The upshot is that the site has been almost completely rebuilt in a little over a week and I’m finding more an more to like about this system. Take a look at this introductory video showing how simple the editing interface is.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’m all for a system which makes life easier for end-users (fewer exasperated support calls, less training etc.) but Concrete5 does something which many other systems fail to do. There is very little back-end development experience needed in order to build themes for the system, though the solid MVC framework which underlies the software does give developers plenty of scope to play.

The following video demonstrates how quickly a static HTML page can be converted into a Concrete5 theme.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For me, the real value of this system is in the way it removes bottlenecks from the production process. The back-end developers can concentrate on adding bespoke functionality, rather than bespoking standard functionality. The front-end devs can build the front-end and the content suppliers can concentrate on populating content.

This is the best tool that I’ve added to my web-building kit since WordPress.

A Google Analytics API has long been one of our most widely anticipated features. Today we’re pleased to announce that the Google Analytics Data Export API beta is now publicly available to all Analytics users!

What’s so exciting about an API? The API will allow developers to extend Google Analytics in new and creative ways that benefit developers, organizations and end users. Large organizations and agencies now have a standardized platform for integrating Analytics data with their own business data. Developers can integrate Google Analytics into their existing products and create standalone applications that they sell. Users could see snapshots of their Analytics data in developer created dashboards and gadgets. Individuals and business owners will have opportunities to access their Google Analytics information in a variety of new ways.

via Google Analytics Blog: Web Analytics Tips & Tricks: Attention Developers: Google Analytics API Launched!.

It seems that the real-time search capability which Twitter purchased with the aquisition of Summize is now being integrated into the main user interface. 

The new sidebar features a search input, the results of which are displayed in the main body of the page. Searches can be saved so that they become available via a single click in the sidebar.

There is also a trending topics section so that you can see the most popular topics of conversation.

The Saved Searches, Trending Topics and Following sections can all be collapsed to clean up the sidebar when they’re not required.

Speculation: It could be that Twitter are trying to win back users from third-party Twitter apps. Increasing their pageviews in preparation for paid advertising?

Unified Social Media Search

These sites aggregate search results from multiple sites and services.

• SocialMention – http://socialmention.com/
• WhosTalkin – http://www.whostalkin.com/
• SamePoint – http://samepoint.com/
• Delver – http://www.delver.com/

Blog Directories and Search

Directories are a good way to find blogs by category although search is usually a better indication of the relevance of a blog’s content.

• Blog Catalog - http://www.blogcatalog.com/
• MyBlogLog - http://www.mybloglog.com/
• Twingly – http://www.twingly.com/
• Google Blogsearch – http://blogsearch.google.com/
• PostRank – http://www.postrank.com/
• Technorati – http://www.technorati.com/

Twitter Directories

These sites help you find Twitter users based on categories. The downside is that you can only find people who have added themselves to the directories but they can be a quick way to find relevant people.

• WeFollow – http://wefollow.com/
• Just Tweet It – http://justtweetit.com/
• Twellow – http://www.twellow.com/
• TwitterLinkUp – http://www.twitterlinkup.com/
• TwitDir – http://twitdir.com/

I’m sure I’m not alone in having been in situations where I’ve made an update and then sat refreshing the browser scratching my head as to why the update isn’t showing, only to realise that I’ve been looking at the live version rather than the development version of the app or site.

To avoid this confusion and to avoid the need for checking the address bar when checking edits, I’ve been using different color schemes for each deployment platform. This gives an instant visual indication of which version is being viewed.

In the following example from Ackura PressRoom, I did a quick search and replace in the CSS files for the app to change the standard color code for headings and links. I also switched the logo to add an additional label and to match the color scheme.

Local development copy

Staging environment

Live application

The downside of this is ensuring that the edited css files and images do not get copied when deploying updates. A solution to this would be to use override stylesheets that would be included dynamically acording to the host address for the page.

e.g.

mainstyle.css

h1,h2,a{
 color: #ff0000;
}

localcopy.css

h1,h2,a{
 color: #0000ff !important;
}

Then the header of the page could include something similar to this (pseudo code)

<link rel="stylesheet" href="mainstyle.css"/>
<?php if($hostname=='localhost'){ ?>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="localcopy.css"/>
<?php } ?>

This technique would give the advantage of having the visual indicator of which environment was being viewed whilst allowing the code to be deployed in its entirety.

Thanks to everybody who got in touch to say they were enjoying my web advent series. If you missed them here’s the full list:

1. Web Advent Day 1 – FeedBurner
   
2. Web Advent Day 2 – Social News
3. Web Advent Day 3 – Online Presentation Applications
4. Web Advent Day 4 – hCard Tools
5. Web Advent Day 5 – Mobile
6. Web Advent Day 6 – Mashup Tools
7. Web Advent Day 7 – Analytics
8. Web Advent Day 8 – Comics
9. Web Advent Day 9 – Tech Blogs
10. Web Advent Day 10 – Open Source Software
11. Web Advent Day 11 – Web Design Resources
12. Web Advent Day 12 – Geek T-Shirts
13. Web Advent Day 13 – CSS Tools
14. Web Advent Day 14 – Lightbox Clones
15. Web Advent Day 15 – Microblogging
16. Web Advent Day 16 – WordPress Themes
17. Web Advent Day 17 – jQuery Plugins
18. Web Advent Day 18 – iPhone Apps
19. Web Advent Day 19 – Cheatsheets
20. Web Advent Day 20 – Online Image Editing
21. Web Advent Day 21 – Sources of Inspiration
22. Web Advent Day 22 – The Twitterati
23. Web Advent Day 23 – WordPress Plugins
24. Web Advent Day 24 – Toys

Right then, I’m off for a mince pie and a lie down.

