Macworld 2008 has come and gone this morning revealing some amazing new products. Say goodbye to netflix and blockbuster as Apple has announced it’s new movie rental service through iTunes. Read the blow by blow over at Engadget.

Here is a teaser from their big notebook announcement:

It fits in a manilla envelope!

Best CSS Tools

I found this article over at Technology Magazine.  Some great tools!

I found this great article over at Techlicious

Here is an excerpt:

Duh - does it even need an introduction? Google Analytics helps you learn even more about where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site. It makes it easy to improve your results online. Write better ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives, and create higher-converting web sites. Google Analytics is free to all advertisers, publishers, and site owners.

StatCounter is a free yet reliable invisible web tracker, highly configurable hit counter and real-time detailed web stats. Insert a simple piece of our code on your web page or blog and you will be able to analyze and monitor all the visitors to your website in real-time.

And the winner is… LOBORTIS File Hosting Service. There are a lot of hosting services out there. This is the first I’ve seen with a capacity of up to 5GB! Give it a try and let me know what you think. I did a trial run and it was very easy to use, quick and smooth and the success page was clear as day. It gives you 100 days before erasing off of their servers. My new favorite!

Here is a great article outlining the need for quality links that stand out in your web site or blog. The thrust of the article supports optimizing your web sites for scannability. Readers or viewers are quickly drawn to pictures on a web site, but they are also equally drawn to links because they are underlined and/or colored differently from the rest of your text. Here is an excerpt from the article:

Web design Tip #1: Links on Your Home Page

Unless you are web designing a site that is only made of 1 page, your home page should have links to all the other parts of your website. Bear in mind too that most online readers will scan through your home page much more than they are likely to read it, so you need to make sure that your links speak for themselves and are self-explanatory. However, avoid a home page that is made up only of links, and nothing else. Doing this will defeat the purpose of scannability; the links will no longer stand out. Also, never make your link title fancy or make your readers guess where the link will lead to. Your web design company will also be pleased if you put in links to the other general pages of your site.

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I found this article over at Virtual Hosting. What a great resource! Here is a quick link list. Be sure to read the original article.

1. Ergonosearch - accessibility and usability search engine
2. Sparkl - web design resources search engine
   
3. CSS Search - Quickly find CSS resources
   
4. Lurpo - “search engine for custom search engines”
5. DevX - search resources on web development
   
6. Rollyo - create custom search engines
   
7. Cake PHP Search Engine - search Cake PHP programming information
8. Web Designer’s Search - custom search for web design tools
   
9. DevSearcher - “programmers search engine”
10. Final Web Portal - searces for the best information on CSS, SEO, PHP, web design, hosting and programming
11. SEO Search
12. SEO Expert Search - expert advice on how to optimize your site for search engines
    
13. Webmaster Search Engine - searches through sites dedicated to web development
    
14. Search.net - get info on .net sites
    
15. Whois.net - information on domain ownership
    
16. Zippy - information for webmasters
    
17. Internet Archive - search through old internet sites

Check out this article on the 10 biggest web annoyances. I know you’ll agree if you’ve experienced any of these. My biggest pet peeve on the internet is Microsoft’s lack of respect for being standards compliant. Here is an excerpt about compliance from the Computer World article:

“Few things are more infuriating than going to a Web site and being told, ‘The page you have requested requires Internet Explorer to function properly.’

The historical origin of this problem is Internet Explorer’s incomplete (and sometimes incorrect) support for the core standards that are used to build Web pages. Because IE commands the largest market share among browsers, many Web designers build pages not to conform to standards, but to conform to IE. With Firefox’s success, more and more sites (with the notable exception of some Microsoft sites) work properly in Mozilla’s browser. But that leaves users of Opera or Safari out in the cold still. From online banking applications to newer Web 2.0-style sites, pages may not load properly on all browsers, which forces people to use different browsers for different sites.”

There are a plethora of blogs on the internet today. The figures range from 31-150 million. One of my favorite sites is Stumble Upon, which, sends you to a random site with the click of a button. I would say 70% or more of the stumbles that I do land on a blog. I have found a LOT of great websites offering design resources, tutorials and just plain good advice. The following is a small list of sites that I have discovered and want to share with you:

• http://www.oswd.org - Open Source Web Design. Great open source collective with over 2000 templates and counting.
• http://www.iconarchive.com - Icon Archive. All kinds of icons for mac and windows.
• http://www.flvix.com - Flvix.com. Video converter to extract clips from YouTube, Google, etc.
• http://www.mycelly.com - Free CSS Templates!
• http://fireftp.mozdev.org - FireFTP. Free cross-platfrom ftp client for FireFox.
• http://www.avivadirectory.com/color - Aviva Directory. “The Canonical List of Online Color Resources for Designers.”
• http://positioniseverything.net/css-dropdowns.html - Great little CSS drop down menu.
• http://www.powstock.com - Powstock. List of free and cheap stock photos.
• http://opendesigns.org - Open Designs. Free website templates from The Open Design Community (TODC).
• http://www.photoshoplab.com - Photoshop Lab. Photoshop tutorials!
• http://blog.html.it/layoutgala - Layout Gala. More free CSS templates.

I hope you have time to visit a few of these sites and take advantage of the great wealth of design knowledge available on the internet!

I just had to write about this one! Adobe recently came out with it’s latest version of Photoshop and it is everything the previous versions are and more (pardon my skill for pointing out the obvious). Some of the capabilities I have been experimenting with are photo extraction, color matching, photo re-sizing, text layer properties, image effects and much, much more!

An amazing feature of Photoshop CS3 Extended is it’s ability to pull images from other documents that contain pictures. Upon opening a document, such as a PDF file or word doc, you automatically get a prompt to view the whole page or one or all of the images contained in the document. This is a great feature for web designers working off of mock ups provided by the customer.

I am not the first person to be excited about MODx and I won’t be the last, so I thought I would continue to spread the word. MODx is a very powerful tool and very easy to use. I have found it easy to intuit because it just makes sense. It has a straight forward method of editing your html and css files that really functions like your using your ftp program to download edit and upload. The tags are simple and easy to use and get used to and there is a lot of support on the web. I was able to convert a custom template into a fully functional MODx template with no headaches or problems at all. There are all kinds of great snippets (read: plug-ins) available as well as “chunk” capabilities for those static sections of your website. Once your html has been converted you simply set up your directories to match your new template and off you go! I am new to this cms and I am hooked. I highly recommend checking it out!