I would like to share 25 Most Useful Blogs for Web Design and Development. Almost all of them are daily updated, and cover a wide range of topics including inspiration, design trends, tutorials, interviews, website showcase, programming techniques and resources. Add them all to your RSS reader and receive these useful information every day.
Subscribe to all of them by importing this OPML file (Right-click and Save as)
GoMediaZine is a group of guys and girls who are passionate about art and graphic design. The blog filled with lots of helpful tutorials and advice about business and design. (RSS)
WebDesignerWall serves as Nick La’s public blog where he posts his design ideas, tutorials, and talk about modern web design trends. (RSS)
Veerle Pieters is a graphic/web designer living in Belgium. Veerle’s Blog is an online source for topics ranging from XHTML/CSS to graphic design tips. (RSS)
Fubiz site is focused on the subjects of the graphic world. You can get some really inspiring and creative pictures from Fubiz. (RSS)
AdGoodness showcase only the best advertising and design around the globe. This site is there to start a conversation, to inspire, to enjoy great work, or to just talk about what your views are. (RSS) Read the rest of this entry »
Google Ventures seeks to discover and grow great companies, they believe in the power of entrepreneurs to do amazing things. Google Ventures is broadly interested in startups in industries including consumer Internet, software, hardware, clean-tech, bio-tech, health care and others.
They invest anywhere from seed funding to tens of millions of dollars and embrace the challenge of helping young companies grow from the garage to global relevance. They’re looking for entrepreneurs who are tackling problems in creative and innovative ways. Are you one of them?
Source: http://www.google.com/ventures/
Are you interested in developing some plugins for Chrome too? We have seen lots of browser plugins for Firefox at the moment, it would be nice if we can see some nice plugins for Chrome as well.
Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, has published an article about “How to Write a Chrome Extension in Three Easy Steps“. Here is a brief introduction of how to write your own Google Chrome extension in three steps:
1. Install the developer-channel version of Google Chrome
It takes maybe 3-4 minutes, you basically run a small program to indicate your preference. The developer version also gets new features (such as pressing “F11″ to get full-screen mode) way before the beta/stable releases of Chrome.
2. Read the initial documentation
Extensions currently have very Greasemonkey-like functionality: you identify which web pages should be modified, plus JavaScript to be added to those pages. Your plugin has to have a unique identifier. And you have to bundle your extension directory into a “.crx†Chrome Extension file.
3. Try it out
If you’re running the developer version of Chrome, you can install the “hello world†plugin from the extension howto page just by clicking to download the .crx file. Then type “chrome-ui://extensions/†.
Source: How to Write a Chrome Extension in Three Easy Steps
Have you migrate your feeds hosted on Feedburner to Google’s servers yet? We have just completed the migration one week ago, and It looks like my feeds are working normally. All of us should perform the migration as soon as possible because Google has announced that they expect to get all the feeds transferred by February 28, and after that day Feedburner feeds will start reporting a 404.
Feed Compare and Feed Analysis has released new versions that support migrated Google Feeds recently. You can analysis the growth of your own feed and compare it with your competitors. However, if you have not completed the migration yet, they are not working for you. So, what are you waiting for?
Source: http://www.blogperfume.com/feed-analysis/
Source: http://www.feedcompare.com/
The SitePoint online CSS and HTML references have been available for some time now, and have already become a valued source of free information for web designers and developers around the world. Recently, Sitepoint has announced a shiny new look to the SitePoint Reference Site and the highly anticipated first release of JavaScript Reference Information.
The look and feel of the old reference site has been completely replaced with a brand new slick, easy-to read design, including interactive examples, improved navigation, page layout and much more…
Source: SitePoint CSS, HTML & JavaScript Online References
A while ago, we had a Comparison Between Zend and CakePHP Framework. A lot of our readers have given us some valuable opinions about these two frameworks. Now we are going to look at how Glenn Vanderburg compare Prototype with jQuery, and why he still prefers Prototype to jQuery.
He concluded that jQuery is a very nice piece of work, and makes some common tasks easier than their Prototype equivalents. Where it’s good indeed. But its design is uneven, and its scope is limited.
For him, at least, Prototype is still the tool of choice. he thinks it’s a richer, more thorough, and overall better designed library. You can view the detailed comparison of Prototype and jQuery here.
Glenn Vanderburg does not intend this to be an anti-jQuery screed. Neither is it an exhaustive comparison of Prototype and jQuery. Simply put: praise has been lopsided in favor of jQuery of late, and he feels like singing the praises of his personal favorite.
Please feel free to share your opinions about these two most popular JavaScript libraries.
Source: Why I still prefer Prototype to jQuery
More and more applications these days are migrating to the Web. Without platform constraints or installation requirements, the software-as-a-service model looks very attractive. To compete with desktop applications, Web apps must offer simple, intuitive and responsive user interfaces that let their users get things done with less effort and time.
In the past we didn’t cover web applications the way we should and now it’s time to take a closer look at some useful techniques and design solutions that make web-applications more user-friendly and more beautiful.
SmashingMagazine presents the first part of our extensive research on design patterns and useful design solutions in modern web applications. You’ll find a collection of 10 useful interface design techniques and best practices used in many successful web-applications.
Source: 10 Useful Web Application Interface Techniques
FreebiesDock is simply a collection of completely free design resources. All the products you’ll see there were created exclusively for FreebiesDock and you won’t see them anywhere else. There are hundreds of “free downloads” websites, but most of them provide poor quality services.
Paul Kadysz is the proud founder of FreebiesDock who wants it to be different. It provides some quality free downloads includes WordPress themes, Website templates, Royalty free icon sets, Royalty free stock photos and Design related articles.
Requirements: –
Demo: http://freebiesdock.com/
License: License Free
Browser Security Handbook is meant to provide web application developers, browser engineers, and information security researchers with a one-stop reference to key security properties of contemporary web browsers. Insufficient understanding of these often poorly-documented characteristics is a major contributing factor to the prevalence of several classes of security vulnerabilities.
Although all browsers implement roughly the same set of baseline features, there is relatively little standardization – or conformance to standards – when it comes to many of the less apparent implementation details. Furthermore, vendors routinely introduce proprietary tweaks or improvements that may interfere with existing features in non-obvious ways, and seldom provide a detailed discussion of potential problems.
Browser Security Handbook currently covers several hundred security-relevant characteristics of Microsoft Internet Explorer (versions 6 and 7), Mozilla Firefox (versions 2 and 3), Apple Safari, Opera, Google Chrome, and Android embedded browser.
Open-source test cases provided alongside with this document permit any other browser implementations to be quickly evaluated in a similar manner.
Requirements: –
Demo: http://code.google.com/p/browsersec/
License: Apache License 2.0
ThemeForest has a nice feature; It allows the authors to upload zip files containing screenshots of their themes. A script then extracts these files and displays the images accordingly. NETTUS has shown us how to open zip files with PHP.
First of all, we create a simple upload form that allows the user to select a zip file. Ensure that the user chooses a zip file, and then save it to as a unique file. And then, extract the contents from the zip file and save them to a specific folder. And finally delete the zip file and echo out the contents.
Source: How to Open Zip Files with PHP