1. The “von Slatt Original” Keyboard
   Nothing says evil genius like a bit of steampunk on the desktop.
2. B-Movie Victims – I don’t know why I like these so much, other than the fact that – armed with these little bods – my Flickr account would start to fill up with shots from “Attack of the 50 foot coffee mug” and similar.
3.  Cyber Clean – it sounds more exciting than it is but anything that can get all of the crap out of my keyboard would be worth it.
4.  42 Utility Towel – as a fan of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy books since I was at school, I can’t help but like this, I like to think of myself as “a frood who really knows where his towel is”.
5.  USB Podcast Kit – I’ve toyed with the idea of creating a podcast, and done some video podcast stuff at work. So this little set seems like a great starter pack.
6.  BladeRunner 3 – This is one of the many indoor RC helicopters available these days, but very few of them have 3 channel control making it easier to fly in a seemingly controlled manner.
7.  I-Axe USB Guitar – having let my guitar playing skills wither and die over recent years, it would be fun to rekindle the fires of rock and unleash my inner axe-man. However being older than I was and having a couple of young children means that I would need to keep the noise down whilst grinding out face-melting riffs. This USB enabled guitar lets you use your PC as an effects rack and recording studio.
8.  Gorilla Pod – the best little tripod there is, stand it up or wrap it’s flexible little legs around stuff to cling on wherever you need it.
9.  Pogo iPhone Stylus – sometimes I find that my fingers just aren’t up to the job of picking out tiny links in safari on my phone, that combined with the frequent need to wipe the screen clean of greasy fingermarks means that a stylus would be a useful tool to have. Thankfully Pogo have managed to come up with just that.
10.  Selk Bag – Believe it or not, for holidays I quite like to go camping. For that reason the Selk Bag would be great, however I have an alternative reason for wanting one. Come Halloween, a yellow Selk Bag would make the perfect basis for a Gordon Freeman HazMat Suit costume – just add Black Mesa badges!
11.  Khet Laser Game – I like a good board game, and this one comes with lasers, yes actual lasers, could it have any better geek credentials than that?
12.  Mana Energy Potion – I confess that my limited gaming time means that I stopped playing WOW when the beta ended but that doesn’t mean that I don’t think these are cool. Tiny energy drinks disguised as mana potions.
13.  Mind Hacks – This book sounds fascinating, it’s in my nature to try and find out how things work (just ask my parents), and this book contains over 100 experiments, tips and tricks to help you to understand how the brain works.
14.  Miracle Berry Fruit Tablets – I like my food, I like to try new foods but these tablets temporarily re-wire your taste buds so that food you know tastes different. Apparently sour or bitter tastes will be transformed into sweet delicious things.
15.  Mini-Kaoss Touchpad Effects Processor – Sound toys don’t get much better than this, with a hundred effects at your disposal and a neat touchpad interface, it’s just what I need to compliment the Stylophone that i got last Christmas.
16.  Really Tiny Book Light – For me, there’s nothing better than a late night read. However in order to avoid disturbing the other half, this little clip on reading light looks like the business.
17.  I Am Not A Paper Cup – I’m a confessed coffee addict and I’m all for reducing waste, so this thermal porcelain coffee cup is a cool thing indeed. Modelled on the starbucks paper cups in double walled porcelain with a silcone lid, it’s reusable and kinda cool.
18.  Dot Robot – The first novel from technology writer and broadcaster Jason Bradbury, involving robots, gamers and crime fighting, it sounds like a fun read. Unfortunately not published until February, it’s available to pre-order from Amazon.
19.  Lynx 6 Robotic Arm – as a kid, I always wanted one of those programmable robot arm kits that seemed to show up regularly on Tomorrows World. This is exactly the thing I wanted – I don’t know what I’d do with it but I still want one.
20.  Wacom Cintiq 12WX Interactive Pen Display – I often find myself sketching ideas out on paper these days and then either scanning the pages or (when there’s no scanner available) taking a photo of the sketch to import into the computer. I’ve been considering the possibility of getting myself a graphics tablet for a while but this goes a step beyond. A combined screen and graphics tablet, this is like a digital sketchbook – fantastic.
21.  Vuzix iWear VR920 – Virtual Reality is back, Yay! OK so every couple of years a new VR technology comes along and  resolutely fails to set the world alight. Several years ago I had some of those LCD shutter glasses that hooked up to the PC graphics card but the effect was pretty horrible. These new breed are starting to look more like the business. Creating the effect of a 62-inch screen and having built in head tracking and microphone, these Geordie Laforge-alikes could be the FPS players’ dream kit. You will look stupid to anybody who sees you using them but it won’t matter because you won’t know they’re there.
22.  R2D2 DVD Projector – Have your own R2 Droid projecting feature films onto you wall whilst you control it using the Millenium Falcon shaped remote.
23.  Bullet Ice Cube Tray – When serving drinks this christmas and new year, stand out from the crowd, not with any old novelty ice cubes but with ice bullets! cool…literally.
24.  MacBook Pro – Despite having been a Windows user for many years (I used Macs in the mid-nineties) I’m thinking that it’s time to consider getting myself a Mac. The latest MacBook Pro looks lovely and so far I’ve not heard any bad reports about them – that’s not to say there aren’t any – I just haven’t heard any.

