There are an amazing amount of Wordpress plugins to choose from (over 3000!), some of them are great, some of them leave a lot to be desired. Here’s a list of 10 wordpress plugins that have proved their worth and are definitely worth a look!

This is a brand new plugin which applies a continual pulse to any element specified. ‘Pulseable’ properties include "background-color’, ‘color” ‘border-color’ and ‘opacity’. Specifying more than one property to pulse on a single element can have a pretty cool effect.

Visit the plugin page »

In this short tutorial I’ll be demonstrating how easy it is to create your own horizontal scrolling portfolio. Obviously you can use this effect for things other than a portfolio; you could use it for a short photo gallery, slideshow or a product showcase…

Have a look at the demo to see what I’m talking about.

Instead of trying to constantly impress users with snazzy graphics and smooth flash movies lets go back to the basics and think about the what they like and what they hate. You may think your site is usable, good-looking, easily navigable and fast… but do your users agree?

So, here are seven things you can do to make sure your users stay for more than five seconds:

I’ve finally managed to get my personal website built and running. I meant to get it done ages ago but so much had been happening that I simply didn’t have time.

My new website will act as a portfolio and a personal blog. Like all other great things in the world the site is built on Wordpress and themed by me.

See the site now - james.padolsey.com »

Recently there’s been some "hype" around the previously unknown fact that Twitter accepts cool UTF-8 characters. To be honest I never really assumed otherwise but the story covering it got over 2000 diggs today so I’m probably in the minority.

The actual story which was dugg was offering a bookmarklet which you can press to bring up a popup window which enabled you to copy (*gasp*) and paste (*gasp*) funny characters into your tweets. The only problem with this being that it is manual and not really worth the effort… not even slightly! I’m quite lazy so cannot be bothered to open a new window… go into that new window… highlight a bit of text… copy it… select the twitter window… and then paste it into the textbox! So, spending that wouldbe wasted time I created a sweet little GreaseMonkey script which does all of it for you!

Recently I’ve been working on a brand new plugin for jQuery. It’s not quite finished and it’s in the "experimental" stages but I think it’s progressed enough for a release.

The new plugin is called "seekAttention" and allows any element on a page to seek the users attention… with added effects! I’ve been careful to take usability and customization into account with this plugin. It’s fully automated - it detects element size and builds an overlay to suit that element and you have a number of options so you get to decide how the plugin behaves.

Originally I wasn’t looking forward to the launch of Google Chrome for one reason - it’s *another* browser which us web developers have to cater for. But since I heard it is based on the not-so-bad WebKit rendering engine I started getting excited. What does this mean for Firefox though - can they compete with Apple and Google (both WebKit)!? The new Google browser is not just another duck in the pond either; they have completely rethought the typical browser interface and have added a bunch of features making the browser experience better for users and the developing experience better for us developers.

A tutorial that I wrote explaining how to develop a degradable style switcher in jQuery and PHP has just been published on NETTUTS.

I thought it would be a good idea to expand on the tutorial for the benefit of those who want to integarete the style-switcher into their own website.

Okay… We all know about the ‘javascript’ pseudo protocol and how wrong it is to use it within links to initiate functions. What I’m talking about here is doing some like this: (please don’t!)

<a href="javascript:func(this)">Linky</a>

There is one valid way to use it though… You’ve probably seen quite a few sites that have bookmark links intended for you to drag the link to your bookmarks panel within your browser. These links are not limited to plain old URLs! - You can actually put javascript within them (with the ‘javascript’ protocol) so when you click on one it can carry out something on the page you’re currently on. These are known as "bookmarklets" and can be really useful!