AddyOsmani.com | Where Web Businesses Grow

Over the past year, we’ve seen website toolbar’s become an increasingly popular way for site-owners to offer users a consistent set of powerful social features, regardless of what page they’re on – Share, Subscribe, Tweet, Talk – you name it and chances are there’s a toolbar out there that offers some variation of these features. Facebook were one of the first companies to introduce this toolbar concept and have been the source of inspiration for many others. 

Taking a leaf from their book, companies like Wibiya and Meebo have been at the forefront of a toolbar-for-the masses revolution, offering easily customizable widgets for almost anyone to install on their pages. Larger companies have also been hopping onto the toolbar-band too, with sites like CNET.com embracing this concept as a way to offer their visitors more ways to interact with their site.

In today’s post, I’m going to show you how to create your very own jQuery-powered website toolbar and then we’re going to pack it full of lots of useful widget features such as those found in the Wibiya-toolbar – I call it jQuery Fubar.

[More]

In today’s post I’m going to share 20 jQuery Plugins that I think could really improve your user interface in just a few minutes. Some of them require a little more customization or integration than others, but on the whole, the plugins in this post will hopefully give you the inspiration and implementations you need to give your projects that little extra something.

[More]

If you’re a web developer and you haven’t explored the many ins and outs of Facebook app development so far, I would definitely recommend taking a weekend out just to try it out – you might be surprised at what you might learn (and it always looks good on a resume ). What I like about the Facebook platform is that you get a nice steady integrated flow of your friends comments, events, application notices and more made we want to ask the question – how can I build something cool that can use all this data? It’s actually surprisingly straightforward.
[More]