One of the joys of using discovering WordPress is finding a good combination of plugins to enhance the site. This list reflects both the plugins that I’m currently using and some others which I’ve not yet implemented but feel are worth investigating.

1. Akismet – Spam catcher for blog comments, it does an excellent job.
2. All in One SEO Pack – This plugin takes care of ensuring that your posts have keyword and description meta-tags and includes loads of features for tweaking your site to be as serach engine friendly as possible.
3. Broken Link Checker – A handy little tool which regularly checks all of the links on your blog and warns you of any broken ones. Includes a handy interface to change or unlink broken links without editing the full post or page. It does struggle with some redirected links but that’s not really the fault of the plugin.
4. Comment Approved Notifier – Very simply, if you are using comment moderation, this plugin will send an email to a commenter when you approve their comment.
5. Google XML Sitemaps – Since all of the major search engines agreed to support the XML sitemaps protocol, this plugin does everything you need to make sure that your content gets indexed as efficiently as possible.
6. Post-Plugin Library – This does nothing by itself but provides the common codebase for the following two plugins plus a couple of others.
7. Popular Posts – Using the Post-Plugin Library, this plugin will generate a list of popular posts on your blog, it features option such as matching the current post category and excluding the current post or excluding posts of a certain age.
8. Similar Posts – Displays a list of related posts for any post. Similarity can be based on any combination of word usage in the content, title, or tags. A useful way to let readers know about other content you have on the topic that they are reading.
9. ShareThis – Adds a discrete but highly functional sharing button to your posts allowing easy sharing and bookmarking for a large number of services.
10. Smart 404 – This plugin will attempt to find the best matching post if a requested page cannot be found. You can also use it to suggest a list of possible posts if no match is found. I use this to catch broken links which exist following the switch to WP.
11. Tagaroo – As you’re writing, Tagaroo analyzes the text in your post and suggests intelligent tags and images for the things and events you’re writing about. Powered by the Thompson Reuters Calais service
12. WordPress Database Backup – A useful tool to use just in case of technical failures. This will take a complete backup of your WordPress Database and either store it on the server or email it to you.
13. WordPress Reports – This is a great tool for monitoring blog performance, it provides a seven day overview of visitor stats and subscriber counts if you are using Google Analytics and Feedburner.
14. WP-Cumulus – A nice visualisation plugin which provides an alternative to traditional tag clouds, see the amazing tag-o-sphere on this site.
15. cforms – Use this to deploy contact forms on your wordpress site. Lots of options and features make this a flexible helper.
16. WP Super Cache – Speed up the site with this plugin which generates static pages to reduce the amount of database usage required.
17. NextGEN Gallery – An advanced plugin for organising and displaying image galleries.
18. UMapper – A plugin which provides a wealth of options for including maps in your blog posts, handy if you post on location specific things such as events.
19. podPress – tons of features for turning Wordpress into an ideal podcasting platform, iTunes optimisation, download stats and many others.
20. Wordpress Thread Comment – Make your comments sections threadable, individual comments can be replied to and the threads displayed accordingly.
21. WP-Gravatar – This plugin lets you use Gravatar, MyBlogLog, OpenAvatar, Wavatar, Identicon, monsterID or Favico.ico files with your comments. Also includes plenty of other features.
22. Category Icons – Assign icons to post categories for display next to post titles.
23. WP More Feeds – Generate RSS feeds for category and tag archive pages.

Twitter is rapidly gaining adoption beyond the early adopter set. Here are a list of people who I like following split into two groups – The Web experts and celebrities from other fields.

Web Expert Tweeters

• Jeffrey Zeldman – Web standards champion
  
• Paul Boag – Web design guru, award winning podcaster
• Drew McLellan – Web designer, developer, entertaining twitterer
• Molly Holzschlag - Web standards advocate, instructor, and author
• Dan Cederholm – Web designer and author, expert in standards based design
• Chris Pirillo - Geek, internet entrepreneur, live web videocaster
• Michael Arrington - Techcrunch editor, source of web news
• Andy Clarke – Web designer, author, speaker
• Brian Solis – US based Social Media PR expert
• Tara Hunt – Social Media guru, speaker
• Jeremiah Owyang – Social computing analyst for Forrester Research
• Kevin Rose – Founder of Digg.com, serial internet entrepreneur
• Neville Hobson – UK based Social Media PR expert

Celebrity Tweeters

• Stephen Fry  – I can’t bring myself to write a summary of who Stephen Fry is, as I couldn’t possibly do him justice. He’s been rightly described as a national treasure.
• John Cleese - actor, writer, comedian and Python
• Jonathan Ross – TV and Radio presenter, currently resting after an incident
• Robert Llewellyn - actor, comedian, broadcaster and writer who played Kryten in Red Dwarf
• Wil Wheaton - best known as Wesley Crusher on Star Trek, he’s a blogger, writer, stand-up comedian…
• Greg Grunberg - plays Matt Parkman in Heroes
• Brea Grant - plays Daphne Millbrook in Heroes
• MC Hammer - yes, seriously, MC Hammer of “U Can’t Touch This” fame
• Darth Vader - OK, so he’s fictional but very funny nonetheless

