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Web Domains: Tools To Use, Articles To Read
June 28th, 2007 in Developer's Toolbox | 60 Comments
A thought-out domain name can save you a lot of time and bring you a lot of traffic. Search engines love topic-related domain names and they seem to be an important aspect which is being used to evaluate web-pages. Besides, if you have a popular web-site with enviable reputation, you might be willing to make sure that your visitors don’t get to some surprising web-sites mistyping your site’s URL. An overview of related resources is therefore both useful, handy and time-saving. Apart from that: apparently, domain names handling can also be a successful business, you just need to know what trends are coming and which terms will be important in the future.
Let’s take a look at essential, hand-picked domain-related tools, articles and resources we’ve found in the Web during our research.
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21 Fresh, Usable and Elegant Wordpress Themes
June 26th, 2007 in Design Showcase | 178 Comments
Sometimes it’s just amazing to see, how developers use creative approaches to design amazing layouts, based upon a simple Wordpress template. Every now and again we take a look around, and select Wordpress themes, which offer thought-out design, flexible template structure and conform to the basic principles of usability. The choice is big enough, but the search is worth it. We invest our time, browsing through dozens of web-sites, news aggregators and design-communities and put enhanced solutions together, so you don’t have to.
Let’s take a look at
2123 fresh, usable, simple and and elegant WordPress themes, which have been released over the last few months. Among other things, we’ve also selected some of the new minimalistic solutions - all of them make use of clear and precise typography. They’re definitely worth a look.You can also take a look at
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80+ AJAX-Solutions For Professional Coding
June 20th, 2007 in Developer's Toolbox | 333 Comments
Web-developers can create amazing web-applications with AJAX. Stikkit, Netvibes, GMail and dozens of further web-projects offer a new level of interactivity we’ve used to give up the idea of. Modern web-applications can be designed with enhanced user interfaces and functionalities, which used to be the privelege of professional desktop-applications. AJAX makes it possible to create more interactive, more responsive and more flexible web-solutions. And it’s the first step towards rich internet applications of the future.
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML isn’t a new programming language, as it is often mistakingly called. Basically, AJAX is a set of XHTML, CSS, DOM, XMLHttpRequest and XML, put together and used together for the same purpose - to improve the user-server-interaction.
- To understand the idea behind AJAX, you should read Jesse James Garrett’s article “Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications” and Wikipedia: Ajax;
- to learn the basics of AJAX, you should go through some AJAX tutorials we’ve presented previously;
- to learn more about professional CSS coding, you should visit 70 Expert Ideas For Better CSS Coding;
- and to get a powerful and handy CSS-Toolbox for your future projects, you can use 53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without.
In this article we’d like to present a list of over 90 useful AJAX-based techniques you should always have ready to hand developing AJAX-based web-applications. Auto-completion, instant field editing, menus, calendars, interactive elements, visual effects, animation, basic javascripts, as well as an extensive developer’s suite should give you a useful and powerful toolbox you can use every day, without a need to go through hundreds of AJAX-related bookmarks.
You may also want to take a look at the article 60 More Ajax and Javascript Solutions For Professional Coding.
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Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful
June 14th, 2007 in Graphics | 79 Comments
We love creative favicons. Their beauty lies in the approach a designer has chosen to put something really unique inside of the 16×16px box. Designing favicons, it’s necessary to work with miniature images, and every extra pixel can be the wrong one. A good favicon is original, beautiful and - in best case - fits to the logotype and color schemes used in the web-site. Creating them is a challenge not every designer is able to cope with. It’s hard, but not impossible. In fact, many creative solutions are possible, but it’s damn hard to come up with some of them once you need them.
Sometimes it’s enough to rescale the logo to an appropriate size, as shown by Xpanity Favicon:
If rescaling doesn’t provide optimal results, you can try to extract some parts of your logo and bundle them together, like Kijiji did.
We’ve collected some of them - 40 gorgeous, creative and visually appealing favicons you can use as a source of inspiration, e.g. if you have a creativity block. Images are linked; to visit the page with the favicon you like, just click on it.
You can find further favicon-showcases in the posts we’ve published before:
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40+ Tooltips Scripts With AJAX, JavaScript & CSS
June 12th, 2007 in Developer's Toolbox | 170 Comments
Web users love informative clues. Whatever questions and misunderstandings might occur - delivering precise answers immediately is the primary task a responsive user interface should be able to cope with. To do that, developers have to consider subtle and well-thought tooltips - used correctly, they can greatly improve user experience and help users to get things done. In Web such “responsive” hints can be provided by tooltips. E.g., unclear input fields in web forms are perfect examples of a situation you might be willing to use a tooltip for.
We’d like to thank Jurgen Koller for compiling an extensive list of tooltip scripts we’ve stumbled upon during our search. It gives many useful pointers, but we’ve managed to find some more. You might be willing to use Koller’s post as a quick reference for your search.
Let’s take a look at 43 handy tooltips scripts for intuitive and well-designed visual clues. It’s nice to have them all in one place, once you need them. It’s nice to be able to find them, once you don’t have time to search for them.
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7 Brilliant Free Fonts: Faceplate, Sling, Cicle
June 8th, 2007 in Fonts | 54 Comments
Every month we take a look around, browse through dozens of fonts collections and select most irresistible typefaces released recently. We collect most beautiful high quality freeware fonts, which can be used for private and/or professional projects without any restrictions whatsoever. If you’ve tried to find them once, you know how time-consuming the search can be. Indeed, these beauties can be quite hard to find, but the search is definitely worth it. We search for them. So you don’t have to.
- You can subscribe to our RSS-feed to keep track on our next posts.
- You can find more free fonts in the post Five More Freefonts: ChĂșcara, Preface, Colaborate we’ve published recently. It contains links to over 55 more free high quality fonts.
- Free Fonts of the Month: Geo Sans, OT Versa, Diavlo: 5 more brilliant free fonts for your collection.
Let’s take a look at 7 free high quality fonts we’ve come across over the last 30 days.
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Sideblog
David Leggett shares 5 Pixel Popping Techniques for Adobe Photoshop. Among them the 2 pixel divide effect, the pixel shadow and the shadow highlight.
The most memory efficient browser is Firefox 3.0. Not only trumps its older version, but every other popular offering on Windows. Sam Allen's findings.

Everyday Icons offers over 30 sets of beautiful patterns and icons for free download. Some of them are just sexy. 
Finetuna is a free service that allows you to upload an image, comment on it and share it with clients and co-workers. Firefox-extension is available as well. Useful.
Designers can design everything. For instance, packing tapes. Examples of pretty and clever packing tapes designs.
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Tiles Generator generates tiles, patterns and stripes on the fly.
Envelope icon set features a variety of different envelopes and folders of different sizes. Available only as .eps.
Hyphenator is a Javascript that implements sophisticated, automatic, client-side hyphenation. It inserts soft hyphens using an algorithm commonly known from LaTeX and Openoffice. Useful.
To comfort your visitors with a pleasing and intuitive composition use the Golden Ratio Calculator for your designs. More on this topic.














