Surfin’ Safari: CSS Animation

Personally, I think animation should be left to JavaScript, but this is actually pretty neat, you have to download the open source version of WebKit to see it, but it’s definitely worth a look into the future of CSS.

Get Your Flickr ID

I’m currently building a refreshed version of cssKarma.com and I want to display my Flickr photos on the site, but I couldn’t find my damn ID to grab the JSON feed. This is a neat little app that can quickly get your Flickr ID.

20 Tips for better Conference Speaking

Cameron Moll lists out 20 great points on how to grab your audience while speaking. Since I know I have this problem from time to time, I thought this was an excellent read and very share–worthy.

Aviary

Aviary is like an online version of PhotoShop. But that’s not why they’re on this list, I think I’ve actually posted this link before; but now they have a real slick new navigation menu that I LOVE. Check this out, it’s very interesting.

Something else to read over: XRDS

This morning it occurred to me that I haven’t written a post about my RSS feeds. I’ve been meaning to for about a year now, but for whatever reason it hasn’t happened until now. I rely on my feed reader for a lot of inspiration so I feel like I should share that and maybe promote some great sites at the same time.

I Break my feeds into 2 categories: Work & Fun

Work

• 465 Berea Street
• A List Apart
• Authentic Boredom
• Cindy Li
• CSS Juice
• CSS-Tricks
• CSS3 . info
• CSS Newbie
• David Walsh
• Design View
• del.icio.us [CSS tags]
• Digg RSS search results [CSS]
• Elliot Jay Stocks
• For a Beautiful Web
• Hicks Design
• Jeff Croft
• jQuery for Designers
• Kyle Fox
• Meyerweb
• Mezzoblue
• Net Tuts
• Noupe
• Ordered List
• Pab’s Corner
• Position Absolute
• Script & Style
• Signal vs. Noise
• SimpleBits
• SitePoint
• Smashing Magazine
• Snook.ca
• Stop Design
• styl.eti.me
• TechCrunch
• Usability Post
• Vector Tuts
• Vitamin
• Web Designer Wall
• Yoast
• Zeldman

Fun

• Chris Coyier
• ESPN > MLB
• Ian and Star
• Obama Blog
• Planet Marly
• The Onion
• xkcd

So, that’s all of them. Did I miss any big ones? Let me know if there’s some great resource we should all be reading.

10 Tips to Improve Your UI

Smashing Magazine, once again, has a great article about user interface. This article gives you some quick and helpful tips on improving your user interface design. A lot of stuff we should all be doing.

Anti-RSI

This is a Mac program to help prevent RSI (which is basically carpal tunnel). I saw some pictures of people with RSI, it’s gross and looks very painful. I use Anti-RSI now, and I think you should as well. I’m not posting the pictures, but if you Google it, I’m sure they’ll turn up.

Helpful hyperlinks with JS

An article from the boys over at SitePoint. This bit of JavaScript will pop an icon on the end of your links, letting the user know what they’re about to click. This can also be done with CSS 2.1, but by using JavaScript we’re making it available for… well let’s just say it… IE6 users.

CSS Deployment 101

Reinhold Weber talks about how to compress a CSS file before you push it to the server. this will shave off some load time by reducing everything to one line and removing much of the white space. It also allows you to modularize your CSS without it effecting HTTP requests, because this script will also combine all files into one once it’s on the server.

Equal Height Columns with jQuery

A very useful bit of jQuery creating equal height columns. Pretty slick integration, I’ll be using this.

Web Directions North

Web Directions is a conference I went to last January, it was very cool. Possibly the best conference I’ve been to so far. It’s coming back this February in Denver; if you have the means, I highly recommend it.

Good Practice in Pagination

Smashing put out a good article on a topic that I think gets overlooked a lot when dealing with user interface. A lot of times it’s taken for granted, but pagination is an important page of the UI.

Freshbooks

Freshbooks is a service for the freelancer out there. It’s a fast way to track time and invoice your clients. I currently use Harvest, but I really like how Freshbooks deals with invoicing

35 Fireworks Tutorials

I use fireworks and there are NO good tutorials out there form e. So I was THRILLED to find this link. Photoshop is great and all, but it’s a program meant for web & print design. Being a person who doesn’t do any print design, a lot of the features in Photoshop are just cruft to me, so I happily use Fireworks.

