Category Archives: Featured

The Internet’s Best of April Fools’ Day 2010

April 1st has come and gone once again. This year’s turnout was pretty good, with Google being the most extravagant as usual. For posterity, I thought a roundup of some of the best would be in order.

Google Becomes “Topeka”

Referencing Topeka, Kansas’ changing of their name to “Google, Kansas” for a month, Google changed their name to “Topeka” for April Fools’ Day.

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Ars Technica’s Ken Fisher on Ad Blocking

I’ve written at length before on the subject of ad blocking and how it hurts your favorite websites. My diatribes have been a little strongly worded in the past, which may blunt the effect I intended them to evoke. Fortunately, a much larger site…

Dayta: The One Week App

Developer Sahil Lavingia built a high-quality iPhone app in only one week, and blogged about it on the One Week App blog. The resulting application is called Dayta. Dayta is designed to help you log any sort of data set that you wish to…

Get a Larger Version of a Mac Application’s Icon

Have you ever wanted a large version of an icon, maybe for a software review on your blog? (Or maybe you just want a closer look at the details of the image…) In Mac OS X Leopard or greater, it’s actually fairly easy to…

The iPad Will Find its Niche: My Thoughts on Apple’s Tablet

Unless you’ve been living in a cave somewhere, you’ve almost certainly heard about Apple’s new iPad tablet. The $499 device is essentially a giant iPod Touch, but with a few additional features. The integrated ebook store (or iBooks, as Apple prefers to call them…)…

Using the WordPress Uploader in Your Plugin or Theme

WordPress has a nice media uploader dialog that it uses on the editor pages. Now wouldn’t it be nice if you could use it to handle image uploads for part of a plugin or theme you’re writing? Maybe you want to add an easy…

Best of 2009

Happy New Year! It is now 2010, and we’re heading into the fourth calendar year of Webmaster-Source. It has been a long year, as usual, filled with more than 35 archive pages worth of posts. That’s a lot, isn’t it? On the other hand,…

Slashtags: Adapting Twitter Culture to the New Retweet

Twitter users have on more than one occasion invented their own new functionality for the microblogging service, and the developers have often taken the conventions and integrated them into Twitter’s core feature set. Originally the @reply concept was just that: a user-developed practice that…

Learning CSS Sprites

What exactly is a sprite? It’s a CSS technique that can make your website load faster. Instead of having a dozen images that are included on every page of the site (one for your logo, one for an RSS button, a few fore social…

Laptops Are Easier on Cellular Network Usage than Smartphones

It’s no secret that cellular providers price-gouge and under-deliver, but apparently they’re not well informed on what devices are worse for their networks. Ars Technica reports that smartphones use up to eight times more cellular capacity as laptops, based on a recent study by…