I will shortly be writing a article about how to use web notifications to provide notification to your websites users however I thought it might be useful to provide a bit of insight of my ideas on places it might provide a good user experience to do this.

One of my initial thoughts for web notifications would be to move common notifications from sites like Facebook and twitter into web notifications. While this would be a good user experience it is a bit of an obvious idea and I do see both twitter and Facebook implementing this. After further thoughts on this matter i came up with the following ideas:

• A sales website (e.g amazon) notifying user of order shipment
• A poker site (e.g partypoker) notifying you a new game is starting
• A news aggregator notifying you of articles you have yet to read

Unfortunately there is one problem with this, all these notifications are really useful but with the current implementations of notifications will not work without a tab open with the website in it. This isn’t the ideal solution and I am hoping that in the future this could be made to work without the websites being open.

Anyway watch out as coming soon is my tutorial on how to use the notifications within Safari to add notifications to the Mountain Lion notification centre.

Expanding text  is a jQuery Plugin which shows and hides content, it shows a preview of the content and then the user clicks to see the full content.

Ideas for use:

Blogs – Shorten the length of your homepage by showing your posts with a preview and then allowing them to click to learn more

Mobile Website – hide text that is not important, show summaries and if the user wants to find out more they can.

Demo

I have uploaded a demo of Expanding text for you to test out so you can see if its right for your site.

Source

As always you can find this on GitHub

I have made a quick update to my jQuery Hoverpanels plugin to allow it to support touch devices which do not allow you to hover over elements. I have made a demo available for you to play with (see demo), but you can also find the plugin in use on the homepage of this blog.

The updated plugin can be found in my jQuery Plugin github repository where I have also added some example code to help you get started.

Today I started work on a new project (don’t worry I don’t plan to neglect my other projects), the new project is http://urlm.im/ which is a url shortener.

While I am very aware that their are lots of URL shorteners I just thought this would be an interesting project to work on and like all my projects I will in time make it completely open source. I will also look at exploring ways in which I can differentiate the site from other URL shorteners but my main aim is to ensure all the code is open source.

At the moment the site is barebones and the first port of call is for me to build the structure I am going to use for the code. It will try to maintain the same code structure I setup for qAdmin to maintain consistency across my projects.

Updated – Project created on github

I realised earlier that I haven’t been keeping people up to date with the latest developments I have made on my open source projects so I thought I would put together a quick update.

qAdmin

qAdmin is the primary project I have been working on in recent weeks and there have been some major developments. In case you havent heard of qAdmin, I developed qAdmin originally for a client I was working on but it was canned due to the client no longer wishing to capture data and the system being no longer needed. The idea behind qAdmin is that you can setup a website to capture data however you see fit, once this data is in a database it can be read by qAdmin, viewed by users with permission and exported to a CSV if necessary. To minimise the impact qAdmin makes on a database it only creates one table, future versions of the system will provide the option to store its user account information in flat files but the preferred option will be to keep the user account information in the database.

qAdmin recent developments

• The web application was completely re-written to be more expandable, the core of the HTML was separated out so you can now easily write custom themes, full skinning engine will be available in later builds.
• CSV export functionality was implemented
• foundation has been setup for adding additional users, interface is on the todo list

If you want to play around with the new version prior to me releasing it properly feel free to download it from my github repository.

I am hoping to release a official beta within the next 2-3 weeks. Prior to this I may be looking for a different name for the project due to the qAdmin.com domain already being taken (By a company that buys domains but doesn’t use them which is annoying).

jQuery Plugins

I have been spending some time developing a few new jQuery plugin but none are polished enough to release. More updates will come about this in the coming weeks.

Previously we have talked about some of the mobile specific HTML5 but that was only the start, today I am going to go through the core of the new HTML, CSS and Javascript available on a mobile web browser.

read more

Recently I have been asked to provide a functionality to allow panels of content to be hovered over and to show related links. While this could have been achieved easily using standard jQuery code I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to create my first jQuery plugin.

I have uploaded a demo of jQuery Hover panels for you all to checkout

I already have plans for more jQuery plugins which will be more complex so keep an eye on this blog for my future developments.

Update: This plugin can now be found on both github and on the jquery website http://plugins.jquery.com/project/hoverpanels