Resources

  • 99designs
    99designs helps you run a “design contest”, where thousands of designers compete to create the best possible design to meet your needs. All you need is a clear idea of what you want designed and how much you’re prepared to pay for it.
  • A List Apart
    “For people who make websites” – A List Apart Magazine explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices.
  • Amaya
    Amaya is an open source Web editor endorsed by the W3C. Browsing features are seamlessly integrated with the editing and remote access features in a uniform environment. This follows the original vision of the Web as a space for collaboration and not just a one-way publishing medium.

    Amaya started as an HTML + CSS style sheets editor. Since that time it was extended to support XML and an increasing number of XML applications such as the XHTML family, MathML, and SVG. It allows all those vocabularies to be edited simultaneously in compound documents.
    Source: W3C and the WAM (Web, Adaptation and Multimedia)

  • Apache Maintenance Basics
    You’ve downloaded and configured your Apache server and are ready to move on to the next project. Can it really be left to fend for itself in a darkened room?

    Yes. To some degree, anyway. On the other hand, completely ignoring your Apache installation would be foolhardy.
    Source: ServerWatch

  • Clearspring Launchpad
    Clearspring’s free Launchpad widget builder lets you easily turn your website’s content into a widget which site visitors can use to place your content on all the major social media sites (MySpace, FaceBook, Google, hi5, Live, Yahoo, WordPress, Blogger, etc.). The service also provides tracking and analysis.
  • Color Schemer Online
    The Color Schemer online is a fast and easy way to get a fresh new palette of related colors for your web site.
    Choose a color you like and Color Schemer will provide a grid of 16 related colors (with their RGB and HTML hex values), with the option to lighten or darken the scheme.
  • color.org
    Whether you’re looking for some help designing the color scheme of a web site, a blog, or a house, you can’t do much better than colr.org, a site that loads random Flickr images and intuitively parses the colors out of the photos to give you the best combinations possible. You’ve got quite a few options here: you can load your own image for a little color play, pick random color schemes compiled by other colr.org users, even choose a specific web site to copy colors from. [LifeHacker annotation]
  • ColorZilla
    ColorZilla is an extension for Mozilla Firefox that assists web developers and graphic designers with color related tasks – both basic and advanced. With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. You can Zoom the page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page. The built-in palette browser allows choosing colors from pre-defined color sets and saving the most used colors in custom palettes.
  • Core JavaScript Guide: Version 1.5
    Starting at the beginning, this reference explains everything you need to know about using core JavaScript. It assumes you have the following basic background: a general understanding of the Internet and the World Wide Web and a good working knowledge of HTML. An excellent resource.
  • Create a multi-state image toolbar on your Web site with this JavaScript guide
    This document guides you through the process of using JavaScript and the DOM to build a three-state toolbar that accurately and efficiently handles different button states (normal, highlighted, selected), and the interdependencies between them.
    Source: TechRepublic – Create a multi-state image toolbar…
  • CSS Menu Generator
    webmaster toolkit offers this CSS Menu Generator to generate both the CSS and the HTML code required to produce a text-based yet appealing set of navigation buttons.
    Source: webmaster toolkit
  • CSS Tab Designer
    CSS Tab Designer is unique and easy to use software to help you design css-based lists and tabs visually and without any programming knowledge required! Read a review.
    Source: OverZone
  • Dataopedia
    Dataopedia gives you a run-down of all the data it can find about a website. It aggregates data from dozens of sources in combination with a number of public APIs, and includes data about traffic, screenshots, names of people involved, WHOIS information, Google PageRank, multimedia links and embeds, jobs, office locations, and so on.
  • dTree
    dTree is a free JavaScript tree menu. That is very simple to set up and use. You don’t have to worry about adding pages to the tree in a specific order, which makes it ideal for generating a tree from a database.
    Source: Destroydrop by Geir Landrö
  • Easy RGB Color Harmonies
    Options such as color matching, searching for a tint, a color calculator and monitor calibration add value to this easy to use free online color tool.
  • Exact Factor
    Free alert service ExactFactor tracks search engine results by key words, and can email anyone interested in how any web site is doing in the battle for the top Google, Yahoo, or Live.com spot. After signing up for an account, you enter one or two web sites and key words to track them by. You’ll see an instant report on the site’s ranking on each search site, and can hit “Get alerts” to be e-mailed when that site improves, declines, or hits the front page of the search results.
  • FastStone Capture
    FastStone Capture is a powerful screen capture utility with built-in editing tools. It allows you to capture anything on the screen including windows, objects, menus, full screen, rectangular/freehand regions and scrolling windows/web pages. It sends captures to editor, file, clipboard, printer, email, Word/PowerPoint document or even your website. Editing tools include resizing, cropping, sharpening, annotating, applying effects, watermarks and many more. It saves captures in BMP, GIF, JPEG, PCX, PNG, TGA, TIFF and PDF formats. Additional features include a small handy capture panel that offers quick access to its capture tools and output options, global hotkeys, automatic filename generation, support for external editors, a color picker, a screen magnifier and a screen ruler.
  • FeedBurner
    FeedBurner is a one-stop create-your-own-RSS program provider. Among other things, it provides tools to analyze your feed traffic and usage, notifications of technical issues with your feed, and ways to optimize, publicize and monetize your RSS feed.
  • FreeStyle Menu
    A very flexible unlimited-level, drop down JavaScript menu that uses UL/LI list data formatted with a CSS menu layout. It’s powerful, lightweight and extremely easy to use!
    Source: Angus Turnbull
  • Google Ad Planner
    Somebody called Google’s new Ad Planner tool “Google Trends for Web Sites on steroids,” and that’s not really an overstatement. Even experienced media planners will want to test-drive this gratis, information-rich planner program that lets you tap into Google’s wealth of information and build media plans with just a few clicks.

