Here are some fun things I found on the web lately. As always, there is a little bit of everything for everyone and please enjoy.

 This is a video that I love a lot. It is a short video documentary with everyday images of Mexico City. You can see that the place where I live is very beautiful and totally busy. No donkeys, no sarapes, no guns, no fear and no stereotypes. The video is by AZOTEA POST.

I have two other videos, these are slightly creepy but if I could watch them, then you can watch them too.

That was creepy right?

To finish this post off, here are some few lovely links:

• Swatches from the China Glaze Hunger Games collection. I totally need some of these polishes, specially since I got confirmation that the collection will be available in Mexico by March.
• Andy from StyleScrapbook just showed us her new StyleScrapbook for Kipling camera bag collection and I totally love it! I can’t wait until it hit stores and hopefully, I will be able to buy the one that I want here :D.
• This 15 year old from Brazil makes the best thematic nail art I have ever seen!
• If you are looking for web friendly fonts to use in your website, try using Google Web Fonts. There are over 400 free fonts and the setup is super easy! Don’t over do it though :/.
• Krissy has one of the most beautiful blogs, Shimmer Like Gold, I’ve ever seen and she just opened a second blog called k. I can’t wait to see what she does with it.
• Apart from doing #febphotoaday, I’m also doing #febphotoskill. I hope I can finish both challenges, here’s the image in case you want to do it too.

For more info & photo credit, go to instafa.me.

Have a nice weekend!

The other day, my dear business partner showed me an incredible food blog (she’s the one who got me into baking) and besides it having a gorgeous design, it loaded extremely fast despite it having really big, high quality pictures.

I immediately did what I always do and decided to check out the source code to see if I could find out how her images had that nice fade in effect. Enter the jQuery Lazy Load plugin!

When you have a web page, all the images load at the same time when you open it. If you have big images, high quality ones or just images that have big file sizes, then the loading time can take a loooong while. Most of the users don’t like that and they will say that your website is too slow and things like that, that you sure don’t want to hear and might not know how to fix without compromising the quality of your images or your beautiful blog design.

I did a little diagram to explain how this little piece of code works.

As I said before, usually the web page will load every single image that it can find, even if you can’t really see it at first glance. In reality, when you open a website you can only see whatever it fits inside your browser window. This area of visibility is called a view port.

The jQuery Lazy Load plugin only loads the images that are localized inside this view port and as you are scrolling down, it loads the rest. It has some cool effects like fade-ins and things like that. I love how images just appear as I scroll down and it is very smooth about it.

I’ve been using this plugin for at least 2 weeks now and I don’t regret doing it. My website is much faster and I can take care of taking better quality pictures without compromising my reader’s time. I totally recommend this for blogs that are very image heavy.

Ok, I’m sold. How do I install it?

For self-hosted WordPress blogs, the only thing you have to do is install the jQuery lazy load plugin from your dashboard and activate it. I should note that if you have a LightBox plugin installed, it will not work.

For Blogger, the process is a little bit trickier since you have to edit your template file. Simply go to the Template tab on your dashboard, then click Edit HTML, say continue to the warning. Now, using Ctrl (Command) + F search for “</head>”. Above that paste this code:

<script charset='utf-8' src='http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='https://sites.google.com/site/addinblogger/how-to-add-in-blogger/lazyload-min.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script charset='utf-8' type='text/javascript'>
$(function() {
$(&quot;img&quot;).lazyload({placeholder : &quot;https://sites.google.com/site/addinblogger/how-to-add-in-blogger/grey.gif&quot;,threshold : 200});
});
</script>

Click save and you will be done. This code was found here.

If you try it, please let me know how it worked out for you and also tell me if you would like more posts like this one.

Kisses!

Tomorrow is the SOPA Blackout day, while major sites like Facebook and Twitter will work as usual others like Reddit and Wikipedia will be going dark. Here is a video explaining this law and how it affects the internet. 

You might think that SOPA is only in the US and that it won’t affect you that much, the fact is that these laws can be found in any country and if they start getting approved without anyone doing anything, the internet will change forever. SOPA and PIPA may only affect the United States but there are other laws that are trying to become international treaties such as ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) which is trying to get many countries on board with IP monitoring, Hard Drive inspection in airports and many other terrible things. In Mexico we have senators trying to pass an IP monitoring law. Things like SOPA, ACTA, PIPA and Protect IP can happen everywhere and it’s up to all of us to do something about it.