• Showcase Of Brilliant Comic Book Cover Art
  
• 50 Beautiful Examples Of Tilt-Shift Photography
• Beautiful And Original Product Designs
• Sexy, Bold And Experimental Typography
• Pixels Go Mad – The Celebration Of Pixel Art
• Excellent Book Covers and Paperbacks
• 35 Fantastic HDR Pictures
• Data Visualization and Infographics
• Funny and Creative Animated Videos
• Innovative Designs and Devices
• 50 Stunning Underwater Photos
• Behind the Design: 5 Stories of Great Inspiration
• Smoke Photography and Smoke Art
• 10 Futuristic User Interfaces
• 35 Beautiful Music Album Covers
• Top 10 Creative Ways To Display Time
• The Right Type: 5 Inspiring Typography Tales
• 60 Beautiful Music Videos
• Beautiful Examples of Moleskine Art
• 30 Unforgettable Movie Opening Sequences
• 50 Beautiful Movie Posters

Full Featured Editors

• Photoshop Express Adobe’s online version of Photoshop is a little light on features but gradually improving.
• Aviary This site has an entire suite of tools in development, The image editor is just one of these with a pattern generator, colour swatch designer and a new vector editing tool currently available.
• Pixlr is a competent image editor, interestingly exposes an API allowing application builders to integrate the image editor into their own apps. 
• Splashup
• Picnik
• FotoFlexer
• Snipshot
• Dr. Pic

Favicon generators

For website builders, creating a favicon sometimes isn’t worth firing up an image editor for. These tools will convert an uploaded image into a favicon file.

• http://www.favicongenerator.com/
• http://www.favicon.co.uk/
• http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/
• http://antifavicon.com/
• http://www.genfavicon.com/

Comic Strip Generators

My enjoyment of webcomics has already featured in this blog but if you have comic ideas but insufficient skill to draw the panels, you could use one of the online comic creator tools.

• Stripgenerator
• Comiqs
• Rok Comics
• ToonDoo

Other stuff

Other image generators for those less serious moments.

• LolBuilder – the LOLCats captioning tool on the ever-popular icanhazcheezburger.com.
• roflbot Similar to LolBuilder
• signgeneratormaker.com a list of generators for fake signage.

Basics

• XHTML [pdf] by Florian Schmitz
  
• CSS Cheat Sheet [pdf] by Dave Child
• JavaScript [ pdf ] another good one from Dave Child

Javascript Libraries

• JQuery 1.2 [ pdf ] by Adrien Gilbrat
• mootools 1.2 [pdf] from mediavrog.net
• Prototype 1.5.0 [ pdf ] by Jonathan Snook
• Scriptaculous Combination Effects [ pdf ] by Amy Hoy
  

Programming

• JAVA Language Quick Reference [pdf] by Jialong He
• .NET Format String Quick Referencee [pdf] by John Sheehan
• Core C# and .NET Quick Reference [pdf] by Stephen C. Perry
• JSP™ SYNTAX version 2.0 [pdf] from java.sun.com
• PHP Cheat Sheet [ pdf ] by Dave Child
• Ruby on Rails [ pdf ] by Dave Child

Databases

• MySQL Cheat Sheet [pdf ] by Dave Child
• SQL Server Cheat Sheet [ pdf ] by Dave Child

Other Stuff

• Microformats Cheat Sheet [ pdf ] from Suda.co.uk
• XSLT Cheatsheet [ pdf ] from Mulberry Technologies
• WordPress Theme Help Sheet [ pdf ] from wpcandy.com
• Google [ pdf ] from adelaider.com

1. Twinkle – A simple Twitter client, but as far as I know, this was the first client to use the iPhone’s location service to update your Twitter location and display Tweets from near your current location.
2. Hahlo – An online app which still ranks amongst the best clients for Twitter on the iPhone.
3. Twitterific – The third Twitter client in my list is a Swiss-army-knife for Tweets.
4. Last.fm – this application is a mobile version of the Last.fm music player, it relies on a Wifi connection so only useful at home or in the office for me.
5. Flickup – A Flickr client for the iPhone which enables full resolution uploads and automatic Geotagging in addition to adding a title, description and tags to the pictures.
6. BBC iPlayer – since iPlayer became iPhone compatible, I now regularly use it to watch TV in bed. Like Last.fm, it requires a Wifi connection to work.
7. Eventful – This application makes it easy to find out events that are taking place near to you current location.
8. iTalk Recorder – A high quality sound recorder which allows you to append a new recording onto an existing one.
9. Shazam – The service which listens to a clip of music and then tells you what it is. No more wondering what the music on that TV program or advertisement is.
10. Google Mobile App – an optimised way to access not only Google’s search services, but also, GMail, Google Reader, Google Docs and many others.
11. TimeTracker – A simple little application which tracks the time that you spend on any task. Cleverly doesn’t need to be running all of the time to track time elapsed on a task.
12. Brightkite – Brightkite is a location-aware social network which was something of a pain to use until the iPhone app was released so that you no longer need to search for your location to tell Brightkite where you are.
13. Facebook – This app has pretty much killed my use of Facebook in a web browser. Unfortunately it doesn’t let you use any of those fantastic Facebook apps. (Did you spot the sarcasm in that last sentence?)
14. LinkedIn – Facebook for professionals, another app that has nullified my need to visit the site with a web browser.
15. Galcon – This RTS game is amazing, especially when played with workmates over the local network. The great thing is, if you’re not doing well, it doesn’t matter – the games rarely last more than a couple of minutes.
16. Fieldrunners – A simple implementation of the desktop favourite Tower Defense, this game can soak up hours and it’s terribly addictive.
17. MazeFinger – Fast paced, load and fun, Play this just for the joy of hearing a robotic voice chanting “Awesome” at you.
18. Thereminator – It’s amazing how much fun you can have making weird noises with this, or in my case trying (unsuccessfully) to play the Doctor Who theme music.