    Create or log in to your Google Account first, then start your research or build a media plan. Choose your country, language, demographic data, likely keywords and sites, then see which sites Google says your audience is likely to visit.

    Within the application, you can click on a site and get thumbnails showing relevant data: how the site performs on your chosen demographics, by country, other sites visited, popular keywords, etc. Keep the thumbnails open for fast comparison. Click to view according to audience reach, best matches or composition index to further refine your results. [WDFM Annotation]

  • How to Size Text in CSS
    It’s a tug-of-war as old as web design. Designers need to control text size and the vertical grid; readers need to be able to resize text. A better best practice for sizing type and controlling line-height is needed; and in this article, Richard Rutter obligingly supplies one.
  • HTML Validator Firefox Plugin
    HTML Validator is a Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation inside Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen in the form of an icon in the status bar when browsing. The details of the errors are seen when looking the HTML source of the page.

    The extension is based on Tidy and OpenSP. Both algorithms were originally developed by the Web Consortium W3C. Both algorithms are embedded inside Mozilla/Firefox and makes the validation locally on your machine, without sending HTML to a third party server.

  • HTTP Header Request Viewer
    Do you know which HTTP Headers are seen by search engine spiders? Just enter a URL and this site’s search engine spider will analyze the HTTP Headers of that page. The output will show you what HTTP Headers the search engines are extracting from that page.
  • Kotatsu
    Kotatsu is a free AJAX utility that generates clean code for tables. Start off with a default 2 row by 2 column table and add as many rows or columns as you desire. You can also specify classes by cell, row or column. A time saver for those who code by hand.
  • Lifehacker Programming Resources
    Lifehacker offers some useful resources for programmers, including a five-part series on learning to code:

    • Learn How to Code Part I: Variables and Basic Data Types
    • Learn to Code Part II: Working With Variables
    • Learn to Code Part III: Arrays and Logic Statements
    • Learn to Code Part IV: Understanding Functions and Making a Guessing Game
    • Learn to Code Epilogue: Best Practices and Additional Resources

    Also included are tips for choosing a text editor and specific programming projects.

