2012年4月30日 星期一
Goodbye -9999px: A New CSS Image Replacement Technique
The -9999px image replacement technique has been popular for the best part of a decade. To replace a text element with an image, you use the following code:
- <h1>This Text is Replaced</h1>
- <style>
- h1
- {
- background: url("myimage") 0 0 no-repeat;
- text-indent: -9999px;
- }
- </style>
<h1>This Text is Replaced</h1> <style> h1 { background: url("myimage") 0 0 no-repeat; text-indent: -9999px; } </style>The element’s background is displayed and it’s text is moved off-screen so it doesn’t get in the way. Simple and effective. It was often adopted to show graphical titles — that’s rarely necessary now we have webfonts, but you’ll still find it used all over the web.
Until now.
A new technique has been discovered by Scott Kellum and promoted at Zeldman.com:
- #replace
- {
- text-indent: 100%;
- white-space: nowrap;
- overflow: hidden;
- }
#replace { text-indent: 100%; white-space: nowrap; overflow: hidden; }The code indents the text beyond the width of its container but it won’t wrap and the overflow is hidden.
While it’s a little longer and more difficult to remember, performance can be improved because the browser’s no longer drawing a 9,999px box behind the scenes. It will also prevent the weird left-extended outlines you’ll see around links using hidden text.
I haven’t been able to discover any downsides — only than I wish I’d discovered it first. Have you adopted the technique? Have you experienced any issues?
via 
2012年4月29日 星期日
2012年4月26日 星期四
If You Think “Social” Means Viral, You’ve Got It All Wrong via Digital Quarters
This article was published as a guest post at AllThingsD, and is republished here for Digital Quarters readers.
A few weeks ago, Forbes Chief Product Officer Lewis DVorkin and I sparred at the Rebooting Media Live event in New York. With an audience of top digital and media executives, I shared the results my company is getting from social — that social users are more than 2.5 times as valuable as users from search. Lewis surprised me by saying that when it comes to behavior on the Forbes Web site, he is seeing the opposite. more
2012年4月20日 星期五
2012年4月18日 星期三
2012年4月17日 星期二
Startups Uncensored #25 - 10 Strategies for Startup Success with Jason Nazar - YouTube
Outstanding advice! Listen to the ten greatest challenges entrepreneurs face, and how to master them:
1. Ideas: The Entrepreneur's Dilemma
2. Pitching to Investors
3. Building a Team
4. Getting Customers
5. Free Marketing Tools
6. Growing and Tracking Online Revenue
7. Better Business Development
8. Making Strategic Decisions
9. Managing a Board
10. Finding Balance
2012年4月15日 星期日
2012年4月14日 星期六
2012年4月13日 星期五
路易斯･范･安：大型在线共同创作
路易斯･范･安带来了新一代的验证码，通过真人回复来将扫描书籍电子化。他琢磨这种无数个在线合作还能为我们带来什么更大的益处。他在 TEDxCMU介绍了他的新项目，叫Duolingo。这个项目能帮助成千上万的人学习外语，同时又把网页内容进行快速准确地翻译，而这一切都是免费的。
Luis von Ahn builds systems that combine humans and computers to solve large-scale problems that neither can solve alone.
2012年4月12日 星期四
2012年4月9日 星期一
The Golden Age For Startups? (VIDEO) - Forbes
Is the best time ever to be starting a new company in Silicon Valley?
Late last month, I moderated an all-star panel for the Churchill Club on that topic. With easy access to seed capital, the proliferation of online tools to do a variety of basic Web task and the growing availability of computing power and storage in the cloud, you can certainly argue that the barriers to starting a new company – particularly one offering Web-based consumer services – is easier than ever. What not quite so clear is whether it has become any easier to achieve long-term success.
Our state-of-the-startup panel included:
- Draper Fisher Jurvetson venture partner Heidi Roizen.
- SoftTech VC founder Jeff Clavier.
- SmugMug CEO and co-founder Don MacAskill.
- Blogger and Kaufman Foundation senior fellow Paul Kedrosky.
- Microsoft corporate VP Dan’l Lewin.
You can watch all the action in video below:
The myth of the overnight success - Chris Dixon
Angry Birds was Rovio’s 52nd game. They spent eight years and almost went bankrupt before finally creating their massive hit. Pinterest is one of the fastest growing websites in history, but struggled for a long time. Pinterest’s CEO recently said that they had “catastrophically small numbers” in their first year after launch, and that if he had listened to popular startup advice he probably would have quit.
You tend to hear about startups when they are successful but not when they are struggling. This creates a systematically distorted perception that companies succeed overnight. Almost always, when you learn the backstory, you find that behind every “overnight success” is a story of entrepreneurs toiling away for years, with very few people except themselves and perhaps a few friends, users, and investors supporting them.
Startups are hard, but they can also go from difficult to great incredibly quickly. You just need to survive long enough and keep going so you can create your 52nd game.
It should only take you a few hours... - The Hiltmon
It Should Only Take You a Few Hours...