1. jQuery Multimedia Portfolio -Non obstrusive and accessible portfolio supporting multiple media : photos, video (flv), audio (mp3), will automatically detect the extension of each media and apply the adapted player.
2. Pagination- Create navigational elements, when you have a a large list of items you can display them grouped in pages and present navigational elements to move from one page to another.
3. Ingrid - ngrid is an unobtrusive jQuery component that adds datagrid behaviors (column resizing, paging, sorting, row and column styling, and more) to your tables.
4. jWYSIWYG - This plugin is an inline content editor to allow editing rich HTML content on the fly.
5. jTruncate in Action - jTruncate provides simple yet customizable truncation for text entities in your web page.
6. Drop Shadows - Interesting Drop shadow effect generated by a jQuery Plugin
7. jQuery: CSV to Table – This plugin loads a csv file and creates a table with the contents in that csv file.
8. jGrowl – a jQuery plugin that raises unobtrusive messages within the browser, similar to the way that OS X’s Growl Framework works.
9. Colorize – a jQuery plugin to add background color to alternate table rows, highlight a row/column on mouse over, and colorize a row/column when you click your mouse button over it. You can colorize as many table rows as you want. A repeat mouse click reverts the row to the original background color.
10. jqGrid – The grid is a Ajax-enabled JavaScript control that provides solution for representing tabular data on the web. Since the grid is client-side solution and loading data dynamically through Ajax callbacks, it can be integrated with any server side technology.
11. jQuery Feed Menu - allows users to click your feed icon and be presented with a list of feeds to choose from.
12. jqChart - Ajax & Draggable Simple Chart on Canvas+jQuery.
13. jquery.biggerlink - A jQuery plugin to make it really easy to enable the specified element/s to behave as a proxy for their first contained link.
14. Ajax Manager -Helps you to manage AJAX requests and responses (i.e. abort requests, block requests, order responses).
15. Lazyload-Delays loading of images in (long) web pages. Images below the fold (the ones lower than window bottom) are not loaded. When scrolling down they are loaded when needed.
16. jQuery Tag Suggestion- The same tag suggesting as-you-type support that del.icio.us is uses.
17. Jcrop – a quick and easy way to add image cropping functionality to your web application. It combines the ease-of-use of a typical jQuery plugin with a powerful cross-platform DHTML cropping engine that is faithful to familiar desktop graphics applications.

*I use the word ‘Interestingly‘ under caution, perhaps ‘Geekily‘ would be a better fit.

Cartoonist Robert Crumb predicted Twitter in the 1960’s. (source: Christopher Herot)

1. Twitter – the original and still the most popular, it’s simplicity is key to it’s usefulness.
2. Jaiku – pretty much follows the same formula as twitter with the addition of attaching an icon to a post.
3. Plurk – An attempt to do things slightly differently, Plurk uses a timeline view for your own an friends posts and color codes different types of posts.
4. Identi.ca – based on laconica, an open source platform which supports the Open Microblogging protocol.
5. FriendFeed – part microblog, part aggregator
6. SecondBrain – More of an aggregator like FriendFeed, SecondBrain includes options for categorising your posts into collections.
7. Strands – Another aggregation based service, Strands also offers ways to automatically track the music that you listen to. There seems to be more on the way from this service too.
8. Seesmic – Video microblogging service, Seesmic is not starting to be integrated into blog commenting systems so that people can leave video comments.
9. Utterli – Utterli offers easy addition of video or audio to posts.
10. Present.ly – a private microblogging platform which allows posting to a group which can only be seen by selected members.
11. Yammer – another private microblogging platform, Yammer won this year’s TechCrunch50 prize.
12. Kwippy – features threaded discussions.
13. Rejaw – attempting to provide some powerful features without sacrificing simplicity.
14. Boobik – NSFW! Strictly for adults, this service is for people to share pictures, videos and talk dirty to one another.
15. Ping FM – Although not strictly a microblogging platform in itself, Ping FM allows you to post to multiple services at once including many of the ones mentioned in this list.

If you still want more then check out this big list of Twitter clones.

My personal favourite is Thickbox, because I generally use jQuery as my javascript framework and so-far, thickbox has always done whatever I needed to do. There are, however, loads of lightbox clones to choose from so here’s a selection.

1. Lightbox2
2. Lightbox+
3. LightBox Gone Wild
4. jQuery lightBox plugin
5. Leightbox
6. Greybox
7. Highslide
8. FancyBox
9. Facebox
10. Awesome Box
11. ibox
12. Multibox
13. Shadowbox
14. Prototype Window

The list covers a number of different variations on the functionality and javascript frameworks (or lack thereof), sorry there’s not more detail, hope to get back to form this week.