  • LogoInstant
    If you need a logo but you’re lacking the design chops to whip one up, score a free one at LogoInstant. LogoInstant is a design service that cranks out a new logo every day. The logos are completely free for both personal and commercial use and come in a layered Adobe Photoshop source file so you can edit the name or make more advanced changes.[LifeHacker Annotation]
  • LogoYes
    LogoYes is a site offering a flash program to create logos. Just select your industry, a symbol, text, typography and colors for your logo. Once you finish, you can purchase a high-resolution file with your logo for only $69 or include a business card design based on the logo for an additional $30.
  • MyGengo
    Several ways to translate web sites, texts or documents online have emerged in the past few years, with Google Translate probably being the best-known tool. Google’s service is free and works for most quick and dirty translations, but when it comes to delivering truly accurate results, nothing can beat a human translator. In 2008, Google itself toyed with the idea of establishing the so-called Google Translation Center, a marketplace that was supposed to match translators with people who need texts translated.

    The concept was shelved later, and now it’s a startup called MyGengo that tries to become the world’s Mechanical Turk for translations. MyGengo offers human translation services between English, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Italian and Russian. And it does work much like Amazon’s crowdsourced marketplace: The site’s 600 “certified” translators wait for a customer to upload a document or text and take care of those jobs they can deal with. Customers can choose between three quality and pricing levels and usually get the translations back within a few hours, saving up to 70% in costs when compared to professional translators.

    MyGengo says their system makes it possible to accept just about any job size, including those usually denied by traditional translation agencies. Customers can have books, office documents, newspaper articles, blog posts or even tweets translated.

    The service offers two specific solutions for people who need to localize a website or an application: Starting March 2010, an API will speed up the process of requesting the translation of frequently updated content, for example blog posts or comments. Another solution dubbed String lets developers manage all language “strings” of a multilingual website through a dashboard during the localization process. This hosted service will link to the API, but using String by itself is completely free (more background). [Lifehacker Annotation]

  • Open Clip Art Library
    This project aims to create an archive of user contributed clip art that can be freely used.
  • Open Source Web Design (OSWD)
    Open Source Web Design is a site to download free web design templates and share yours with others. We help make the internet a prettier place.
  • opensourceCMS
    This site was created with one goal in mind. To give you the opportunity to “try out” some of the best php/mysql based free and open source software systems in the world. You are welcome to be the administrator of any CMS system here, allowing you to decide which system best suits your needs. You should also visit CMS Training Videos for more in depth video tutorials for many of these systems.
    Source: The Open Source Collective Inc.
  • Password Generator
    Just enter a username and password and this script will tell you what to put in your .htpasswd file
    Source: Inch
  • PikiFX.com
    An online picture editor, pikifx.com emphasizes special effects. You can use it to: – Resize and Crop, – Add creative effects, – Add borders, – Add creative text
  • Ping-O-Matic
    Ping-O-Matic is a service to update different search engines that your RSS feed has been updated. Instead of pinging each major aggregator/search engine separately, one update to Ping-O-Matic will update all of the major services.
  • Regular Expression Tutorial: Learn How to Use and Get The Most out of Regular Expressions
    This tutorial will teach you all you need to know to be able to craft powerful time-saving regular expressions. It starts with the most basic concepts, so that you can follow this tutorial even if you know nothing at all about regular expressions yet. It will also explain how a regular expression engine works on the inside, and alert you at the consequences. This will help you to understand quickly why a particular regex does not do what you initially expected. It will save you lots of guesswork and head scratching when you need to write more complex regexes.
  • RSS Compendium RSS Resources
    Here’s an endless list of what appears to be every possible RSS resource you might ever need. Alas, the list is alphabetized rather than categorized, but we soldier on. You’ll find a plethora of fanatically specific tools that do interesting things such as WordPre.cio.us. This is a PHP script that will grab the RSS from del.icio.us and add/update the entries in your WordPress blog. There’s also RSStatic, which will take the information from the feeds you choose and generate static HTML pages for each item in the feed. You will also find beaucoup resources such RSS tutorials and primers to get you started with RSS publishing. [WDFM Annotation]
  • RSS Field Descriptions
    To publish your RSS feed you need to segment your data, links and tags and whatnot into a number of individual fields, some of which are required and some of which are optional. The title, link and content are easy, but what about “text input” or “TTL (Time to Live)” or “GUID (Global Unique Identifier)”? If you’re flummoxed, this is the go-to place for descriptions of all the settings and fields you need to know.

