web design

CakePHP 3 and the need for breadcrumbs

I’ve been catching up with the CakePHP roadmap. One of the tickets for the next release (CakePHP 3.3.10, scheduled for tomorrow), is this ticket, relating to the breadcrumbs navigation.

When building applications with CakePHP, you have a couple of easy ways to generate breadcrumbs for the easier user navigation. One, is to use HTML Helper, which provides a quick and simple way. The other, is to use a feature rich Breadcrumbs Helper, available since CakePHP version 3.3.6 (but not mentioned in the release notes).

Digging further down into templates, and best practices for user navigation, and different ways of styling breadcrumbs (Smashing Magazine, Hongkiat, UI Patterns), I thought – wouldn’t it be nice to have breadcrumbs navigation built into a human brain?

I mean, how many times did you catch yourself in some dark corner of the Internet, trying to figure out how did you get there? If only humans had breadcrumbs navigation built into our brains, that would be so easy to trace back the steps. Browser history can, of course, help, but with so many open tabs and several things happening in parallel, a flat list of tabs is not much help.

Top 29 books on Amazon from Hacker News comments

hacker-news-books

I came across this nice visualization of “Top 29 books ranked by unique users linking to Amazon in Hacker News comments“.

Amazon product links were extracted and counted from 8.3M comments posted on Hacker News from Oct 2006 to Oct 2015.

Most of these are, not surprisingly, on programming and design. A few are on startups and business. Some are on how to have a good life. Which is a bit weird.

10k Apart – Inspiring the Web with Just 10k

From this article, I’ve learned about an excellent (for our times) 10k Apart competition:

With so much of an emphasis on front-end frameworks and JavaScript runtimes, it’s time to get back to basics—back to optimizing every little byte like your life depends on it and ensuring your site can work, no matter what. The Challenge? Build a compelling web experience that can be delivered in 10kB and works without JavaScript.

Think you’ve got what it takes? You have until September 30th.

I can’t wait to see the submissions and all the ways to squeeze the awesomeness of the modern web into just 10 kilobytes. This reminds me of the Perl Golf posts over at PerlMonks and ~~Assembly~~ PC 64K Intro from my ~~childhood~~ early days (here are some examples).

Wikiwand – Wikipedia Modernized

I came across an interesting take on Wikipedia – Wikiwand. It’s basically an upgraded and modernized design of the Wikipedia. You can either search and browse it like you do with the regular Wikipedia, or, better even, install a browser extension (here’s one for Google Chrome), which will redirect all your Wikipedia page clicks through to Wikiwand. You get exactly the same content, but now it’s actually quite pleasant to explore. Have a look at Cyprus page, for example:

I’m not a frequent Wikipedia reader, but in the last couple of days, I have to say, I’ve found myself spending much more time than usual reading Wikipedia pages on the Wikiwand website. Maybe, it is time for the Wikipedia face lift after all.

But it’s not just about forcing a different web design upon thee. There’s more. You get options (upper-right corner). You can switch between light and dark designs, sans and serif fonts, adjust font size and text justification, and more. If you create account and login (Facebook is supported), you can bookmark pages too.

Even if you are not a fan of fancy websites, I suggest you give it a try for a couple of days. You might find yourself quite surprised.