1. Firebug is an essential for testing and tweaking CSS designs, the ability to manipulate the rendered DOM, means that you can even test tweaks to script-generated markup.
2. Another FireFox add-on, the Web Developer Toolbar extension does many of the things that Firebug does but adds a few other little treats to the mix such as the ability to quickly deactivate stylesheets or background images for instance.
3. Vertical rhythm calculator This tool converts pixel values to em values depending on the font size of the text. You can also set margins and paddings, depending on the line height you’ve defined. available in the browser or as a downloadable Air application.
4. PSD2CSS Online An online service that generates Web pages from Photoshop designs. This is an impressive technical achievement with a growing list of features. By following the guidelines and naming conventions, you can precisely choose how the transformation from PSD to (X)HTML and CSS is done.
5. CSS Redundancy Checker You can use this tool to find CSS selectors that aren’t used by any of your HTML files, handy for trimmimg bloated files down to size.
6. CSS Text Wrapper make HTML text wrap in shapes other than just a rectangle. Great for creating stylish, magazine-type layouts.
7. CSS Sprite Generator This tool will convert a number of images into a single image and generate the CSS to create CSS sprites – elemnets which display only a part of a larger image. The benefit is that a single image download can reduce page load times.
8. MinifyMe This AIR application will compile multiple CSS and JavaScript files into one for optimising your site delivery.
9. CSS SuperScrub This tool aims to reduce the size and complexity of your CSS by stripping unneeded content, redundant items and intelligently grouping the remaining element names.
10. typeface.js This interesting development takes a different approach to rendering custom fonts in web pages. Rather than replacing the text with an image or Flash object, it uses the vector rendering capabilities of the browser to “draw” a specially converted version of the font.
11. Kotatsu A simple HTML table generator. The tool lets you attach classes to cells which is very useful for styling up tabular data.
12. Juicy Studio: CSS Analyser Juicy Studio’s CSS Analyser combines the W3C validation service with additional checks of color contrast (helpful for vision-impairment accessibility issues).
13. FormatCSS allows you to paste your valid CSS code, correcting and standardizing your source code.

Hat tip to Smashing Magazine for helping me find most of these.

Today, it’s a list of potential christmas gifts. Geeks love T-shirts, especially when they are clever, funny or both. References to movies, gaming, roleplaying and internet culture are all good so here are twelve that I’ve picked out.

Disclaimer: None of these are affiliate links so I don’t get anything for posting them here, I just like them.

ThinkGeek

Personal Soundtrack Shirt

Buy from ThinkGeek

WiFi Detector Shirt

Buy from ThinkGeek

Im in ur blank, customisable shirt

Buy from ThinkGeek

Science!

Robot

Buy from WearScience

Cheers

Buy from WearScience

Threadless

Robot Dance Contest

Buy it from Threadless

Damn Scientists

Buy it from Threadless

Stat City

Buy it from Threadless

Jinx

I’m only here because my server is down

Buy it from Jinx

The cake is a lie

Buy it from Jinx

Carpe Noctem – Seize the night

Buy it from Jinx

Cancel or Allow

Buy it from Jinx

A List Apart

An online web design magazine co-founded and published by Jeffrey Zeldman (see further down this list), A List Apart stands by it’s core value: “FOR PEOPLE WHO MAKE WEBSITES”. Featuring regular contributions from some of the top professionals in the industry, this should be in your subscription list if you have ANYTHING to do with building and managing websites.

http://alistapart.com/

Boagworld

Paul Boag is the creative director at Headscape, his weekly podcast, produced with Marcus Lillington has become recognised as one of the best web design podcasts, recently winning the .net magazine award for best podcast.

http://boagworld.com/

Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine’s aim is to inform their readers about the latest trends and techniques in Web development: clearly, precisely and regularly. Regular collections of great design and development resources make this an ideal source of inspiration as well as knowledge.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/

Vitamin

Founded by Ryan and Gillian Carson, Vitamin is another magazine format site with regular contributions from many highly regarded experts in their respected fields. Vitamin expands the topic base to include information for entrepreneurs and web start-ups.

http://www.thinkvitamin.com/

StylizedWeb

StylizedWeb is a site which blogs about current design trends and tutorials. It has a discussion forum which though not busy, contains some good information. The content of the site is quite biased towards WordPress Development and, though not regularly updated, still makes a useful resource.

http://stylizedweb.com/

SimpleBits

SimpleBits is a tiny web design studio founded by designer and author Dan Cederholm. Dan’s books are excellent but the value of this site mainly lies in the “notebook” – the SimpleBits blog.

http://www.simplebits.com/

Zeldman.com (Jeffrey Zeldman)

Jeffrey Zeldman was one of the first designers, bloggers, and independent publishers on the web, and one of the first web design teachers. The Daily Report is one of the oldest continuously published blogs.

http://www.zeldman.com/

Meyerweb.com (Eric Meyer)

Eric Meyer is a web standards advocate and author of several books on CSS. His site is stuffed with cutting edge web design ideas and techniques.

http://meyerweb.com/

BittBox

Published by Jay Hilgert, BittBox provides regular resources for designers, fonts, textures, Photoshop brushes etc. This is another great place for inspiration.

http://www.bittbox.com/

456 Berea Street

Roger Johansson’s articles, tutorials, and comments on web standards, accessibility and usability.

http://www.456bereastreet.com/

Web Design TV

.Net Magazine’s video podcast features regular tutorials using products such as Dreamweaver, Flash and Photoshop plus occasional interviews and product news.

http://www.netmag.co.uk/zine/podcast

Although there are many arguments over the safety of  open-source software over proprietory systems, most studies show that open-source software does have a higher flaw discovery, quicker flaw discovery, and quicker turn around on patches. Open-Source is no longer just for programmers’ hobby projects with many big players such as Google and Sun Microsystems stepping into the arena. Even Microsoft, a bastion of proprietory software, has seen the need to begin participating to a larger degree with the open-source community. Here are just ten of the great pieces of software available as open-source projects.

Firefox

Firefox delivers a full featured and mostly standards driven browser platform. It’s extensible architecture and thousnads of available plugins has made it a favourite amongst web developers and web power-users alike. It continues to gain in popularity despite plenty of other alternatives available.

OpenOffice

OpenOffice is a multi platform and multi lingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute.