    The “text input” setting allows a data entry box to be displayed within your feed. That data entry box can be filled out by the subscriber, who then pushes a button and drives an action. The action may be to send information back to the publisher, or the publisher may allow the subscriber to do something else, such as enter a keyword and then be driven directly to Google for those search results. “TTL” refers to the number of minutes that the feed is allowed to be cached by a server before the feed needs to be refreshed. And the “GUID” is a string that uniquely identifies an item. When present, a feed reader may choose to use this string to determine if an item is new. [WDFM Annotation]

  • Search Engine Friendly Layouts
    The Search Engine Friendly Layouts website has been created for both the webmaster and the search engine optimization specialist. The layouts on the site are all designed to be web standards-compliant, yet also search engine friendly. These layouts have all been created by Adam Senour, and he gives them to you at no cost whatsoever.
    Source: ADAM Web Design by Adam Senour
  • SearchStatus
    SearchStatus is a toolbar extension for Firefox and Mozilla that allows you to see how any website is performing. Designed for the highly specialised needs of search engine marketers, this toolbar provides extensive search-related information about a site, all conveniently displayed in one discreet and compact toolbar.

    For every site you visit, SearchStatus lets you view its Google PageRank, Google Category, Alexa popularity ranking, Compete.com ranking, Alexa incoming links, Alexa related links and backward links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

    The SearchStatus Mozilla/Mozilla Firefox extension appears unobtrusively at the bottom of the browser on the status bar. If you choose to view backward links for a particular page, they open in new tabs in the same browser window. Disable the automatic Google and Alexa queries and they fold away from view.

  • SenderID/SPF/DomainKeys Test Server
    This server allows you to check the format of any DomainKey, SenderID or SPF records published by your domain and to see the result of these authentication checks on any message you send to it. To use this service, send an email to any address at senderid.espcoalition.org. Once you have sent your message, click the “View Sample” button on the site to see your message results. Note that the results are quite detailed so you could use this site as a general analysis of your email setup as well.
    Source: Email Service Provider Coalition (ESPC)
  • Shopping Cart Reviews
    Online retailers are first faced with figuring out which shopping cart system they want to use to run their business. This blog tackles the many, many shopping cart providers that offer very decent options for what is usually a monthly fee. The authors literally take these systems out for a test drive and write about their benefits, shortcomings and unique features. They also provide a step-by-step wizard that first asks if you want to buy a cart, rent a cart or need a gateway system (which connects your current site to a payment process). It then evaluates your specific needs and churns out a variety of options for you to consider. The site presents itself as an independent operation with information on at least 100 different types of shopping carts.
  • SPF Overview
    This article, the first of a two-part series, explains the concepts and trade-offs involved in SPF protection and shows DNS administrators how to set up SPF records.
    Source: Linux Journal
  • Splashup
    Edit your images on the fly online with Splashup, a web-based image editor that integrates with Flickr, Facebook, and Picasa. Splashup offers up a surprising array of image editing tools, far beyond the usual crop of resize and contrast– you can also edit multiple images, play with filters and layers, use a variety of brushes, and more. Splashup is one of the best image editors in a long line of image editors; i.e., Picnik, Pixoh, and Resizr, to name just a few.[Lifehacker Annotation]
  • Sprixi
    If you’ve been having trouble finding free or Creative Common-licensed photos for use in your projects, Sprixi filters out the fluff to help you find the images you really want.
    One of the frustrations of searching for anything on the internet, let alone images, is imprecise search results. If you’ve ever searched for something and found something completely different—usually because the file name or the associated keywords were strangely or inappropriately applied—then you know what we’re talking about.
    Sprixi helps circumvent the strangeness of file names and misapplied keywords by letting users vote on whether or not an image is really what they were looking for. Search for “school bus”, for example, and get some images of a micro-processor bus and you can flag them as not helpful to your search. Because thousands of users have come before you, analyzing the images, you won’t often find misplaced images. Search results are divided into sorted and unsorted images, with the sorted images on top—sorted in this case means that users have verified that the images do in fact contain the thing you are looking for.
    Sprixi currently pulls images from Flickr, OpenClipart.org, and from user uploads. Sprixi is a free service and requires no registration or login to use. [Lifehacker Annotation]
  • Stupid htaccess Tricks
    If there’s something you want to do with a .htaccess file, you will likely find out how on this page.
    Source: Perishable Press
  • Text Fixer
    This site features online text and html changing, modifying, converting tools designed to save you time making web pages or preparing text for web publication. If you’ve ever needed to capitalize sentences or convert line breaks to <p> or <br /> then this site can save you needless manual labor. There are other useful tools as well, like the one to uncompress html to make it readable and the ones to uppercase or lowercase text. Basically, the most common tasks that someone who works in an office or does freelance web development might encounter. Most of the tools have been created using javascript so you should be able to change large amounts of text as the processing is done on your computer instead of being limited by a server script.
  • The reliability of web servers
    The reliability of your host provider’s servers should be a constant concern to you. After all, you rely on their reliability to keep your business running. How can you tell just how reliable their servers are? Read this article and find out for yourself.
    Source: upperhost
  • The RSS Blog
    This blog is an excellent source of down-in-the-trenches RSS news, information and trends. While some of it may be a little too down-in-the-trenches for you, a recent visit to the blog led us to guides to the best practices for RSS, which literally contains every single technical detail you need to know in order to publish or troubleshoot your RSS feed. There was also a review of the pros and cons of the most popular RSS readers and updates on the latest tools and widgets from big players ranging from Google to MySpace. [WDFM Annotation]
  • The Ultimate RSS Toolbox
    As the name says, this is the ultimate RSS toolbox for every reading or publishing tool you might need. This includes a review of RSS readers by platform, mobile RSS readers, email to RSS converters, RSS feed formatting checkers, stat packages, ping tools and on and on.

