del.icio.us needs no introduction, and if you still do not use delicious bookmarking service, there is something obviously missing in your life! Delicious is a famous social bookmarking site that has achieved rapid popularity and growth ever since it was being purchased by Yahoo Inc in 2005. Delicious is my all-time favorite bookmarking service. Many features have contributed to this, including the website’s simple interface, human-readable URL scheme, a novel domain name, a simple REST-like API, and RSS feeds for web syndication. Hence I was really particular about placing a delicious badge in my blog from the very beginning.

As part of my recent blog redesign I’ve searched many places for a nice looking delicious bookmark button which can also display the total bookmark count just like the tweetmeme button. I wanted a button that blends along with other bookmarking buttons such as twitter, digg, facebook etc. A significant amount of my time was spent on googling and browsing through the wordpress plugin directory, but I never found what I wanted.

So finally, I’ve decided to create my own wordpress plugin. After going through some beginner level tutorials on wordpress plugin development nuts and bolts, I have created what I exactly wanted. I am really really happy, that I have become the proud owner of a wordpress plugin
Read the rest of this entry »

I have been thinking about a complete redesign ever since the day my blog was officially launched. My previous design which was my first wordpress effort was released 6 months back.

and now, I’ve shaped something fresh.

It’s now your turn guys, please have a look at my new theme and lemme know your honest opinion about the new look and feel. If you hit upon any pages or section that are not working or looking weird, please lemme know right away. Still there are a couple of dead links (Portfolio, About), please bear with me I will make it live very soon. I never get a chance to test everything completely, so sharing it with you guys Share your review comments pls…

The DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) is a software development principle, which has been formulated by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas in their book The Pragmatic Programmer. The DRY code philosophy is stated as “Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.” A system’s knowledge is far broader than just its code. It refers to database schemas, test plans, the build system, even documentation. In simple words DRY principle is a software design theory that stresses the importance of not duplicating code.

Every software programmer these days uses a variety of design principles and design patterns in their day to day programming tasks. It helps them improve the quality, performance and maintainability of the software system by avoiding code redundancy.

DRY principle in CSS coding

Unlike software programming web design lacks formal principles or theories of its own. Knowing and understanding certain software principles can really benefit you as a web designer / developer. Here, by incorporating DRY principle in web design, especially in CSS coding can really enhance our web design experience.

Avoiding code duplication is one of the basic principles of CSS coding from the start. To write clean and optimized CSS code is the key to develop faster loading and less bandwidth-burning websites. In the case of a website with 50000 monthly hits, if you can save 5 KB by optimizing the CSS file, you will eventually save more than 2.5 GB bandwidth a year. The result can be really overwhelming for heavy traffic generating websites. Read the rest of this entry »