Paint.Net

Paint.Net is free image editing and photo manipulation software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools

WordPress

WordPress is a web content management system, primarily designed for blog hosting, it can be easily used to manage many different types of website. The development community supporting wordpress is huge and diverse giving rise to thousands of plugins to provide additional functionality.

Drupal

Drupal is another web content management system, this one is geared to creating community sites with built in modules for managing user profiles, discussion forums and multiple blogs. Like WordPress it has an active developer community with lots of modules available to extend it with.

MediaWiki

MediaWiki is a free software wiki package originally written for Wikipedia. It allows collaborative editing on documents within a familiar interface.

Pidgin

Pidgin is a multi network instant messaging client which allows you to login to many different accounts at once. At present it supports sixteen different networks.

ThunderBird

Another development from the Mozilla Foundation, Thunderbird is an email client which helps you better manage your unruly inbox and scales to the most sophisticated organizational needs while making it easy to find what you need.

Miro

An open source video player, Miro can play almost any type of video file and also makes it easy to watch web-based content with thousands of channels to choose from, integrated bittorrent and the ability to save videos from YouTube.

MySQL

Last but by no means least, MySQL is the worlds most popular open source database platform. MySQL was aquired by Sun Microsystems in February 2008 but remains an open-source platform. Thanks to Sun’s financial backing, MySQL is now being taken seriously as an enterprise-level database platform in addition to being the platform for the majority of recent (and not so recent) web applications.

Looking for more

For further research, many projects are under development at hub sites such as Sourceforge, Codeplex and Google’s Project Hosting

Credit due to Lifehacker for some of these.

TechCrunch

http://www.techcrunch.com

The biggest and most authoritative site for tech news, enough said.

ReadWriteWeb

http://www.readwriteweb.com

A major source of web-related news. This site covers everthing that is likely to be of interest to web developers.

The Register

http://www.theregister.co.uk

A tech news site based primarily in the UK.

Mashable

http://www.mashable.com

A blog focused solely on social networks.

Engadget

http://www.engadget.com

Get the latest Hardware news and reviews.

Gizmodo

http://www.gizmodo.com

The Gadgets Weblog is like Engadget but slightly quirkier, Gizmodo seems to be happy to report what’s cool and unusual in addition to what’s new.

Boing Boing

http://www.boingboing.net

A Directory of Wonderful Things – Boing Boing brings an eclectic round up of stuff on the web that’s interesting and noteworthy.

Everybody Go To

http://www.everybodygoto.com

I’ve been following this one for quite some time and seen it develop into a very strong site. The articles cover Web Startups, Technology, Internet, Open Source, Web Applications, Blogging and Design.

Killer Startups

http://www.killerstartups.com

Killer startups is an endless list of new web startups with quick reviews of their offerings, this is often the place to hear about stuff long before it becomes newsworthy enough to appear in the likes of TechCrunch.

XKCD

Described as “A webcomic of romance,sarcasm, math, and language.” XKCD combines geeky subjects with a healthy dose of surrealistic ideas and musings on the human condition. Not having an ongoing story, it’s a great comic to dive into at random.

PVP

The popular geek-culture related Webcomic by Scott Kurtz. PvP follows the lives and adventures of the staff on a fictional gaming magazine.

Penny Arcade

Equal parts comics and commentary, Penny Arcade features Tycho and Gabe, the alter egos of creators Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Read about the antics and thoughts of the Penny Arcade crew, updated every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Perry Bible Fellowship

The Perry Bible Fellowship was once produced on a weekly basis for newspapers such as the UK Guardian, the Ottawa Express, and the Baltimore City Paper. Currently it’s creator, Nicholas Gurewitch, is taking a break from drawing the comic, but it’s another good one to browse randomly.

Update – 17 Dec 08: The PBF website is currently offline, hopefully this is a temporary state of affairs.

Real Life Comics

This semi-autobiographical comic by Greg Dean puts a funny spin on life as a typical modern day geek. In addition to the everyday real life stuff, there are regular jaunts into an exagerrated world of Greg’s creation.

Little Gamers

Created by Christian Fundin & Pontus Madsen, Little Gamers is rude and crude but regularly delivers the laughs and topical subject matter.

HijiNKS Ensue

Joel Watson’s Hijinks Ensue uses geek pop-culture references to make fun of other geek pop-culture references. If you are into SciFi, Technology, Comic Books, Cartoons, 80’s TV, Non 80’s TV or geek-life in general you should find something to laugh at here.

Dilbert

Although not originally a web-based comic, Dilbert chronicals a bunch of office cubicle dwelling stereotypes. The well observed humor should strike a chord with anybody who works in or has ever worked in a corporate office environment.

Google Analytics

Free, easy to implement and packing enough power to satisfy most general analytics requirements. Google Analytics has had regular additions to it’s functionality and is soon to provide an API.

Clicky

Clicky provides an API allowing you to easily do more with the data collected. Like Google Analytics, it provides a customisable dashboard, but for monitoring on the move, it also has an iPhone optimised interface.

CrazyEgg

CrazyEgg provides a wealth of imaginative visualisation options for your data and also alows you to run specific tests. If you are monitoring site analytics on behalf of a client, there are options to share branded reports with them.

Mint

Mint has an extensible architecture with a number of third party add-ons available. This is a great choice if you want to track more than just the usual website performance statistics.

Woopra

Woopra is a more heavyweight application. It runs through a rich client application and is optimised for monitoring multiple sites at once. In addition to providing real-time monitoring, it also allows you initiate a chat session with a visitor to the site. This could be used to serve a customer service function as well as just analysis.

