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links for 2010-12-21

  • Helping people like you learn to use Comic Sans appropriately.
  • This is my final blog post for The Atlantic. Five years ago, as a way to boost the competitive metabolism of The Hotline, Chuck Todd hired me away from ABC News to create "Hotline On Call." I was to be the first political reporter working for a mainstream news organization whose output would be exclusively online. "On Call" made its debut in early September, the same week that Chris Cillizza began "The Fix." Back then, reporters didn't blog. Newspapers and magazines hired curators to update their websites, and reporters would occasionally post online, but there was a strict separation based on platform. You were considered legitimate only if your byline appeared in print. You were considered a blogger if it didn't. And you didn't want to be a blogger, because bloggers back then were second-class citizens of the country of journalism. Bloggers were partisan activists, yellers, provocateurs and upstarts.
  • It was announced today that Yahoo is shutting down the popular social bookmarking service Delicious. So we thought we’d help you out with some solutions to export the bookmarks to other services. Users have a few different choices. You can choose to export your bookmarks into an html file and import them into your browser or directly import using services like Diigo, Xmarks and Faviki. Export Your HTML After logging into Delicious users can export the bookmarks along with their tags into a single html file. This file can then be added to most browsers by opening the bookmarks tool bar and locating the “import “ feature. On Firefox an import can be achieved by going to Bookmarks > Bookmarks toolbar > click on the icon with the star> import.
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    links for 2010-12-10

  • It’s no secret that we love textures and patterns here at WDL. They’re great for easily adding lots of interest and depth to a design, whether it be a huge background pattern or just some subtle textures here and there. So to continue our “Best of 2010? series, this week we’re covering textures and patterns. We’ve seen a lot of them this year, but some really stood out. So here’s our picks for best textures and patterns of 2010. We picked our favorites, but tried to include a mixture of styles.
  • The Web Design Ledger is a publication by web designers for web designers. We cover a wide range of topics such as Photoshop, web design, photography, programming, and more.
  • "Tron: Legacy" is a high-tech 3D adventure set in a digital world that's unlike anything ever captured on the big screen. Sam Flynn , the tech-savvy 27-year-old son of Kevin Flynn, looks into his father's disappearance and finds himself pulled into the digital world of Tron more »where his father has been living for 25 years. Along with Kevin's loyal confidant Quorra, father and son embark on a life-and-death journey of escape across a visually-stunning cyber universe that has become far more advanced and exceedingly dangerous.
  • The web and its related disciplines have grown organically. I think it’s safe to say the web is not the domain of just the geeks anymore—we all live here. And those of us who work here should have sophisticated, native tools to do our jobs. A little over two years ago, I started reflecting on the web as a design medium. Coming from a print design background, most of what I knew about design was still applicable; but the things that weren’t made a huge difference. What came of this was a presentation I gave at a few conferences (the abbreviated 10-minute version of which you can see on Vimeo). The discussions that followed prompted me to look closely at how the creative process—and the tools we use—affect designing for the screen. The framework for what a page is has changed considerably even in the past few years, though our applications for designing those frameworks are still stuck in the web of yore, and largely dictated by their use for print design.
  • I’m not sure about you, but I still favour using Photoshop to create my designs for the web. I agree that this application, even with its never-ending feature set, is not the perfect environment to design websites in. The ideal application doesn’t exist yet, however, so until it does it’s maybe not such a bad idea to investigate ways to optimize our workflow. Why use Photoshop? It will probably not come as a surprise if I say that Photoshop and Illustrator are the applications that I know best and feel most comfortable and creative in. Some people prefer Fireworks for web design. Even though I understand people’s motivations, I still prefer Photoshop personally. On the occasions that I gave Fireworks a try, I ended up just using the application to export my images as slices, or to prepare a dummy for the client. For some reason, I’ve never been able to find my way in that app.
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    links for 2010-04-28