It sure seems easy to make a table. Anyone can do it, right? Get 1 large flat rectangular piece of wood, 4 equally tall wooden poles, 4 nails and a hammer. Nail the 4 poles to each corner of the flat rectangular bit, and you have a table. Ta daaa!
Now ask a carpenter to craft you a table. First they will spend time discussing the purpose and function of the table - indoor or outdoor, kitchen or dining room, for show or heavy use, what load does it need to bear. Then they will determine the materials to use - hard vs soft woods, laminate, plywood or railway sleepers. Then they will look at the aesthetics of the table - beveled edges, foot design, center or corner mounted legs. And when they finally get down to crafting the table, they spend a lot of time to mitre, mortise and dovetail all joints, install bracing points, use quality glues, dowels and screws, test its levelness, sand it flat, stain it, seal it, polish it and produce a table they are proud of. Seems a whole bunch more work, doesn’t it? It just a table, no?
But there are differences between the two approaches, did you see any?
read more
2012年4月5日 星期四
2012年4月4日 星期三
Dont Follow Your Passion, Follow Your Effort « blog maverick
Dont Follow Your Passion, Follow Your Effort
Mar 18th 2012 2:47PM
I hear it all the time from people. “I’m passionate about it.” “I’m not going to quit, It’s my passion”. Or I hear it as advice to students and others “Follow your passion”.
What a bunch of BS. ”Follow Your Passion” is easily the worst advice you could ever give or get.
Why ? Because everyone is passionate about something. Usually more than 1 thing. We are born with it. There are always going to be things we love to do. That we dream about doing. That we really really want to do with our lives. Those passions aren’t worth a nickel.
Think about all the things you have been passionate about in your life. Think about all those passions that you considered making a career out of or building a company around. How many were/are there ? Why did you bounce from one to another ? Why were you not able to make a career or business out of any of those passions ? Or if you have been able to have some success, what was the key to the success.? Was it the passion or the effort you put in to your job or company ?
If you really want to know where you destiny lies, look at where you apply your time.
Time is the most valuable asset you don’t own. You may or may not realize it yet, but how you use or don’t use your time is going to be the best indication of where your future is going to take you .
Let me make this as clear as possible
1. When you work hard at something you become good at it.
2. When you become good at doing something, you will enjoy it more.
3. When you enjoy doing something, there is a very good chance you will become passionate or more passionate about it
4. When you are good at something, passionate and work even harder to excel and be the best at it, good things happen.
Don’t follow your passions, follow your effort. It will lead you to your passions and to success, however you define it.
"The Future of Internet Search" by Esther Dyson
NEW YORK – Imagine that Googling an address gave you a list of the closest buildings, ranked by distance. Not exactly what you were looking for, most likely. But that is pretty close to what we still accept for most Internet searches. You don't get what you actually want to finish your task; you get a list of pages that might lead you to it.
more...
Daniel Burrus: A Lesson From Google: Why Innovation Is the Key to Your Company's Future
I've always said that innovation is a key driver of business success. We saw this in action with Google. Back when Google was a startup, they focused heavily on innovation in search. As a result, they created a major source of income and a name for themselves as the dominant search engine.
Google was able to accomplish this in a relatively short amount of time because they kept the pipeline of innovation going and encouraged their engineers to spend 20 percent of their time coming up with new ideas. As a result, they gave us Gmail, Google Maps, Chrome, and a host of other advances.
One of the hard trends happening right now is that the main computer people use is shifting from a laptop/desktop to a smart phone and tablet. This shift started two years ago and was fully predictable. Just look back over my previous blogs and you'll see I was talking about this shift long before it happened.
When the trend started to emerge, what did Google do? They saw the iPhone and its success and they introduced the Android. It was a bit more copying than innovating, but they did still innovate (albeit just a little bit).
Where Google dropped the innovation ball was with social media. They saw Facebook grow incredibly, so they introduced Google+. Was much innovation involved? Not really. It's definitely more copying than anything else. They simply made their own version of Facebook. No wonder Google+ is having a hard time taking off.
Here's the problem: When you focus on your competition and copy them, you end up competing with them. However, when you focus on innovation, you become the competition and others try to copy you. That's a huge difference.
Realize that no matter how hard you try to copy someone, you can never catch up because the leader is innovating. In fact, the only way to really catch up is to jump ahead.
Unfortunately, Google became so focused on social media that they lost their original spirit of true innovation. I even heard that the engineers who spent 20 percent of their time on innovation were told to focus that time on innovation within the realm of social. That, of course, dilutes the innovation engine.
Moving forward, I'd like to see all companies, not just Google, get back on the innovation bandwagon. For any company to thrive in the future, innovation, not copying, is the key. Remember that we're in a world of exponential transformational change. With bandwidth, processing power, and storage accelerating so rapidly, it's truly a time for every company to innovate at new levels. Technology has leveled the playing field, and the game is changing. It's time to stop playing the old game and start defining the new one.
Article first published as A Lesson From Google on Technorati.
Follow Daniel Burrus on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DanielBurrus