Enquisite

Enquisite is an analytics package tailored to help with search marketing campaign monitoring. It’s PPC monitoring and alerting can help to detect and act upon suspected click-fraud or problems with how your search ads are served. It also provides rich tools for market trend analysis and geo-specific analysis.

BLVD Status

A fairly new application, BLVD Status aims to provide analytics optimised for search and social media marketing. There are some very clever looking tools for analysing referals for external sites.

Yahoo Pipes

Pipes is one of the most popular tools for creating simple mashups, possibly due to it’s reasonably intuitive interface. I used it recently for an experiment in trying to find appropriate images to illustrate a twitter feed.

Zembly

Zembly from Sun Microsystems is a slightly more technical mashup builder. Like Yahoo’s pipes, it allows you to publish components and use components published by others, however it’s end delivery is far better defined. Zembly is geared towards creating apps for various platforms such as Facebook apps, Meebo apps, OpenSocial apps, iPhone apps, Google Gadgets, embeddable widgets, and other social applications. It does require a reasonable knowledge of javascript and HTML in order to build anything, but offers a wealth of powerful functionality.

Dapper

Dapper provides a specific but vital service in mashup building. A service for extracting information from the web in a re-usable form. This could be as simple as creating an RSS feed from a site to building an API for working with published data.

Microsoft Popfly

Popfly is Microsoft’s mashup builder, it’s nicest feature is the way that components can be plonked together in a purely drag & drop kind of way, or you can drill deeper and add code to implement more complex functionality.

WSO₂ Mashup Server

WSO₂ Mashup Server provides a more heavyweight platform for building mashups. It has facilities for creating secure APIs for existing datasources in addition to being able to consume external services and data sources. This is much more of an Enterprise-level offering.

Google Mashup Editor

Google Mashup Editor is a framework for building mashups using Google’s extensive collection of APIs. The end results usually rely on users signing in with their Google account but for creating gadgets for iGoogle, it’s a good option to try.

Thanks have to go to Dion Hinchcliffe for helping me research these.

Mippin

Mippin offers a service to turn your syndicated web content into a mobile optimised web site. Mippin’s mobile portal also helps to publicise your content to mobile browsers.

Soocial

Soocial is a service which makes it easy to manage and synchronise contacts across multiple devices and programs. It worked seamlessly for me on my old Motorola L7, better than trying to type out names and addresses on the tiny keypad.

Brightkite

Brightkite is a location aware social network. Still in it’s infancy, it’s become much better with the introduction of an iPhone application so that you don’t have to manually tell it where you are every time you check in.

SpinVox

Spinvox is a mobile service which will convert a spoken message into text and deliver to a specified location, blog, email, text message etc. The service uses manual transcription to avoid mistakes and seems to be well liked by a lot of people.

Qik

Saving the best for last, Qik (in my opinion) is one of the most amazing developments in mobile web technology I’ve seen. The ability to stream live video from a mobile phone to the web and get real-time feedback revolutionises the concept of instant publishing. Robert Scoble’s impromptu invitation to the Twitter HQ and subsequent live-streaming of the interview was a great example of online video-journalism.

The hCard microformat is an XHTML adaptation of the vCard standard, it is used for representing people, companies, organizations, and places. Here are four resources to get started and make the most of hCard.

hCard Creator

Starting with the simplest resource, microformats.org’s hCard creator simply requires you to fill out the forms and then copy and paste the generated code into your web page.

hCard Validator

Once you’ve created your hCard formatted content, you can use this unofficial validator to make sure it checks out OK. Options to check fragments or entire pages make this a nice flexible option.

Technorati Contacts Feed Service

For a simple way to extract hCard information from a web page for use in your contacts application, Technorati provide this simple service to scrape a webpage for any hCard formatted contact information and returns a vCard file which is compatible with most contact managers (email clients etc.).

Operator Firefox Extension

This Add-on for the Firefox browser will alert you to the presence of several different types of microformat and offer actions for each one depending on which format is found. This is a useful tool for research, making data gathering a much quicker process.

Tomorrow’s post – Mobile Web Resources.

SlideRocket

SlideRocket have built a very slick presentation application which incorporates the advantages of being web-based (flickr photo search etc.) with the ability to take a cached copy of a presentation to play in an offline player, meaning that you are not reliant on a web connection in order to present. The collaborative aspects work well allowing presentations to be shared publically or by password. You can also share presentations, images or individual slides with other SlideRocket users creating a large pool of content to choose from.

280 Slides

280 Slides has steered clear of adding too much advanced functionality and focused on ease-of-use. For many people this will be the fastest of these applications to dive in and start using.

Empressr

Empressr is an application which differentiates itself through social network integration tools, in addition to a wealth of sharing options for embedding presentations in Facebook, Myspace and others, they also have the facility to import live tweets from twitter into a presentation. Brave presenters could import live feedback as part of their presentation.

Social Median

Social Median has been growing thanks to some excellent examples of getting the users involved in reviewing and shaping varius elements of the site. By implementing the ability to follow other users and incoporating “@” replies in the comments system, they have created much more of a community feel than you might find on other sites. Social Median’s adoption by some fairly high profile social media personalities such as Louis Gray and Michael Fidler is surely a vote of confidence in the continued usefulness of the site.

Twine

Twine is more of a bookmarking service, which allows you to create “Twines”, essentially themed collections of links to resources. By subscribing to targetted Twines, you can be sure of getting updates related to a very specific area of interest.

Both of these sites are great resources for research and breaking news. If you’ve not tried them yet then take a look and see what you think.