cssvault - inspiring creativity

I have always been a huge fan of the minimalistic sign-up form. You know, the ones where all it takes to create an account is to provide 3 items: username, e-mail address, and password. Including the password confirmation box and that makes four. So, I was ecstatic when Luke Wroblewski’s article came out. Here he was telling us that there is actually a better approach which allows its visitors to plunge into the service without being stopped by a sign up and a login screen.

I tested one of the featured sites myself, Geni and behold, I never even saw a registration screen. I was converted from visitor to user in a snap.

Other featured sites included Jumpcut, TripIt, and Fidelity’s myPlan.

Now that is what you call thinking out of the box!

iBegin has just released iBox, a “lightweight, fast, and flexible” lightbox script.

It supports the following content types:

Images
It supports image overlaying and will automatically scale down the window if the browser’s viewpane is too small.

Documents
Displays linked documents in a similar fashion as Images.

Inline Containers
iBox can also display containers (e.g. hidden DIVs) within the same page.

YouTube Videos (Flash Video)
iBox’s architecture supports plugins. Images, Documents, and Inline Containers are all plugins, and YouTube Videos is provided as an example for developers to make their own plugins.

One notable aspect of iBox is its support for non-JavaScript capable browsers. It supports a target attribute which specifies the target document to be loaded, so that you can specify a different value for the HREF attribute. Very nifty.

Links:

• iBox Homepage
• iBox Support Forum
• iBegin Labs

jQuery happens to be my favorite JavaScript framework, so I was very happy when Noupe came up with a list of 50+ Amazing Jquery Examples. The article has “Part 1″ attached to it so expect to see more. The list ranges from useful to awesome to just cool, such as the following:

• Date Picker - a flexible unobtrusive calendar component for jQuery
• Style Switcher - allows your visitors to choose which stylesheet they would like to view your site with. It uses cookies so that when they return to the site or visit a different page they still get their chosen stylesheet
• Table Sorter - turns your standard HTML table with THEAD and TBODY tags into a sortable table without page refreshes
• Form Validation
• Image Galleries
• and more …

I have no idea where it gets its icons or how this site came to be but Iconfinder seems to be a very decent resource for quickly finding free icons.

My only annoyance is that it doesn’t show the license type right away and I have to click a button which brings up an AJAX-ed overlay which is sometimes delayed. It would be so much better if the license type were displayed beside the icon in the search results page. An alternative would be having an advanced search page where users can specify the license type, icon size, etc.

The site should also benefit from having an “icon submission” page where people can contribute though I can understand if the reason this hasn’t been built in yet is because submissions will need to be moderated, and that takes time especially with the amount of spam online forms receive nowadays. I know this for a fact, because 99% of site submissions and comments we receive here at CSS Vault are from spambots.

Alternatively you can check out this blog post on 31 sources of quality, free icons.

Funny weekend Dilbert strip

Seeing photos of the Meebo Mini just gets me excited about this wonderful little app. Check it out!

And they just launched Meebo Rooms a couple of months ago. Man, they just keep getting better and better!

Meebo

It’s about time. Social news ranker / aggregator Digg has gone live with its new design and it is looking SWEET. I personally like it and I think it’s a major improvement over the old design.

Old Digg.com:

New Digg.com:

My Cool Button is a web service that allows you to create nice looking web2.0 style buttons.

Mashable has come up with a good, solid compilation of 300 Wordpress plugins and themes. With an equally megalomaniac title such as WORDPRESS GOD (yes it’s in all CAPS) this is a good source of material for anyone trying to get into Wordpress, both newbie and experts alike.