Month: August 2009

Smart suburb planning in NYC, 100 years ago

Forest Hills Gardens, a suburb of NYC, is a 100-year-old model of community planning.

I recently moved to New York City (Brooklyn, to be specific) and in an interesting twist came across a Slate magazine slideshow  (Forest Hills Gardens) via a tweet from one of my favourite Toronto-based publications, Spacing magazine. The article/photo essay details the principles enacted by turn of the 19th-century Forest Hills Gardens community, a suburb 20 minutes from Manhattan that is transit-oriented, walkable, and features mixed-use zoning and a variety of single-family dwellings, from attached to freestanding.

Continue reading “Smart suburb planning in NYC, 100 years ago”

Paragraph-level commenting for WordPress

Digress.it is a Wordpress plugin enabling threaded, paragraph-specific discussion on posts and pages

The team from the Institute for the Future of the Book team have announced the release of digress.it, a completely overhauled version of the old Commentpress theme for WordPress, which allowed paragraph-level commenting. Digress.it is a plugin which Continue reading “Paragraph-level commenting for WordPress”

Facebook uses browser-specific body classes

Use browser-specific body classes to avoid extra stylesheets or invalid CSS

Having recently worked on a website for which page load and performance was really important, I’ve found myself viewing the source code for more and more sites. Taking a look at Facebook recently revealed that they use browser-specific classes on the body element, so that if you’re browsing with Safari 4, you’ll see something like: Continue reading “Facebook uses browser-specific body classes”

HTML5 Canvas Experimentation

HTML5 canvas is sweet. Being stuck with IE6 for a few more years isn’t.

If you are in any way involved in the crafting of websites, you’ve probably already seen this HTML5 Canvas element experiment circulating the interwebs. If you haven’t, enjoy. Too bad most of us will have to wait till IE6 hits less than 1% market share before we can actually start using this stuff on mainstream websites.