Free Web Icons
Originally from Digg: 50 of the Best Ever Web Development, Design and Application Icon Sets.
Some of these are really nice; all of them are free!
Geekery: HTTP Error Codes Illustrated, And Other Funny Illustrations
Incomplete, but very funny illustrations for the HTTP error codes, on Flickr. I wish they did some of the “Access Denied” kind, but this is a good start. The account owner, Ape Lad, has other entertaining illustrations, including An Alphabetical Listing of Nonsensical Monstrosities.
Speaking of funnly illustrations, further wandering through the Internet’s tubes uncovered tofuttibreak on tumbrl, YABH (Yet Another Blog Host). My favorites so far are this one and this one and this one.
Firefox Plug-in For Screen Capture
I needed to take some images of a website today, and I needed a little more flexibility than a generic screen capture program could offer. I did a FireFox extention search, and came up with FireShot. The big selling point (if you can call it selling, when it’s free) for me was that it can capture pages longer than the screen, which was exactly what I needed. I hear there’s a version for something called “Internet Explorer”, whatever that is.
You can also edit pictures right in FireShot, including highlighting and annotation, save the image as a file, upload it to several file sharing websites, or print them. Big ups to FireShot!
The only problem I had with it is that there are Adobe Flex elements on the page I wanted to capture, and it needed to re-render them to get the image. But those Flex elements were AJAX-driven, which doesn’t work unless called at the right time. But this is not a frequent requirement, and I’m guessing it would be pretty hard to do it any other way.
Very nice JavaScript drop-down menus
There are plenty of drop-down menus out there, but this one not only works well, but it’s easy to use, and has a “reuse-friendly license” (you can use it as long as you leave in the copyright notice). This one is from SCL Software. Unfortunately, some of the website is in Spanish, but I kinda was able to figure it out anyway.
The drop-down menu code is available here. I originally found it in the daily email from javascript.internet.com (a wonderful resource), on this page.
Book: Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability is a book by Steve Krug about some high-level concepts on website design that take real-world users into account. I ordered this book, but I haven’t read it yet. The reviews on Amazon are very favorable, but I initially heard about this book on a tutorial on using AJAX in WordPress for interactive forms.
I really have high hopes for this book, because I like my tech guides with a heavy dose of reality. I’ll let you know when I start digging into it.
Comparison of Java Web Frameworks
Yekmer’s blog contains this post with a comparison of java web frameworks from the perspective of someone who really wants to do something useful with it.
For him, Wicket won.