ldopa.net

Honestly, I could play with “Blueprints” all day.

~jeff

I’ve played around with a lot of these ‘AJAX gallery/overlay’ kinds of things, but GreyBox strikes me as perhaps the most flexible. You can overlay text, pictures, video, animations and even other websites on top of your own page. The author’s Python-powered AJAX CMS ‘Skeletonz’ looks pretty cool too.

UPDATE: also worth pointing out is the nifty new swfIR JavaScript + Flash image enhancement suite. Not to be confused with sIFR, the kind-of-a-pain-in-the-ass Flash font replacement, swfIR will take your pictures and scale them, round their corners, rotate them, and add drop shadows. This stuff is only getting better and better.

~jeff

Gorgeous XML/PHP chart generation tool available here; available as a freebie (with restrictions) or as a licensed download. If you’re writing code for the web that has to generate charts of any sort, take a look.

~jeff

I’ve been doing a lot of CSS work lately, and along with the ever-useful “Web Developer” Firefox extension, I’ve recently become enamored of “Firebug” as well. It’s got a pretty incredible feature set, with the crown jewels being live editing of HTML of CSS. Check it out; it’s must-have extensions like Firebug that keep me coming back to Firefox, which just goes to show you, allowing your product to have extensibility is always a good move.

~jeff

Until we have the nifty rounded corners of CSS3 compliant browsers, web designers will have to resort to CSS skullduggery to get nicely rounded corners. Cornershop is a lovely interface for clear instructions on how to make your own rounded corner boxes, without a whole lot of foolish shenanigans and rigmarole.

~jeff

Nifty webtool showing you the live results (and giving you the code!) of your CSS manipulations. Like my beloved CSSEdit, but on the web.

~jeff

Very clean vector line art symbols and pictographs available for download right from the National Parks Department. Use them to clearly mark the hiking trails and boat launches in your apartment.

~jeff

Very useful search engine for royalty free photography — I especially like the color matching function. Found via this article at IBM Developerworks on free resources for broke-ass web designers. I’m paraphrasing.

~jeff

Thanks to the ever awesome Bill Alatalo for turning me on to stock.xchng, a wonderful search engine of decent quality royalty-free photos.

Also good for cheap-ass cheapskates like me: iStock Photo, which isn’t free but is certainly cheap-ass. Both are better than trolling Flickr’s inefficient Creative Commons search engine or even worse, the terribly lame search engine on the Creative Commons site.

~jeff

Lussumo has just released version 1.0 final of their new open-source discussion board CMS, “Vanilla“. I played around with it the other night, and so far, it looks like a winner — prettier, more functional, and more easily extensible than phpBB. Most impressively, it’s got a simplicity and elegance of design that shows all the way through, from the front end UI to the back end code.

Mark my words, this app is going to become the “Wordpress” of discussion boards. What I particularly respect is the decision to “one-down” the competition by modularizing the add-ons so, much like Firefox, the software can be as simple or as complex as the administrator desires. That’s smart, insightful and thoroughly modern thinking in software design.

~jeff

Nifty tutorial on how to make those trendy abstract desktops. I’m stuck on step 5.

~jeff

I’m not sure why Apple didn’t put this into the OS themselves, but this nifty color picker allows you to ascertain the freaky HTML hex value for any color you can, um, pick. I still prefer the crayons, myself.

~jeff

Josh asked me a while back if it was possible to make a .swf with an alpha (transparency) channel — I said I didn’t think so, but I was wrong, although it’s a feature often being used for evil and not good. Por ejemplo, on this page, there’s an iTunes ad which often appears on the left hand side which actually extends into the text in the center*. In a disconcerting intrusion, at some point the ad actually smashes a guitar and whips a headphone cord over the text; cool, technically, but from a readers’ perspective, godawful horrid.

(link fixed, thanks Trevor!)

~jeff

*probably using the z-index feature of css, although I haven’t actually checked the code.

Max Design has a logical, methodical, pleasingly lucid breakdown of how to lay out a web page using CSS — I wish every step-by-step technical walkthrough on the internet was half as well-written and copiously illustrated as this.

~jeff

Looking for some old daguerreotypes or sepia-toned tintypes to liven up your site? OMFG me too! Let’s both visit fromoldbooks.org for some lovely public domain scans from old books.

~jeff