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LinkPost – April 2009

It's that time again... Another month has gone by, another post to tell you what you may have missed.

This month I decided to actually group the links into categories to make it easier to find what you are interested in (go me!). The offerings of links this month include two CMS options that aren't WordPress, fonts, fonts, and you guessed it more fonts, some free themes, some jQuery offerings, Web-Server testing and security links, Some adobe AIR goodness, and more. So get your ctrl-click (command-click for you mac'ies), or for you talents mouse users, your middle-click ready.

CMS Links

15 Free WordPress Themes (magazine layout) - These are some really great themes if a magazine layout is what you need your site to be.

TextPattern - This is a simple no-nonsense CMS system that is open source and freely available. It also has a nice seperate plugin that you can use on any PHP site to help with text-to-html conversion (great for comments, contact forms, etc.)

PiXiE CMS - This is a wicked simple CMS system. It is possibly the easiest of all CMS's to customize the look and feel. To make your own theme you just need to know how to edit CSS (they have a framework they use so it's as simple as learning which piece goes where and then just style it). It's not as featured as WordPress, but if you need a lightweight, easy to install, easy to use, your grandma wants to blog etc. this is the CMS for you.

Font Links

BitFontMaker - Yes I realize the picture is not very helpful, but it does display the prowess of the coders. This is a fantastic little web app that lets you design and download your own bit-font.

30 High Quality Free Fonts for Professional Designs - When you need a new font, or have a killer idea and need a new way to present it, here is a list of 30 great modern(ish) fonts you can use.

10 Free Fonts for Logo Design - What makes a font great for Logo Design and not standard design? No idea, but here's another 10 fonts to help you figure that out.

35 Forcefully Fresh Finely tuned Fiercely Fascinating Fonts - just for you, free - Yep, even more fonts.

30 free fonts - Even sitepoint is down this month with the free fontage links.

jQuery

GalleryView - a nice gallery plug-in for jQuery

25 tips to clean up your jQuery - This is a little out dated, but it's not a bad list.

FancyBox - It updated to version 1.2.1, he rebuilt the engine from scratch. I didn't grab a screenshot of it, but it is worth checking out.

6 jQuery snippets you can use to manipulate select inputs - Time for some jQuery form selection manipulation.

jQuery plug-ins that are under 4k - Keep your code and your page load tiny with these plug-ins that are smaller than 4k.

Glimmer - If you were MSDN and just barely figured out that jQuery was awesome, and needed to say, not code but use wizards because .net had rotted your brain out, this is the tool for you (seems like an actually semi-useful tool).

Web Design

ZenTextures - a nice texture site.

600+ gradients and a photoshop tutorial on making them (gimp applicable...ish).

Brusheezy - I actually found this a while ago, but figured that it needed to be in the linkpost. Good site, and remember Gimp 2.4+ can use photoshop brushes *wink wink*.

111 free icon packs - tons, and tons, and tons of icon packs (free does not always mean commercially free, please read the licensing terms before you use them).

PhatBrush - Looks like a new site (offering is small, but good), carries some good photoshop brushes.

Chimply.com Ajax Loader Images - another collection of ajax loader icons.

Ajax loader images - Yes, more of them. This site has a great idea and some really good icons/images, but is poorly executed, the page is wicked busy, and laggy (I warned you).

How to Generate a Color Scheme from any image - Oh snap that was easy! Even though it's a tutorial for photoshop this is gimp friendly.

Design inspiration from running shoes - This is a terrific article on getting color schemes and ideas from running shoes.

Web Server, Testing, Development, etc

IBM DeveloperWorks: Secure your Web Server - If you were IBM, this is how you'd lock down your server from the masses.

Pylot: Performance and Scalabilty Testing Suite - This sounds really cool, but unless you are running python, and have a few more dependencies, this will ultimately only make you angry (Berticus Tested, Not approved).

Pingdom Tools - This is a great site, it shows you what loads, how long it loads, and what is missing from your site from an outside-computers perspective. There are limits to it, but it's a great tool to have in your bookmarks.

Woopra - This is freakishly sweet. They are in beta right now, so sign up and get it going. This provides LIVE stats for who is on your site, what they are looking at, searching for, clicking on, etc. You can even open a chat window in their browser to talk to them! Note, this does not work on all servers and our work proxy kills the client, but you can remote elsewhere and use it

IPLocationTools - Yep, a nice little api you can tap to get the skinny on where people are based on their IP. Includes City, State, Zip (if possible), GPS Co-ordinates, and a little more.

Transfer your mii from your wii - Courtesy of Remo, this will show you how to get your mii off your wii.

WiderBug for FireFox - This is a firebug plug in that changes how firebug is displayed to take advantage of that nice big cinema display monitor you have in front of you.

FireDiff - Sorry no link But this is a nice little program that watches the DOM for changes and logs them so you can see what is being tweaked on your site. Useful for developing, but I found it to be pretty buggy (firebug quit working if you changed tabs, or left it alone for 5 minutes, crashed, etc).

Komodo Edit - A nice little IDE for developing almost anything, it's free and runs on all platforms (although I do enjoy my notepad++ when I'm using Windows).

Selector Gadget - A little bookmarklet that can help with jQuery selectors, follow the link and watch the little video to see a demonstration of how to use it.

Xmarks (formerly FoxMarks) - Sid already uses this (I think), but I just jumped on the band-wagon. It's simple and very easy to use.

20 excellent plugins for Safari - Yes, finally a good post on some plug-ins for safari! No, firebug is not one of them.

Tutorials and Tips

Design to Sell, 12 tips on helping your site convert - Nice read, somethings are a no-brainer, but others are pretty good.

Tips to make you a better web designer and blogger - Pretty 'meh', but a few useful things.

CSS Font Sizes - As with most things from css-tricks, this is a great read.

12 tips for iphone developing - Sitepoint is at it again, this time they tackle the iPhone.

20 excellent tutorial sites for web designers - Another list of great sites to start following.

Web Media

Open Video Player - Sure we have our FlowPlayer, and we likes it that way, but this is how Adobe, MicroSoft, and the like roll. Oh, brush up on your actionscript before attempting to actually use this.

Screencast on Embedding Audio - Chris Coyer (hope I spelled that right) has a screencast on how to implement sound.

FlowPlayer 3.1 is out - Yep, dig out your upgrade monies...

How to play video with an open source player - You didn't really try out the top link in this section did you? Well now that you've failed, follow this link instead and do it the other free way .

Adobe and AIR

How to learn to use AIR - Awesome collection of tutorials and resources to learn how to develop in AIR.

Konolive - a great AIR app to collaborate on projects and share files and docs (a pity our proxy hates it).

51 actionscript and Flex goodies - For all you actionscripters and Flex developers.

Time Killers

Tonematrix - This is a super awesome little sound machine. I could play with thing for minutes...

25 amazing javascript games for fun and inspiration - This is older, but still awesome. If you ever thought that flash was the only way to do browser games, think again.

Super Lame - Minues of creative comic mayhem and fun.

That is this months Link Post, If you found something awesome that wasn't mentioned, throw it in the comments. Also, let me know if you like having a picture with every link, or if you prefer just having the links with a little description of what you're going to see.

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