that was important’ or ‘that was really a turning point in the history of the web’?

“In an effort to increase developer productivity at Google, Steve tried to convince the company to adopt Rails (and consequently Ruby) as a programming language. When that fell on deaf ears (Google really does not want to increase the number of languages that must be supported by their infrastructure), Steve decided to do what any other frustrated programmer would do: he ported Rails to JavaScript. Line by line. In 6 months. Working 2000 hours. Steve is a coding stud.”

“Last Sunday I casually wrote a post about the most common pitfalls in photography. I had written the post a long time ago, but I never put it on this site. The story ended up on the front page of Digg, stayed there for nearly 12 hours and was picked up by a bunch of secondary sources, resulting in 100,000 Visitors within a day (most of them within the first 12 hours). Trying to keep my server up and alive, I learned a lot about what it takes to keep the server alive, hence I decided to slide a non photography related post in, hopefully giving everyone who finds themselves in a similar situation some points to consider.”

Ajax scripts demos and downloads from Florentin Sardan.

“One of the new terms on the horizon is Microformats (sometimes abbreviated µF or uF) - formats, which make it possible to create meta-content which can be not only read, but also understood by machines (which was the basic idea of Semantic Web, which is not Web 2.0). This post is supposed to give you an idea, what Microformats actually mean, which advantages they have and how you can use them to enrich your content and make it more visible and understandable for search engines.”

“On one of my web projects I’ve been working on, we needed to allow the user to edit some information on their profile page. I could have written an HTML form page and then written the php database updater, but why use such outdated interfaces? This is the era of AJAX, and you can’t deny it. AJAX is pretty sweet. I decided on using Flickr-like editing boxes to do the job. If you are not familiar with how flickr handles editing data, here’s a short summary.”

“Have you ever watched your status bar while you wait for a page to load and wondered why several files seem to be downloaded before you see anything at all on your screen? Eventually the page content displays, and then the images are slotted in. The files that keep you waiting are generally the CSS and Javascript files linked to from the ‘head’ section of the HTML document. Because these files determine how the page will be displayed, rendering is delayed until they are completely downloaded.”