•  I’ve been watching My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and I found a pony generator online! It is amazing because you don’t have to learn how to draw to make your own pony and there are so many combinations possible, it also lets you export your pony and that is awesome!
• Sometimes when a webpage doesn’t work it lets you know with an error number (404, 500, 503), here is a list of these errors explained with cats.
• Advice to refining your own style by Alicia from Sea of Ghosts. I’ve been following her for a really LONG time and I just love how true she is to herself and her style.
• I’m not a HUGE Star Wars fan but this Stormtrooper cake is beyond awesome!
• For new and old coders, a guide to Object Oriented CSS is fundamental. I didn’t know how you could apply several classes to an element and that can cut your work and file size to half or more.
• One of my personal goals this year is to get fit. I let myself go the last two months and I went up 6 kilos (ugh!), so I want to go back to my usual weight and stay there, this fitness guide from Zen Habits helped me realize that I don’t have to kill myself trying, instead I’m going to ease into it one step at a time.

Kisses!

From where I stand there are only two main reasons why people use that crap:

1. They are at work and their work computer ONLY has IE installed
2. They are browsing a website that works ONLY in IE

Any other reason is not good enough to justify any IE use… EVER!

Why is IE so annoying?

IE as a browser that you use when you don’t do any web programming might not seem that bad. After all, it’s already there when you get your Windows computer (I refuse to call them PCs) and you don’t have to download everything else and all that stuff.

But then, you start browsing and you notice that sometimes things don’t look right. Some things are just off in some webpages and you are not sure why. Some things don’t work or look like the website had a tornado go over it because things are just scattered all over the place. No, it is not your fault, at least not entirely. It is IE’s fault.

I don’t really know why, but the folks at Microsoft like to make everything complicated. They come up with their own web standards and they like to do everything differently! Of course, this only results in headaches for both the developers and the users.

IE likes to measure things different from the other browsers, it doesn’t like layers or PNG images. IE doesn’t like rounded corners or shadows in your website. IE likes to be a unique butterfly and it fails at it!

Sure, there are many solutions to making websites look like they should on IE. What many don’t know is that those solutions are really hard to implement because IE refuses to do as told.

Personally, I don’t like IE. I think it is an ugly browser, it suggests that you uninstall add-ons (that you probably weren’t aware were installed) so that you can have a better experience, it is not as safe as others and it doesn’t work!

As a web developer, I have to make specific CSS for each and every one of IE’s current versions, except for IE 6 (I refuse to support that thing), add jQuery plugins to make things look right ONLY for IE and then cross my fingers and pray that my website won’t explode from jQuery overload.

To wrap this rant up, I just want to say that if you use IE, at least try to upgrade it and if you can definitely look into installing Firefox, Chrome, Safari or Opera (mainly, any of the modern browsers).

Out of curiosity, which is your favourite browser?

Kisses!

The new Facebook Timeline!

The Timeline is just a fancy name for your new profile. It will be totally different and will let you see all your activity on Facebook since you started using it. I like it a lot, it is very well-organized and I can keep better track of everything that is in there.

Here is how mine looks like:

My Facebook Timeline, with a lot of things blurred to keep the creeps at bay

The large picture is called a “cover” for your profile, then you have your profile picture with your basic info. On the right side you have controls to update your profile and see all your activity. The activity log can only be seen by you.

As you can see, next to the cover image there is an actual time line, you can scroll through it and it will show you all the things you did on a certain date. It is actually really cool and creepy.

This new feature is reserved for developers only but it will roll out on September 30th. Be ready to choose your cover images!

As for the other changes, I’m finding that having my groups and fan pages listed on the same column is very useful. The lists feature is too reminiscent of Google+, but I like that I can hide information from certain people without having to pick and choose from my huge list of friends. The activity feed on the right side is a very quick way to see what everyone is doing.

I don’t like the new Top Stories/Recent Stories thing-y. I liked to be able to choose which ones I wanted to look at and now I can’t do that (or I still don’t know how).

How are you coping with the new Facebook Layout?

Kisses!