Share Something Really Useful!

[dopey220]

I'll start. Here's a Dashboard widget that generates Lorem Ipsum. I use it several times a day:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/reference/loremipsumwidget.html

Also, this is a cool article with lots of great inspiration. I'm pretty good with PS so I don't really read a lot of the tutorials, but the screenshots are a good way to quickly fill your head with ideas:

http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/tutorials/90-new-and-high-quality-photoshop-web-layout-tutorials/

 

[digitalField]

its a pretty opened ended question... and i know the idea is to spur conversations but, sadly, opinionated assertions are what usually get people going.. like if you had posted 'The most useful thing in the world!' then im sure you would have gotten lots of responses from people with 'more useful things'

but ill share my useful thing.
To make your cakephp app detect mobile visitors add

$this->RequestHandler->isMobile()

it will return true if the viewer is on a mobile device, then you can serve up mobile friendly content.

 

[dopey220]

Here's another thing I like to do:

/*

colors:

orange: #f57319
red: #e13741
green: #91c84b
aqua: #3cdcc8

*/

List my color palette at the very bottom of my CSS file, for quick reference.

 

[John444]

Something I find useful is to make your footer and menu (if its not a drop down) iframes, so that you only need to update the one page instead of changing the update on each page.

 

[lucidmedia]

Learn LESS or Sass or similar dynamic style sheet language.

http://lesscss.org/

http://sass-lang.com/

The ability to use variables and mixins will make your CSS quicker to write and more consistent.

 

[JackT06]

CSS3 Generator

 

[digitalField]

Something I find useful is to make your footer and menu (if its not a drop down) frames, so that you only need to update the one page instead of changing the update on each page.

the idea of reusable code is great but frames are less than great.
you should switch to something more dynamic in nature. like php. then you can 'include' your header/footer/navigation code.

much better than using frames.

 

[Apple Key]

You guys may already know this, but Safari's Develop menu and web inspector is amazing!

You can enable it by going to Preferences > Advanced > and checking Show Develop menu in menu bar.

Then you can right click on an element on any webpage, and click "inspect element".

 

[John444]

You guys may already know this, but Safari's Develop menu and web inspector is amazing!

You can enable it by going to Preferences > Advanced > and checking Show Develop menu in menu bar.

Then you can right click on an element on any webpage, and click "inspect element".

Wow I never knew about this, what a great feature!! I will definitely be using Safari more often. Thanks!

 

[ibennetch]

the idea of reusable code is great but frames are less than great.
you should switch to something more dynamic in nature. like php. then you can 'include' your header/footer/navigation code.

much better than using frames.

Not to be pedantic, but most webservers allow you to include files even without PHP. No need to install PHP and burn processor cycles passing every page through the interpreter just to include another file. But yeah, it's a much better idea than manually changing every page. Couldn't agree more.

Also, now that I think about it, some web development software will build the menus, footers, etc. It generates static pages, but you don't need to do each one by hand, you just tell it to put the content on every page. But I tend not to use them.

 

[-pete-]

Nice idea for a post, I'm sure we've all bookmarked some useful stuff in the past.

I'm going to recommend caniuse.com/ whilst its becoming less of an issue following the death of IE6 and the push for IE9, this site does an excellent job of tracking new HTML5 and CSS3 technologies and what browsers actually support them.

I'm also going to give a shout to the Designing for the Web ebook / site, this site helped me learn a ton of stuff about typography, typesetting, colour balance and grid systems, I whole heartedly recommend it to anyone who is just getting started in web design.

 

[digitalField]

Not to be pedantic, but most webservers allow you to include files even without PHP. No need to install PHP and burn processor cycles passing every page through the interpreter just to include another file. But yeah, it's a much better idea than manually changing every page. Couldn't agree more.

wha wha wha? really? ::googling::
ibennetch is right! here is a nice wiki article on the various Server Side Includes you can use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes
i never realized there were so many.

very cool.

M