Book Review: Don't Make Me Think

The second edition of Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug which came out in 2005 is a short 200-page stylish book on Web Usability. It has glowing reviews on Amazon. Jeff Atwood (I'm a long-time follower of his blog and I discovered "Code Complete" after reading through some of this articles) is a big fan of this book.Going by the reviews, I picked this book thinking it is a classic on this topic. I found that one-fourth of the short book was just...

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HOW TO extract subtitles from a YouTube video

Subtitles within videos help non-native speakers clearly understand & follow what's going on while the video is playing. If you wish to take notes from a YouTube video, you will find this tip for extracting the subtitles from a YouTube video (that has subtitles) to be a time-saver. I have adapted this tip from an answer to a related question on the Quora website -Open the video page in Chrome browser (or any other browser that provides HTTP debugging/Developer Tools) and pause the videoRight click anywhere on the page, and click on Inspect...

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HOW TO show expanded form of shortened URL within a tweet using Twitter API

The Twitter micro-blogging service converts URLs within a tweet to a shortened form using its t.co domain to conserve the number of characters so that users can pack more into a 140-character limited tweet.Some evil guys misuse this service to cloak hyperlinks to shady websites. An unsuspecting reader may fall into the trap if the tweet is crafted to make the user click the link.While security is one reason why a developer may want to show the expanded form of the URL while displaying a customized view of a Twitter stream, there are other benefits...

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HOW TO convert a RSS feeed to a JSONP feed on the fly

JavaScript cannot be used to load a feed if the domain from which the feed is originating is not the same as the site where it is going to be consumed programmatically. That's were a JSONP feed can be helpful.JSONP does not use XMLHttpRequest (XHR). It uses the script element so data can be pulled into any site, from any site. The purpose is to circumvent the same-source policy limitations of XMLHttpRequest.Google provides a REST-based feed conversion API, Google Feed API, to convert a RSS feeed to a JSONP feed on the fly. Here's a code sample...

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Dig deeper into jQuery with "jQuery Succinctly"

jQuery Succinctly by Cody Lindley is an ebook that Syncfusion is offering as a free download (requires registration).I've been working with jQuery on & off for the last four years and this book made me realize there is so much more to my favorite JavaScript library. The book lives up to the title as it covers the practical aspects of jQuery  in a straight-forward manner in just 100 pages with 100 code samples. This is a gem of a book - the...

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Getting Started with Windows 8

Windows 8 is reportedly due to arrive by this year-end. For those who can't wait to try out Microsoft's newest "reimagined" Windows operating system, there are preview releases - the latest one is called Windows Release Preview.If you don't have spare hardware to experiment with the new OS, you can try out Windows Release Preview with free Virtual Machine software like VMWare Player or Oracle's VirtualBox. Unlike VirtualBox, VMWare Player requires...

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