  • About a month ago I was reading the New York Times online and they had an article which showed a road in Brooklyn that had been reconstructed to make it safer and more pleasing to the eye. To show the difference in the reconstruction project, they showed a before and after picture using Flash that let the visitor drag a slider over the images, which were sandwiched with one on top of the other, so that you could easily see how dramatic the changes were. I immediately thought that this could be done in JavaScript using jQuery, so I set out to do it.
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    links for 2010-04-12

  • This DNS utility is provided by ZoneEdit.Com, the industry leader in DNS and domain mangement solutions. Click here to sign up for a free, no obligation trial of our dns services. Click here to use our SMTP test utility. Click here to use our global whois utility (domain ownership info).
  • The use of patterns in art and design projects are varied and well known. There are many sources from where you can find free raster or bitmap patterns, but there are not much when it comes to good high quality free vector patterns. So, in this post, we have listed a compilation of good quality and useful free illustrator vector patterns for download. To edit the patterns in Adobe Illustrator, you can access the Patterns in the Swatches panel.You can customize existing patterns and design patterns from scratch with any of the Illustrator tools. There are many advantages of using seamless vector patterns. It is scalable to any sizes without any loss of resolution and you can change the colors, fill, stroke to suit your project. Thus, making it completely editable, modifiable and flexible.
  • When it comes to typography on the web, there seens to be very little proper use or variation of particular glyphs and punctuation marks. For example, an abundant use of three periods (…) for an ellipsis instead of … (…), or – in place of — (—). As such I have decided to devise a table of glyphs, their uses and common misuses and their HTML entities to allow web developers to add some style and correctness to their typography.
  • Is having a dedicated IP address critical for achieving great Google rankings and if an IP address is shared among many sites, is the PageRank for each site diluted? This is, believe it or not, still a very common question in the SEO world, despite the search engines addressing these concerns. Over at DigitalPoint a reader asks: Does anyone have any current knowledge and or real life experience with the importance or lack of, having a dedicated IP address for your hosting account as far as Google Page Rank and other search engines are concerned? If you have 1 IP address and you add on domains, does that dilute page rank or trust? If it is shared and someone else’s website that shares the IP address gets Google slapped, does that impact my website or blog? One reader refers to the 2006 post on the Matt Cutts blog which references a statement by Google’s Craig Silverstein in 2003 :
  • Sometimes I find things on the internet that leave me speechless with their awesomeness. And considering it’s my job to find crazy stuff all day long, that’s actually saying something. But today I am bowing down to “The A-Z of Awesomeness,” a series of illustrations by Neill Cameron, where he takes each letter of the alphabet, crafts an absurd sentence around it, then brings it to life with an excellent drawing as you can see above. There are 25 more epic letters to go, and you must check them all out below:
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    links for 2010-02-19

  • As of today, we have decided to make using Aviary's suite of editing tools FREE for everyone. At Aviary, we believe that everyone in the world should have access to powerful creation tools. We therefore chose our company mission to be We make creation accessible to everyone. Our powerful set of tools helps fulfill this mission by enabling small businesses, students, artists & creators across different genres. As a business, we did need to bring in revenues to cover our costs and development and to accomplish this we created a tiered pricing plan for certain types of uses. Although this was financially successful for us, the side effect of this was that our tools and their features (in their full capacity), were not truly accessible to everyone. We have long felt that to better serve our core mission our complete feature set needed to be in the hands of everyone – not just those who could afford it. Fortunately, our recent round of funding (by Spark Capital, Bezos Expeditions & other
  • To convert a file located on your computer : Check File mode, click Browse and choose the file, select input format (if autodetection fails) and output format, submit the form.
  • Although CSS is generally considered a simple and straightforward language, sometimes it requires creativity, skill and a bit of experimentation. The good news is that designers and developers worldwide often face similar problems and choose to share their insights and workarounds with the wider community. This is where we come in. We are always looking to collect such articles for our posts so that we can deliver the most useful and relevant content to our readers. In this post, we present an overview of useful CSS/jQuery coding tips, tricks and techniques for visual effects, layouts and web form design to help you find solutions to the problems you are dealing with or will have to deal with in future. You may want to look at similar CSS-related posts that we published last months:
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    links for 2009-12-09

