yoda knows I can use all the inspiration I can get…
I need to redesign my dance website, have been promising the magnificent Ava a redesign for years, and need to get going on my friends’ band’s website.
http://mashable.com/2009/03/16/design-inspiration/
I predict eventually, Twitter will overtake Facebook in popularity, but it will take a while… most people don’t really understand Twitter or how it can be used to your advantage. But as Jimmy Falon’s experiment shows, Tweets are ideas spreading like wild fire.
Granted, the first few days you really get immersed in Twitter you can easily lose yourself to time suckage. (Do I really need to know that Imogen Heap is craving pancakes? Or that Kevin Pollak is Tweeting during a big Hollywood meeting? Actually, that’s pretty cool…)
But the more you use it and see how others use it, the more productive you can become.
For instance, I used to visit about 50 different sites a day for news, entertainment, web stuff, etc., now I just follow the Twitter feeds all in one place. In theory this is what RSS readers are for, but that always felt very oppressive and overwhelming to me for some reason.
The trick is to find information worth following — search.twitter.com and the below tools can assist with this.
I’ve only checked out about 10% of these links, so I’ll be coming back to this post as well:
http://www.onlinebestcolleges.com/blog/2009/100-twitter-tools-to-help-you-achieve-all-your-goals/
what really, really challenges me… it looks fine in Firefox, but not IE…
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/03/06/10-fixes-for-ie6-problems/
I knew about a couple of these, but the rest were extremely helpful.
http://net.tutsplus.com/site-builds/how-to-create-a-wordpress-theme-from-scratch/
to come back to — in all my spare time 
I came across this website through Smashingmag’s Twitter feed. You just never know where the helpful resources are going to come from.
In addition to being the most successful web design podcast Boagworld also has a free chapter from his web designer’s manual book available.
I saw this website mentioned on Web Designer Wall’s ‘Best of CSS Design 2008.’
This one in particular caught my eye. It’s unique, colorful and the theme makes me want to navigate the site and use the website:
Something to come back to during coding breaks when I need some inspiration…
I just recently saw a training class offered on Lynda.com (if you don’t know that site, you should check it out — really great tutorials on just about anything computer related)… for Adobe Kuler – and had never heard of that before. It’s a tool/site devoted to color schemes for just about any project (web, print, etc.). For those programmers who are somewhat color blind, perhaps other designers can lend a hand to your color scheme:
Had my first of 2 nights of CSS class through Boulder Digital Arts last night:
http://www.boulderdigitalarts.com/training/details.asp?offering=86
my instructor has a wealth of knowledge and experience, now if I could just retain all the knowledge…. much of the information is review for me, but there are a few magical tricks and hacks that I’ve already gleaned from his class and links from his website:
http://www.macwebguru.com/
And of course as soon as I get a good handle on the standards, they will change… such is life in the techie world.
Perhaps for a few, brief, flickering moments, CSS will flow easily and productively. I can hope!
Read this interesting whitepaper today:
http://www.mcafee.com/us/local_content/reports/2009_threat_predictions_report.pdf
Even though my specific job duties don’t involve a lot of trouble-shooting of this kind, it’s still good to know the threats out there and how to combat and prevent them.
Not only is Layers magazine helpful to read, but the artwork and advertising are very visually appealing and provocative.
Adobe also knows you can’t just publish a magazine ~ you need continually new and interesting, online, interactive features as well.
I go to the site every couple weeks to glean a little knowledge:
http://www.layersmagazine.com/building-css-based-layout-in-dreamweaver.html
