Vagabond’s Caravan

I am in love with CSS, RSS and AJAX! They’re so cool and I was so excited when I realised how much I can do with them! Although I heard, and had been using them for quite some time, I never really go much into them.

CSS is called cascading stylesheet, which allowed a programmer to do practically anything to the visual effect of a website with it. CSS Zen Garden is my favourite css showcase website. It is a website that demonstration of what can be accomplished visually through CSS-based design. You can select any style sheet from the list(on the right, started with Dazzling Beauty to load it). All designs used the same HTML file, which means that they shared the same contents. Each CSS design were submitted by different designers, and they’re sure to be among the top of those submitted. My favourites would be LuGoZee, The Diary and Organica Creativa.

Furthermore, I found CSS Library, a new CSS-only section of Dynamic Drive, the popular free DHTML script site, when I was looking for simple CSS for my Chinese Web Designing Competition. The new CSS Library is very cool, and although the collection of CSS available is still very limited,but it sure has some real good and useful CSS. Me and my group members had decided to implement some of their CSS, included the glossy vertical menu(Love it like hell!) and CSS Pop-Up Image Viewer(just the one we need!).

Well, now about RSS, Real Simple Syndication. RSS is pretty familiar to me since last year, but I never tried it. What I know is they’re just some sort of syndication, which automatically fetch new information from websites and blogs. RSS is usually used when there’s a constant updates of new information, like News websites and blogs. Well, since I am not such a busy person, until I can’t even visit those websites or blogs manually to read, I put it off.

But as the number of my blogs grow, I realised that I need to find a way to put them together, so people can see if they’re updated or not, without having to go to each sites one by one. I did some RSS Feed by using a WordPress plugins, and succeed in getting the titles of my latest posts from all my blogs. So you guys can now see if there’s any new posts in my other blogs by going to this page.

Furthermore, RSS Feed allow you to create automated sites, which can fetch new information and news from other sites. Hmmm, sounds like some great money making tools huh? Hehe.

Next, AJAX! I know you people would say it’s the detergent, whatever. AJAX is short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It is a Web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This is meant to increase the web page’s interactivity, speed, and usability. Gmail is an example of an AJAX-ed web application.

I love AJAX and I had implemeted two plugins which used the AJAX technology. One is the Live ShoutBox, which run ‘LIVE’, as it is AJAX-ed, and the Inline AJAX Comment Plugin(there’s a new ’show comment(s)’ option below each posts with comment(s) on it. Click it and watch the magic play:)).