Freelancer Magazine

Freelancer Magazine in the newest edition to my feed reader. THey have all sorts of great advise for the freelancer and a lot of stuff that’s just good to know. Highly recommended.

I assure you, I’m not sponsored by any of these sites or services.

Better CSS Font Stacks

A good article on how to jazz up your stacks to try and take advantage of users who have more fonts installed. I’m all for this, and as long as it’s done carefully, can get a nice version of progressive enhancement.

5 Terrible SEO Ideas

Richard Bradshaw goes over some trendy (and terrible) things that are common in SEO such as: keyword stuffing, dupe content, link farms, splash pages, and cloaking.

Fun with Overflows

I think this is a great idea (check out the demo). It creates a very similar interface to that of Plurk, the twitter competitor.

Tweet What you Spend

This is a pretty cool service that uses the Twitter API to track spending. I know it can seem kind of geeky (as is reading articles about CSS…), but tracking your spending is a great way to save money, it gives you a lot of power when you know exactly how your paycheck disappears every month. Provided you don’t mind sharing your expenses with the Twitterverse, this is a good service and very easy to use.

One Click, The Importance of UI

Many times my link lists back up a few weeks and I have to revisit an article to really remember what it was about. When I did that to this one, I moved it up to the top of the list. It’s a very interesting article on user interface and the importance of the click. A must-read in my opinion.

Pixel Precision with Diagnostic CSS

A technique for mocking up a design.

Mint Analytics

Analytics software I found while muddling through the An Event Apart web site.

Successfully Present Your Web Designs to Clients

Dave Woods put together a nice article in response to Andy Clarke’s article on static visuals. I’m linking this one up because I think a lot have already read Andy’s and I think Dave did a nice job on this one.

Feature your Products with jQuery

This is a cool jQuery trick from a blog I just started reading a couple weeks ago.

Writing Maintainable CSS

Unfortunately, my link posts are a little backed up right now, so this is probably a week old at this point. But it’s a direct link to the slide show on writing maintainable CSS. I disagree with some of it, but overall, a good presentation.

Space Madness

Ariel is, from what I can gather, awesome, and a consultant for NASA. In this post she described how Twitter is being used on Neptune!

jQuery Seek Attention Plugin

The jQuery seek plugin is very cool. It goes along with the css psuedo class "target". It’ll highlight an area on the page onClick and ca bring a great pop to a page. Give this one a try, I could see this being very useful for those long FAQ lists.

Google’s android vs the iPhone

With the release of Google’s android phone, there are already comparisons to the iPhone. This video lays it out real nice and tells you what you have to look forward to with Android.

Avoiding the Pownce Effect

There seems to be more and more twitter–killer sites out there and, for the most part, they all fail. This article takes a look at why Twitter is so powerful and some things to avoid.

3 CSS classes you should all have

Let me save you some time: .left, .right and .clear. This is something most are already including, but I always think it’s helpful to see what others are doing.

Opera Web Standards Curriculum

Ever since Opera accepted that no one uses their browser for general browsing they’ve been huge activists for the semantic web, and this yet another example of what they’re doing to help the web evolve and educate the masses. Kudos to Opera. This should be required reading for all new developer/designers and even clients.

jQuery How To’s

This is a great list of specific things and how to do them with jQuery.

Fluid

Fluid app is something I’ve been looking into for a little while now. I normally wouldn’t put this up here, because it’s a mac–only application; but it seems really neat. It creates desktop apps from web sites, like a bunch of little stand alone browsers in your doc. It does a similar thing to Google Chrome, by modularizing your web apps so if one crashes everything doesn’t fail.

Digital Web Magazine

I don’t know exactly how this site evaded my RSS reader for so long, but it’s a very informative ‘zine about the web. When I first saw it I read through a few articles and really liked what I saw.

Hngry

Hngry is the lunch time app we all wanted, but are too lazy to build. It’s very nice, but it needs a lot more data.