    You will also find a well-rounded guide to RSS “mixer” tools. These mixer tools are basically RSS editors that allow you to blend RSS feeds from different sources together, getting on the feeds that correspond to your preferences, which are created by choosing and assigning keyword tags. You can also add in content from other media sources such as podcast or audio feeds. Publishers can use a mixer tool to create customized feeds culled from a variety of (accredited) sources for your subscribers. The benefit to your subscribers is that you are the discerning editor who merges specific content from multiple sources (including your own) to create feeds that are uniquely targeted to your readers’ needs. [WDFM Annotation]

  • thumbalizr
    With thumbalizr you can take screenshots of any webpage you want. Use it for your presentations, documentations, visualisations or your webpage. Just enter the target-URL and press the “thumb it”-button. Wait a moment and a screenshot of the desired page will be taken. You can choose between a screenshot with a fixed height of the screen or the complete webpage. That’s it! Just click one of the resolution-links (320, 640, 800, 1024 or 1280 pixel width) to download your screenshot.
  • TrackBack Technical Specification
    Six Apart’s trackBack technical specification
  • URL Rewriting
    A a great overview on how to rewrite URLs, Note that you will also learn the basics of regular expressions.
    Source: Ross Shannon
  • UrlTrends
    UrlTrends was developed to allow Webmasters, Search Engine Optimizers, and domain buyers to determine a website’s (or a specific page’s) rankings in the various search engines and directories. Based on this information you can make competitive analysis of any website with another website — and from this you could possibly determine whether your SEO tactics are positive or negative to your website; or, if you are a domain buyer, determine if a particular domain should be purchased.

    UrlTrends was designed from the beginning to have a different approach to viewing link popularity and other pertinent information. The theory was that webmasters would like to be able to see their link popularity stretched out over time, not just for the current day. This unique approach to viewing the information allows people to make a truly accurate judgment of the website and not be subject to artificial inflation that the instant link popularity reports suffer from.

    Currently, the Trend Report allows webmasters to view their linking trends for eight different search engines (Google, Alexa, Yahoo!, MSN, AllTheWeb, Alta Vista, Teoma and IceRocket), as well as the PageRank and Alexa Rank. A recent addition also allows our users to view the number of end-users of a website that bookmarked the website using Furl or Del.icio.us.

