I often run across websites that provide something useful or interesting; a small tutorial, some inspiration, a useful tool. Not everything warrants a permanent listing in my links, nor do I want to clutter my already unorganized browser bookmarks, so I’ll share them here each week. Maybe you’ll find some of these sites useful as well.
Hyperlink Cues with Favicons
CSS and JavaScript which automatically displays the favicon icon of each website a page links to next to that link.
Programming Books
A new, user-ranked directory devoted entirely to programming books. Most of the books I’ve read are recommended there, as well as quite a few that I’d like to read this year.
When you read code, imagine typing it by hand.
Tips for better understanding others’ code, especially when it’s in an unfamiliar language.
YouTube is Better Than the Superbowl
A 75-second film Dove released at no cost on YouTube that brought a bigger traffic spike than their Super Bowl commercial.
Vanilla
A relatively new open-source PHP message board package I absolutely love. It’s well written, extensible through plugins, actively maintained, and devoid of unnecessary features that could be added as needed for individual boards.
Design Snack
“Digg” for web design inspiration. A website gallery which uses user votes to decide what gets featured on the homepage.
adClustr
A site dedicated to helping you blend text advertising into your website design. CSS snippets and images to help style text ads from AdSense, YPN, and Text-LinkAds.
Sweetie
A set of 150 icons for use in web applications. Free for commercial use and provided in PSD and PNG formats.
Feel free to share anything interesting you’ve found this week in the comments; if I do too maybe it’ll end up in my post next week. I’m off to watch the live webcast of Bill Gates giving the keynote at CES.
##NOLIGHTBOX##
sara
January 8th, 2007
Those are some prettyy neat sites. The youtube commercial is a perfect example of how social media is really affecting how companies are beginning to and should consider marketing (or at least not ignore).
Chris
January 8th, 2007
Thanks for the link to adClustr Dan! I am happy that a few people are starting finding the site useful.
Brendon Kozlowski
January 10th, 2007
Ahh, too bad you limited it to only this week. I could have a lot of fun with this one. Here’s wondering if the spam catcher will block me after this…….
Intype — the Windows’ based TextMate competitor. It’ll probably be one of the closest text editor’s to Macintosh’s extremely beloved editor (TextMate) for some time. It’s currently in its very first early public alpha release.
On a similar note, Crimson Editor, my favorite simple text-editor of choice has released its source code to the continuation project, Emerald Editor, who have released the code publically via SVN. I’ve always wanted to update certain things in the code, such as the REGEX support…now I can.
You like your new find in Vanilla, I like having found bbPress, the forum from Wordpress - although still in beta, I prefer its feature set. The code is a bit (imo) rudimentary, but I believe it follows Wordpress’ coding practices which have been well proven.
Google’s Map API is really easy, but Phoogle makes it even easier.
From Phoogle’s developer’s blog, I found Micah Carrick’s PHP Zip Code Range and Distance Calculation class. I’ve read the comments in this entry with many situations where the distance results incorrectly return 0. I’m thinking that this code returns 0 if nothing was found, which is an easy fix. The included SQL database files are old, and I *think* from 2002 — also easy enough to find an updated version. However, this’ll be nice to not have to recreate the wheel should I ever have the need for some sort of social integration of distance calculations based on user’s location.
While trying to figure out why my AlphaImageLoader wasn’t working properly in IE today, and reading 70+ websites that all told me to do the same thing (and none of them told me I needed hasLayout which I accidentally found out 6 hours later), I found that IE will sometimes produce differing colors with PNG than other browsers. There’s an application to fix this problem, as well as simultaneously optimizing/compressing the image file(s). PNGCrush — I still have yet to test this out, or have a reason to test it out (I was using a 1×1px image today, and the color is fine).
Monospace/Fixed Width Programmer’s Fonts, Triskweline, Macintosh’s Monaco font (lookalike?) font for Windows, and Consolas looks horrible when not used on high resolution, non-ClearType enabled displays.
My colleague also linked me to MIT’s OpenCourseWare, a free online version of their course offerings (without any certification/degrees given, thusly why it’s free).
…I found a few other interesting things this week, but those are truly the better sites. I certainly do have a lot of gems though (at least in my opinion).
Brendon Kozlowski
January 10th, 2007
Oh yeah…the spam filter definitely caught me on that one.