Evernote is a program to help you remember things. Think of it like a post-it not that you wear on your forehead all day.

Microsoft CSS Vendor Extensions

It looks like Microsoft IS actually doing work on IE8, They just beefed up their CSS support. It actually looks pretty promising so far. Looks like their goal is for full CSS 2.1 support and then branching into CSS3.

Measuring SEO: why rankings are worthless

A pretty good read from Yoast about what you should really be focusing on with SEO.

A List Apart

New issue of A List Apart this week, always a must read.

10 Principles of the PHP Masters

Another on from NETTUTS about some tip and best practices while working in PHP

Some sites to be aware of:

Script & Style

Script & Style is a new site by Chris Coyier and David Walsh. The best way I can describe it is like subscribing to the CSS/JS search term RSS feed on Digg, but a little more interesting. There are user-submitted articles, like Digg, but you don’t have to filter out all that Digg-esk junk like articles about hamburger grease and bicycle chains. You just get the stuff you want. I like it, at least subscribe to the RSS feed, it’s well worth the visit.

Google Chrome bugs – Alternate Style Sheets and Max/Min-width

The big news for the week seemed to be about Google’s web browser, Chrome. Everyone seems to love it (I couldn’t install it on my parallel, I’ll try on Vista later on), but there are some bugs reported with it. I guess that’s why Google leaves everything in Beta for a decade.

Animation Jump in JQuery

When I first saw this quick tip from JQuery for Designers I really didn’t see a major need for it. But as I kept seeing it in my news feed it actually grew on me. It creates a nice sliding effect for anchor links, worth poking around with. I really don’t like dumping a ton of JavaScript into my pages, but for a JS light page, or an FAQ, this might be a nice feature.

Using JQuery UI to Control Text Size

I love Nettuts, every week they come out with some really cool tricks. This is one of those things that is a really nice tool to have in your library just in case you need it. I could see this being very useful for reading documents online or just zooming in on an app.

Automatic Awesompersands

YAJQPI I guess, but I kind like this one. It searches through your content to find and restyle ampersands, giving them a hip designer/small coffee shop look by wrapping a span around them (sidenote: are we using spans too much with jQuery?).

JavaScript in Modern Web Design

Web Designer Wall is a pretty popular blog (more so than this one), so I’m sure most have seen this already, but it’s still worth mentioning just in case. Nick La lists out and describes virtually every JavaScript you will commonly find in web design today. If nothing, it’s a great reference list.

Today seemed to be a little JavaScript heavy, but I guess that’s what’s going on right now as we’re all in our JQuery phase.

Most people I ask about inspiration will say something like "Inspiration is everywhere!" Which is true (like telling a sprinter to run faster… thanks coach), but not very helpful when you sitting in a cubical or office and you need to build a comp. And I know, when I’m sitting in a coffee shop relaxing, that last thing I want to do is look around for inspiration or wait for it to hit me.

For many years I’ve taken inspiration and creativity for granted, but when you go through a time where the ideas aren’t firing at you as fast as you’d like, you have to seek them out. Recently I’ve have to do that; so I thought I’d share my sources.

EDU Style

EDU Style is a new source I found. University sites usually have a pretty distinct style, as they convey a different message than most blogs or corporate sites. This is a great source for ideas.

Design Meltdown

Design Meltdown is a neat gallery run by Patrick McNeil. Thousands of sites to look through. Patrick McNeil gave a real good talk at FOWD08 about finding inspiration, you can view his presentation slides on SlideShare.

Daily Design Workout

Daily Design Workout is a very interesting project. Jonas Buntenbruch posts a new design every day, mostly images, but a very good source of daily inspiration.

Flickr 7days

Flickr 7days shows a random assortment of images that have been uploaded to Flickr in the last 7 days. It’s neat to look through, and every once in a while you’ll run into a cool picture you can grab some ideas from.

Twitter public timeline

Millions of people all over the world use Twitter every day, and a lot of them post links. Just go through the public timeline and click some of the links people post, check out the design; you never know what’ll be there.

OpenID site directory

The OpenID site directory is a fairly comprehensive list of all sites that integrate OpenID. It’s a massive list of web sites, why not click around?

Doing a Google search for "CSS Gallery" will turn up some good sites too (like cssmania and css beauty), but I think most us know about those, so I opted to leave most of them out of my list.

A neat source for typography inspiration is any magazine you can get your hands on. Magazines use so many different typographical styles that by just looking through a few different ones you can a ton of ideas to apply to your site(s).

Those are just a few things I’ve done to try and get out of a design slump, hopefully they’ll be helpful for you.

Where do you get YOUR inspiration?