  • Use Apache’s mod_rewrite to make URLs more user friendly
    One way to discourage users from accessing a site is to give them long URLs to type in their Web browsers. Apache admins can simplify this process by using mod_rewrite to redirect complicated URLs to more simple ones.
    Source: TechRepublic – Create a multi-state image toolbar…
  • WebHostingTalk
    A very active forum for discussions about web hosting (dedicated, managed, and reseller hosting, co-location, virtual private server, and much more).
    Source: iNET
  • Whats Its Color
    Some of us have a great eye for complementary colors and matches–and then some of us still don’t understand why brown shoes and black pants are a bad idea. For anyone looking to set an image against a complementary background or find a color scheme, Whats Its Color (their grammar, not mine) is a free web app that can help. Upload an image and the site creates a palette page with a complementary background and a list of unique and dominant colors in your image. Photoshop and GIMP gurus might already know how to sift these kind of things already, but the visible color matching could be a boon for presentation slides or small design projects.
  • WhoIsHostingThis
    If you’ve ever wondered what hosting provider your favorite website uses, the WhoIsHostingThis web site can help. Simply enter the domain name of the site that you want to know more about, and WhoIsHostingThis will reveal and link to the web host in question. This application could be useful if you need to file a complaint for abuse of your copyrighted photos or blog posts, if you are tasked with researching the competition for work, or maybe you just want to host your personal website at the same place your favorite website does. [Lifehacker Annotation]
  • WHReviews.com
    Dan Lemnaru created this website to help you find a wide selection of independent reviews and comments to help you pick the right hosting company. This site will help you quickly find actual customer comments about specific hosting companies as well as reviews.
    Source: Dan Lemnaru
  • Wikipedia DomainKeys Entry
    The Wikipedia entry for DomainKeys.
    Source: Wikipedia DomainKeys Entry
  • Wikipedia SenderID Entry
    The Wikipedia entry for SenderID
    Source: Wikipedia DomainKeys Entry
  • Wikipedia SPF Entry
    The Wikipedia entry for Sender Policy Framework (SPF).
    Source: Wikipedia DomainKeys Entry
  • WordPress Trackback Tutorial
    When used properly, trackbacks and pingbacks are an excellent way to build links and traffic to your blog, as well as building relationships with other bloggers.
    Source: WordPress Trackback Tutorial by Teli Adlam, Teli Adlam | optiniche (December 27th, 2005)
  • WPClipart
    Don’t embarrass yourself by busting out the same tired stock clip art for your next Power Point tour de force. WPClipart has a pile of royalty free images to share.

    The archive currently has 23,872 images, covering thousands of subjects. A significant portion of them are in lossless formats. The site is organized into categories, but if casual browsing fails to find you the perfect gem you’ve been searching for there is always keyword based searches. You can even download the entire collection as a single archive, making it easier to use offline. [Lifehacker Annotation]

  • XML Sitemaps Generator
    This website will let you:

    • Create an XML sitemap format that can be submitted to Google to help them crawl your website better.
    • Create a Text sitemap to submit to Yahoo.
    • Create a ROR sitemap, which is an independant XML format for any search engine.
    • Generate an HTML site map to allow human visitors to easily navigate on your site.
  • Yahoo Pipes
    Pipes is a content creation tool (or “mixer”) that allows you to aggregate, manipulate, mashup, tag and filter content from around the Web. Content can be from a variety of sources such as RSS feeds, XML feeds, Google Maps, podcasts, Twitter, Flickr and other social sharing sites and so on. Your “pipe”, or content, is a unique combination of information that you filter, edit and publish for specific end users — either for yourself or your subscribers. Think of it as an old-fashioned clipping service that you can use for your own private edification… or you can take the compilation that this tool built for you and republish it on your site. Your blended feed showing snippets from other publisher’s feeds does show the source from which it came. Think of it as a byline.

    For example, you could filter incoming feeds and posts from all the best search engine marketing blogs and SEM resources using a keyword tag such as “Google AdWords tips” and get every tip from around the Web the second it is published (btw, that’s a valuable RSS feed to offer to your subscribers if you are an SEO firm). Or you could create your own brand protection mixer that monitors what the world is saying about your brand, company, product or URL in Google Blogs, Technorati, IceRocket, Blog Pulse, Yahoo News, MSN News and Google News. This is a must-watch trend for Internet marketers. [WDFM Annotation]