  • A mysterious light display appearing over Norway last night has left thousands of residents in the north of the country baffled. Witnesses from Trøndelag to Finnmark compared the amazing sight to anything from a Russian rocket to a meteor or a shock wave – although no one appears to have mentioned UFOs yet. The phenomenon began when what appeared to be a blue light seemed to soar up from behind a mountain. It stopped mid-air, then began to circulate.
  • Today we have a review of some of the additional design features you may wish to consider adding to your blog in order to make it visually more appealing and also to make for a better overall user experience. I get a lot of emails about design – it appears most people can install a nice wordpress blog – especially when using the easy install feature that is available on the Cpanel at Hostgator.com and adding themes such as those available at Woothemes.com However it appears a good number of you would like to Jazz up your Blogs – make them more striking and impacting. This post is for those people. For each feature we have suggested, we have also included a screen-shot of that feature in action on some of our favorite blogs. Just one word of warning here — we are presenting you with 20 different features to consider, but this does not mean you should actually use all 20 features. I am a huge fan of customizing your blog and making it as individual to you as possible (bearing in mind
  • Web designing is an art. It is always to learn from the best in the field especially in a dynamic world like Web Design where today’s design become anachronistic by tomorrow. Ergo, Here is a list of the best tutorials to implement latest trends among the web designing community to help you stay in sync with your web designs.
  • Here we go again … our latest list of the 100 best websites sees short attention spans, the rise of Twitter, more browser wars and celebrity gossip sites setting the news agenda
  • Recently I came accross various websites filled with quotes from designers & artists from around the world, insiprational quotes to get you thinking. In this article I have selected various top design quotes that apply to my experience and gives me power to be creative and think foward. I have also asked several fellow bloggers about their favourite design(ers) quotes and the feedback was a very positive and the inspiring list of quotes are embedded in this article. Please join in and add your favourite design(ers) quote in the comments, thank you very much!
  • In May, I wrote about how to negotiate your salary. I argued that following the advice in Jack Chapman’s Negotiating Your Salary: How to Make $1,000 a Minute is one of the best ways to improve your financial well-being. I still believe it. If you’re looking for work or looking for a raise, you should absolutely read his book. But negotiation is a skill you can use in other parts of your life, too. In fact, in You Can Negotiate Anything, Herb Cohen says that we negotiate constantly with our spouses, our children, our parents, our co-workers, and our friends.
  • Every month we’re scanning the web for fresh blogs delivering quality content in the design-dev-freelance community, and these are the 10 entries for September. Yeah, I know, don’t have enough room in your RSS reader. Well, delete some old feeds :]
  • Speed Tracer is a tool to help you identify and fix performance problems in your web applications. It visualizes metrics that are taken from low level instrumentation points inside of the browser and analyzes them as your application runs. Speed Tracer is available as a Chrome extension and works on all platforms where extensions are currently supported (Windows and Linux). Using Speed Tracer you are able to get a better picture of where time is being spent in your application. This includes problems caused by JavaScript parsing and execution, layout, CSS style recalculation and selector matching, DOM event handling, network resource loading, timer fires, XMLHttpRequest callbacks, painting, and more.
  • Originally, I started a blog about Star Wars. Slowly it deviated out to other stuffs too and somehow turned into my mindless chatter,whatever comes to my mind. I enjoy collecting toys and collectibles. So this is still ultimately a toy blog! Aquarium Fish Keeping has been my longest surviving hobby. Enjoy playing RPG games on DS and PSP. Loves to photograph animals and nature. In love with dark mint chocolates and chilli crabs!
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